Today we’d like to introduce you to Bob Bales.
Hi Bob, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I spent 20 years in the US Army as Military Police and Recruiter. After retiring, I did a few things around Houston. I was a third-party recruiter for the oil and gas industry for about six years and then decided to do something closer to what I had done in the military, so I became a private investigator. In 2004 I accepted a position working as an intelligence contractor for the military and spent over eight years in Iraq and Afghanistan. When I would return to Texas for a break, old friends always asked about where I had traveled to. During my vacations, if I did not return to Texas, I would spend a week or two traveling. I spent time in London, Prague, the Philippines, just about anywhere I thought would be interesting. These friends were always amazed at the places I had visited with some saying the farthest they ever traveled was Louisiana. It was round 2012 I decided to start a blog about places I had traveled to, concentrating on the history, customs, and people since that is what interested me. After leaving the contracting world, I decided to write more and began doing some freelance work in addition to my own site. Since then, I have had the opportunity to travel to a lot of places, meet a lot of really interesting people and continue to fulfill my desire to visit, experience, and learn about historic places and events, cultures, and customs.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I went into this as a hobby, just something to share my experiences. Once I decided to do more it was and still is, a big learning curve. You have to not only write things people might be interested in but make it to where search engines will rank it. If no one can find it, no one reads it. Then there is all the social media that comes with it. I am just a one-man operation, I don’t have a staff to do outreach, schedule press trips, contact tourism boards, produce and schedule social media, edit articles, edit photos, optimize everything for search engines and websites. It is just me. It can get a little overwhelming at times. I also got Covid in 2021 and spent 40 days in the hospital, coming out attached to an oxygen cannister. I managed to wean myself off of oxygen in about a month, and a couple of months later was back traveling. The industry is always changing, and you have to keep up with all the new changes without being caught up in chasing the new shiny object that comes along.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
My father was a firefighter, and he took all his vacations in the summer so we could travel and see things. We had a camper trailer and would go to a National or State Park, camp, and see the sites. We visited Civil War battlegrounds, the cliff dwellings in Colorado, the Grand Canyon, and a lot of really neat places for a young boy to visit. That is where I got a love for history, and when I travel and write about places, I always look for the history of those places and try to weave that into my articles. Instead of just saying go here, see this, and stay here, I try to give my reader a sense of the history of the location along with the people and culture of those places. I also enjoy whisky and cigars and do short videos when I travel, smoking a cigar and having a drink while telling people about my day. I didn’t really think anyone enjoyed them until I was in Nepal on a press trip and was smoking my evening cigar when I saw a Nepalese man walking towards me and yelling, “Cigar guy!”. He introduced himself as the minister of tourism and said he loved my nightly videos. Since then, I have had more than a few people recognize me because of the cigars.
What was your favorite childhood memory?
I think all the summer vacations we took as a family when I was growing up. I would always return to school at the end of summer telling my friends about the places we visited and things I had seen. Without spending money on resorts or hotels, eating out at the newest celebrity chef restaurant, or finding that perfect spot for an Instagram selfie, we camped in National parks, spent time fishing, boating, and visiting historic places. I did go to Disneyland in California one year, but it was the places I got to see, Carlsbad Caverns, The Petrified Forest in Arizona, Gettysburg Battlefield, the Pueblo cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde, and others that I am grateful I was exposed to at a young age.
Contact Info:
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