Bordeaux in 365 Bottles: October 2016

October was an emotional roller-coaster that, frankly, I’m happy to be off. I still can’t believe all that happened in an incredibly short amount of time {you can catch up on the full story in September’s Bordeaux in 365 Bottles}. I’m normally super excited to go on a trip, especially to a country I’ve never been to before. Instead, I was thrown in to what felt like a horrible nightmare with my heart strings pulling on me to cancel my trip and stay in Bordeaux.

That’s the thing with traveling for a living, though. My trip to the Philippines wasn’t just a vacation I could cancel because other things came up at home. I had made a commitment to speak at a travel blogging conference, the Philippines Tourism Promotion Board had already paid for my flights to Manila and Busuanga, and I had contracts to work with Two Seasons and Shangri-La. I’m sure everyone would have been understanding had I decided I really needed to cancel, but I was really wrestling with myself over my work ethic and feeling selfish for leaving Emma.

Highs

Spending time with Tim

After the hell we were thrown in to with Emma, Tim and I needed this time together more than ever. Even if we hadn’t dealt with Emma’s cancer scare, a long distance relationship is hard and little rendezvous makes it just the teeniest bit better.

Though we were working, it was the fun part of working – the actual doing and research part of travel writing. With a fairly terrible internet connection that was only available at public areas like the restaurant and pool at our resort, we put the online work mostly aside and just enjoyed our time together.

Also, I kind of really love writing about diving. Until someone invents an iPhone that can Facebook Live and Instagram from 114 feet below the sea, diving is one activity that we can just thoroughly enjoy and then worry about sharing later.

pitching hotels #TBEXph pic.twitter.com/2J8YkIQoCR

— Wanderlass (@wanderlass) October 16, 2016

Speaking at TBEX Manila

The primary purpose of my trip to the Philippines was that I was invited to speak at TBEX, the world’s premier travel blogging and new media content creators conference held multiple times each year on several different continents. Though I’ve been a four-time speaker at TBEX Europe, this was my first time attending and speaking at TBEX Asia.

My talk was on how to expertly work with and review hotels and if you’re interested, you can check out my presentation slides here. And despite that my session time was up again Gary Arndt of Everything Everywhere, one of the top travel bloggers in the industry, and another session promising Krispy Kreme donuts to every attendee, I managed to pack my session.

If you’re a blogger who attended, thank you and I really hope you found it helpful! I’m thinking of turning my session in to a full workshop or online course that covers everything from the pitch to creating engaging content about your hotel stay to monetizing hotel reviews as a passive revenue stream on your blog.

Challenges

Emma had very risky surgery

Just before I went on a press trip to Pittsburgh, I had dog mom intuition that something was going on with Emma. I took her to the vet on a whim, really, and found out she had liver cancer. In a whirlwind of appointments, ultrasounds and CT scans that followed all within a week, Emma’s specialists determined that she was a candidate for surgery but that she had less than 20% chance of a positive outcome.

Tim and I were faced with a very hard decision.

On one hand, we couldn’t imagine not doing everything we could to help her. On the other, there was no way to know how many happy days Emma had left and there was very serious risk that she’d die during or shortly after the surgery. There was also the added complication that the tumor was located in the hardest lobe of the liver to reach and that we might put our sweet girl through an incredibly invasive surgery for nothing if the tumor couldn’t be removed.

The hardest part was that Emma wasn’t acting sick. Her vets said that aside from some periodic vomiting, she wasn’t feeling any pain and probably didn’t know she was sick either.

To watch her play with her favorite toys, happily prance down the street on our walks and do all the things she’s done her entire life while also knowing these could be the last days with her was absolutely heart wrenching.

I just didn’t know how to say goodbye when there were no signs {aside from that giant black blob on her CT scan and ultrsound images} that she was ready to leave our family.

In the end, Tim and I were unwavered. We just knew that if we didn’t go forward with the surgery, the day Emma’s tumor ruptured and we had to say goodbye would haunt us about whether we had made the right decision to let things be.

And so, the nerve wracking day of Emma’s surgery came just days after she’d had her CT scan.

I dropped her off and a friend graciously helped distract me with shopping and lunch. My mom was also enroute to Bordeaux, having booked a flight to be with me just in case the very worst happened.

The surgeon told us that no news was good news. We waited {impatiently} nearly nine hours. And I was terrified when my phone finally rang.

