By Stephen Bugno

Celebrating One Year

Year One has been kind to Bohemian Traveler. I spent a remarkable half year blogging from the road—from jaunts down to Mexico and Colombia to a U.S. road trip of epic proportions. The response from readers has been awesome. People are following from around the globe and I am grateful for everyone’s support.

Contemplating one year of Bohemian Traveler at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC

Funding myself only from a part-time job in a wine shop, a 6-week stint for the U.S. Census Bureau, and a 5-week English camp in Korea, I stretched my dollars to the extreme and still had incredibly rich natural, cultural, and social experiences during each leg of my journey.

I pushed the extremes of my courage and composure in the mountains of Colorado, witnessed the harshest of landscapes in Death Valley, tested my language skills in the largest metropolis in North America, sipped coffee at the source in Colombia, tasted beer at some of the best breweries in the U.S., and witnessed the Lunar New Year in Korea.

Most memorable of all have been the incredible people along the way; both strangers that I met for the first time and old friends with whom I reconnected.

During year two, I will continue sharing with you creative ways to fashion your own genuine travel experiences, how to stretch your travel dollars, extend your vacation time, improve your travel writing, have more meaningful interactions with locals, and provide you with original ideas to volunteer, learn, and work abroad.

Better Late than Never

I’m not quite sure why it took me until 2010 to get my own blog up and running. After more than a decade of teaching English, volunteering, and extended travel on five continents, it was more than time for me to get Bohemian Traveler off the ground.

The Year’s Top Posts:

• Cartagena: Living up to Expectations or Not?
• The Problem with the Backpacker’s Circuit
• Misconceptions about Mexico City
• Salento, Colombia: The Quintessential Backpacker Village
• Botero’s Sculptures in Medellin
• 2010 in review: How I traveled for half the year
• Why I’m going to South Korea
• I went to Mexico City to See an Ice Axe
• Why does the U.K. Hate Me?

We’ve come a long way in one year

In the first year Bohemian Traveler’s fanbase on Facebook has grown to 230, on twitter to nearly 1,000 and almost 100 on the e-mailing list!

Thank you! Gracias! Спасибo! 감사합니다 !

I am immensely thankful to all my readers. I appreciate your comments and suggestions always. It is a great pleasure to be able to share my experiences of travel and cultural exchanges with you.

And most of all, I am pleased that I have slowly started to turn my passion into my career.

Please stay along for the ride. There is much more to come in year two!