Travel

As a travel writer, I measure profit by how many people s trips I impact. By that standard, May 4th is one of the most exciting days in my 30-year-long career. Today, Smithsonian Presents Travels with Rick Steves . a special issue of Smithsonian magazine, hits newsstands all over the USA.

The magazine is 104 pages devoted entirely to my favorite places. For me, this is the travel-writing equivalent of giving birth to a child. While I m a proud papa about my contribution (the writing), the mother of this collaboration — if I may call Smithsonian that — is why this baby is so darn beautiful. I ve never seen my writing mixed with such beautiful art, and then so expertly laid out.

The experience was humbling. I learned years ago that life is too short to work with people who aren t really talented and committed. And, just as important, life is too short to work with people you don t enjoy. In other words, collaborating with talented and fun people brings this workaholic great joy. My (talented and fun) staff and I can be pretty self-assured. We cook up some great TV, radio, guidebooks, tours, and newspaper articles. But we ve never produced a magazine. And in short order, we gained great respect for the talent of the people in Washington, DC, who make Smithsonian magazine.

I had my creative tensions with the Smithsonian staff over the course of the project. Now that it s done, every little tug-of-war I won, I like, and every little tug-of-war they won I like, too. I called it censoring when they took out the more juvenile of my jokes. They politely explained to me that it s not censoring, but editing. Now that the project is finished, I m glad some of my goofy phrases didn t make the cut.

It s human nature to enjoy photos you took, and to favor them at layout time. But I learned quickly to trust the Smithsonian photo editor s choices. Only a handful of my shots made the cut. And yet — wow! Seeing my writing without my own photos, I was actually thankful.

Smithsonian Presents Travels with Rick Steves is on the newsstands from now through early August, or you can order it online. You can also see plenty of additional content related to the top 20 destinations featured in this issue at www.smithsonian/ricksteves .

This is the first of a three-month series of thrice-a-week blog entries that I m writing to celebrate our collaboration with Smithsonian. Half of my entries will be my best effort to give a fun and tangy dimension to destinations featured in the magazine, and the other half will give a pithy immediacy to the new corners of Europe I m currently researching.

Thanks for traveling with me and Smithsonian .