Tears of joy streamed down my face as the surgeon told me that Emma had a miracle. Not only were they able to access the tumor, they removed the entire thing with margins. It was limited to the one lobe of her liver and was a single, huge mass. Just to be sure, they took biopsies of other lobes of the liver. The surgery lasted just over 2.5 hours and Emma was doing extremely well, all things considered.

We weren’t out of the woods yet and the next 48 hours would be critical. Emma had a huge incision and a haematoma. She was still in danger of potentially bleeding out or a blood clot going to her heart.

She did amazingly well over those next 48 hours, with minor fevers that they were always able to bring down. She came home on Friday evening, just over 48 hours after her surgery.

The next few days were tough. Emma was on morphine to help with the pain, but she just couldn’t get comfortable.

I also live on the first (second floor in America) without an elevator in a nineteenth century building with a narrow and winding spiral staircase, as is typical here in Bordeaux. Emma weighs 55 lbs. My back was killing me as I carried her up and down the stairs multiple times a day so she could go down to the street to potty.

I was leaving on my 3-week trip to the Philippines just one week after Emma’s surgery and up until an hour before I had to leave for the airport, I was ready to call the entire trip off. Emma was doing well, but as she was weened off the morphine I could see she just wasn’t feeling great. I felt selfish leaving her, even though she had two house-sitters and my friend would be checking in on her and taking her to her follow-up appointments.

After speaking to Emma’s doctor for her daily check-ups on how she was doing, he convinced me she was fine and I should go on my trip.

Tim and I got photos and regular updates from our house-sitters. Within a few days, Emma was pulling toys out of her toy box and getting feisty. Keeping her calm so she could rest up and recover was a challenge for the house-sitters!

The lab report came back and Emma had a very aggressive form of cancer called hemangiosarcoma. Now that I am home, I need to follow up with her surgeon and confirm the report he gave my friend, but they felt that they got all of the cancer and the biopsy from the other lobes of her liver came back good. She has about 10% chance of relapse.

Emma does still have the brain tumor that her medical team found during the CT scan and it’s in a place where we really can’t do anything but monitor it. But we’re hoping that we have a few good years left yet with our fur baby.

I lost my primary freelance writing gig

I had been receiving assignments as well as pitching some story ideas for Trip Creator, which was bringing in a significant amount of monthly income for me the last few months. Unfortunately, Trip Creator has decided to focus on their B2B (business to business) relationships over direct user relationships and has stopped accepting freelance articles for their website.

Now that I’m home, I need to step it up and pitch some article ideas to other publications. I’ve also been working on lining up more Instagram takeovers and Instagram Story takeovers.

In this business, one thing I’ve definitely learned is that you never put all of your eggs in one basket. You just never know when that basket won’t be an income stream anymore.

I had the trip of mishaps

Maybe it’s karma. Or maybe I had to suffer a little as payback for Emma’s miracle. Either way, my trip to the Philippines was a series of unfortunate mishaps.

It started off when I got to the airport. I couldn’t check-in online, so it was in the back of my mind that something was up but I just couldn’t be too worried about it while dealing with Emma. Once at the airport, it took nearly an hour and four agents to try to sort out my flight. It seemed I didn’t actually have a reservation for the last leg of my journey from China to Manila, even though I had a confirmation that I did in my hand.

Eventually as the flight was about to leave Bordeaux, Air France allowed me to board to Paris and they were going to get in touch with the gate team in Paris to work on the situation while I was in flight.

I arrived in Paris soaked and sticky. I got stuck in an aisle seat, which I hate, and the flight attendant knocked over a brand new carton of orange juice right on to me during the flight.

I had another stressful wait to see if I’d be allowed on the flight at all once I arrived in Paris. I didn’t have a visa for China since I was only transiting and Air France still hadn’t been able to sort out the flight. At the last minute, they got it sorted and I was the very last passenger to board a completely full flight. I was again stuck in the aisle seat.

I spent the next 12.5 hours with the Chinese couple next to me getting up every 20 minutes or so. They refused to switch the window for the aisle seat and I didn’t get a wink of sleep. The flight attendant even pleaded with them on my behalf since they didn’t speak English, to no avail. They were not giving up that window seat.

I was basically ready to kill someone at 35,000 feet.

Finally in Manila, I was that person waiting while all the other passengers retrieve their bag one by one. You hang on to a shred of hope until they turn the baggage carousel off. And then you know you’re not getting your bag.

