Kava and Connections…
William and I enjoyed traipsing around the LA Times Travel Show last Saturday. We had a grand time talking to people who are as passionate about travel as we are and picked up some useful tips from folks promoting Brazil and Africa as destinations. (We’re hoping to go to Brazil in 2014 for the World Cup — what better place for TWB to be?! — and the Festival in the Desert in Mali is definitely on our “bucket list”…)
I also had fun crashing a kava party at the Fijian travel board booth. Travel With Balls is about giving soccer balls out to kids, but as I’ve written before, it also reflects a certain philosophical attitude towards Life — that is, Life’s an amazing journey and we should undertake it with gusto, ebullience and a spirit of adventure. When I spied a large wooden bowl of the mildly intoxicating, muddy brown liquid in the center of the circle of grass-skirt-clad Fijian folksingers sitting on the floor, I half-jokingly inquired if they were giving out samples. (Hey — I’d rather be among grass-skirts than stuffed-shirts…) To my delight I was invited to join them in the circle for a quick coconut-shell-full of the stuff! A TWB rule of the road: It never hurts to ask!
Our Travel With Balls t-shirts garnered a lot of attention and appreciation — it’s too bad we didn’t bring some of our stock with us because several people wanted to buy one…At any rate, the shirts were a great conversation-starter and when we explained the mission of TWB several people pledged to Travel With Balls on their next trip. We also made a couple of connections: The Southern California Travel Agent Association invited us to post our video on their Facebook page and offered to spread the word to their individual members; and a local TV station, KTLA, thought Travel With Balls might make an excellent story for their morning show and asked us to email them the particulars. We’ll keep you posted…
Little by little, the message is getting out there; little by little the TWB team will grow!
Peace & Blessings,
Jan