It is always interesting to gage reactions when someone asks me about my job. I tell them that I am a travel writer that travels to wineries and vineyards around the world and write articles about them. You can observe them processing. I know they processed the word travel and from wineries they processed the word wine. Their comment is almost always, “Well, I guess someone has to do that.”

What people don’t seem to process are the words writer and write. This plum job certainly has its benefits: meeting marvelous people, travel to places never seen before, and of course wine. However there is an unseen part of the business: writing, photography, editing, photo editing, webpage construction and publishing. Then there is also the travel to wine regions by car or a combination of plane and car. These are not nearly as glamorous as the ideas of travel and wine. Spending evenings in hotel rooms wears off easily. Especially after a faulty heating unit sent billowing towers of smoke into our room and we spent the evening in the lobby watching the volunteer firemen come and go. They were much more excited than we were.

If one really thinks about it, there are perks to almost every job. There are also the parts of the job that have to be done that are not necessarily perkish. Just once I’d like someone who asked me about my job to respond with, “All that writing, it must be a hard task.”

What are the perks of your job?

Cheers,

Terry