Cranky from not having any rest next to the world’s most annoying air travel passengers, I about lost it when I was jarred from a blissful sleep just three hours later at the hotel from a jack hammer that sounded like it was next door. The hotel front desk staff had the gull to tell me the hotel wasn’t doing any construction {they obviously were} when I called and said they couldn’t move me because the hotel was full.

I had to spend the next three days wearing the same sticky orange juice covered outfit since China Southern Airlines had no idea where my bag was. What a joke of customer service that airline offers! I had to suggest to them that they call the airport in China and have someone go look for my bag.

At least my outfit became a joke among conference attendees and I wasn’t too embarrassed. I was finally reunited with my bag just hours before I had to give my talk at TBEX.

I weathered my first of two typhoons in Manila. The second, Super Typhoon Haima, would come while on a teeny private island a few days later.

I’m terrified of jellyfish and getting stung on the calf by a box jellyfish, which can potentially be lethal if they sting you in the face or on the chest did nothing to quash my fears. In fact, it made my fear worse. And it hurt like hell.

As if typhoons weren’t enough, there was a violent protest outside of the US Embassy in Manila. The next day, Philippines President Duterte announced he was severing ties with the US. When your husband is in the US military and a shit storm like this happens, the military often bans military members from all travel. Tim was due to meet me in the Philippines just 48 hours later and we thought for sure he wasn’t coming.

Once Tim made it, I thought things were looking up. Until my iPhone took a swim in the Sulu Sea. It’s dying a slow death, but at least we were able to recover my photos.

And then I arrived home to have Bank of America call me up and ask about some charges that were made. I literally used my credit card three times in the Philippines, mostly to buy some essentials while my luggage was on its tour of China.

Think travel is always glamorous for us travel writers? Think again! We endure travel woes just like anyone else.

Most Popular Post

I was on such a roll with getting out at least two, sometimes three, posts a week. Plus, I was doing quite a bit of freelance writing for other publications. I even went to the Philippines with several posts outlined. Unfortunately, the internet was even worse there than it had been while we were living in Italy (and I didn’t think that was possible!). So writing or doing much online work of any kind came to a grinding halt when I discovered it would take 20 minutes or so just to upload an Instagram post each day.

I didn’t do much writing at all in October, but it’s really not surprising that the guide to the Northern Lights in Iceland was the most popular article I’ve written recently. The Northern Lights and Iceland are two of the most read topics on Luxe Adventure Traveler.

Luxe Adventure Traveler’s Complete Guide to the Northern Lights in Iceland

Most Popular Instagram Photo

I took Instagram Stories on the road with me and {painfully} uploaded short videos and photos almost daily while traveling in the Philippines. If you’re not following us there, head over and check it out. We’re doing little giveaways like sending postcards to readers. You won’t want to miss out!

This view! ?? We made the climb up 150 broken and slick steps to the view point before continuing on to Kayangan Lake. I’ve done this Coron Island tour twice and I have to say that I preferred our private tour with @twoseasonsphilippines over the regular group day tour offered by several companies. We could adjust our schedule and leave at our convenience to avoid the crowds, which was very nice.

A photo posted by Luxe Adventure Traveler (@luxeadventuretrvlr) on Oct 26, 2016 at 4:55am PDT

What I’m Drinking This Month

October was like a detox from my normally wine-filled life in Bordeaux. Between being in the Philippines where wine just isn’t as readily available and diving, I was barely even indulging in cocktails. Tim and I had an occasional drink like a basil mojito or this blended drink that was like a mango colada, but we didn’t really indulge much. No drinking is a rule of diving, after all.

The one bottle of wine I did open in October was actually from Napa Valley. Usually not much of white wine drinker, I do like Conundrum White and the 2013 I had on hand was perfect for baking with my Mont d’Or cheese and pairing with it once it became a bubbly fondue.

Bottle Count: 35

What I’m Reading This Month

When you’re forced into a digital detox, you suddenly have a lot more time to read. I made it through three books this month. And a special shout out to bazirbes on Instagram, who recommended Polar Dream to me.

Coming Up in November 2016

I get cranky after about three consecutive weeks of travel and I couldn’t be happier to be home. I was actually supposed to be visiting with Tim in Korea this week, but we decided that it was best I change my ticket and cut that portion of my trip out so I could get home to Emma.

Visiting South Korea will have to wait for another time.

I am headed to Burgundy for a quick trip toward the end of the month for the wine auctions and I’m excited to take part, as well as dip my toe into the Burgundy wine region. And I’m renting a car and taking Emma with me this time. She’s ready to explore some more of France.