20 YEARS IN THE ADVENTURE TRAVEL TRADE ASSOCIATION
By Don Mankin
Adventure Transformations, Inc.
I slid the signed copy of my latest book across the table to my longtime friend and colleague, Ken Dychtwald – a world-renowned speaker, writer and consultant on the corporate and societal impact of the aging baby boomers. He looked up from the book and asked, “Don, do you mind if I give you some career advice?” Advice from someone whose annual income exceeds mine by several orders of magnitude? “Please do.” “Stop writing this crap,” he replied.
After I retrieved my astonished jaw from the floor, he explained: “You should be writing about your travels.” “You take interesting trips,” he continued, “you tell great stories about your trips, and you talk about them with much more enthusiasm than you do about your work.”
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The Light Bulb Clicks On
A little background. At the time of our dinner in 2004, just a couple of months after the publication of the book, I was an organizational psychologist in the middle of a major career crisis. My longtime collaborator on the book in question, as well as a previous book and dozens of articles, was dying from breast cancer. I was at a loss on how to move ahead without her. So, Ken’s advice was timely, as well as right on the mark. The proverbial lightbulb clicked on in my head.
I wasn’t always a traveler and adventurer. I grew up in a working-class family in Philadelphia. My parents owned our house, and we never lacked for the basics, but vacations and travel consisted of 1-2 weeks in Atlantic City every summer. That was it. When I was young, science fiction and Richard Haliburton’s Books of Marvels fueled my fantasies of exotic adventures around the world and beyond. My ambition was to become an astronaut up and visit distant planets.
I studied aerospace engineering in college, hoping to one day ride a rocket into space. I also played football and traveled with my team to such exotic destinations as Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and New London, Connecticut. In graduate school I played rugby and twice traveled with my team to the United Kingdom to get my ass kicked by skinny Welshmen who had played the game all their lives.
Upon graduating with a PhD in experimental psychology in 1968 from The Johns Hopkins University, I began my academic career at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. During my first academic summer break, I took a road trip through Sweden, Finland and Norway, then hitchhiked my way through England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. The following summer, I drove to British Columbia and hopped on a ferry to Alaska. After these two summer adventures, I realized that academic summers were meant for research and writing, not having fun, and settled down to work on my first book.
Transformational Adventures
Once the book was finished, I started traveling again, stopping for solo backpacking adventures in the American Southwest as I moved back and forth cross-country on my way to new positions at universities in Los Angeles, Houston, and Maryland. These adventures were transformational. They opened up my eyes to other cultures, widened my perspective and perhaps most important of all, changed my self-image from an anxious, self-conscious teenager trying to figure out who he was to a somewhat assured adult, an adventurer, and a world traveler. It was largely a façade, but it worked. In time, I actually became the person I pretended to be.
My travel experiences broadened considerably starting in the mid 90s when I started traveling twice year to SE Asia and Taiwan as a university dean overseeing an international program. Until then, I’d had little interest in Asia, but these trips dramatically changed how I think about the region, and SE Asia is now one of my favorite travel destinations. This reawakening of my spirit of adventure was topped off by a 60th birthday present from Ken, a flight into the interior of Antarctica to camp in a tent on the ice for eight days. Those were the trips and adventures that Ken was talking about when he turned my life around with his crude but on-the-mark assessment of my career.
Reinventing My Career…and My Life
Following that fateful dinner, Ken and I worked on an outline for a book describing how adventure travel had transformed my life. He sent it to his agent (Ken is a successful author), who in turn passed it on to another agent she thought would be a better fit with the subject matter and theme.
My agent (how I loved saying that!) recommended that I re-orient the book toward senior travelers and add practical advice. Lacking experience in the travel industry, I realized that I needed to find an industry insider to collaborate with me on the book. I surfed the internet for likely candidates and stumbled upon a promising possibility, Shannon Stowell, President of the Adventure Travel Trade Association. I sent him an email laying out my ideas for the book and my agent’s recommendation. He expressed interest and suggested I come to Seattle to discuss the proposal during the first annual Adventure Travel World Summit in 2005. And so it began, the 20-year adventure with ATTA that transformed my life.
It took over a year and several revisions of the book prospectus, but we finally signed a contract in late 2006 with National Geographic for a collection of 26 personal travel stories plus practical advice on where to go, what to look for, and how to prepare for the trip. Most of the stories were written by Shannon and me and others were contributed by friends and colleagues, including two chapters by Christina Beckmann, ATTA’s VP for Global Strategy. In a major coup engineered by Shannon, the foreword was written by Richard Branson. The book, “Riding the Hulahula to the Arctic Ocean: Fifty Extraordinary Adventures for Seasoned Travelers,” was published in 2008 to great reviews, including one in the Wall Street Journal calling the book “one of the best travel books to cross our desk this year… A wonderful and inspiring read.” Most important, it launched me on a new career, a long association with ATTA, and numerous personal friendships and collegial relationships with ATTA members.
Finding a Home in ATTA
Most of my involvement with the association and its members came via the annual summits. I was primarily an observer at the first three Summits, in Seattle in 2005 and 2006 and Whistler in 2007. I soaked up as much information as possible from speakers, panel sessions and interactions with other attendees, especially about the nature of the industry and how to succeed as a travel writer. I was struck by how open, collaborative and non-competitive the Summits were, unlike the competitive, often cutthroat tenor of the many academic meetings, conventions and events I attended in my almost 40-year university career.
After our book came out, Shannon and I started talking about a follow-on book on the “transformative power of adventure travel,” the header I used for the home page of my new website, my first as travel writer, speaker and consultant. We surveyed the members of ATTA to find people whose lives had been transformed by adventure travel, and I conducted over 35 interviews with these people, mostly members of ATTA and their clients. Shannon and I developed a prospectus for the book based on these interviews, but the Great Recession was still raging, so our agent wasn’t able to find a publisher.
The interviews, plus the National Geographic book, opened up a more active role for me at the Summit. At both Summits in 2008, in Brazil in the Spring and on the storm-tossed boat along the coast of Norway in October, I was on the Summit program as a speaker, using the interviews to illustrate the various ways in which adventure travel can transform individuals, their relationships with others, and society.
I attended every Summit until my retirement in 2024, making new friends each year, establishing useful connections, gaining valuable information and ideas from the presentations, and having once-in-a-lifetime adventures before, during and after the Summits.
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Personal Summit Highlights from 2009 to 2023
In 2009 in Charlevoix, Quebec, I met Richard Weiss and his wife Edie Heilman on the Pre-Summit Adventure on the Gaspé Peninsula, a friendship that continues to this day. At the Summit in Aviemore, Scotland in 2010, I drank gin and tonics with Chris McHugo during a lunch break on a hiking trail during a PSA on the Knoydart Peninsula. In 2011 in Chiapas, Mexico, my PSA took me to the Copper Canyon, where I ziplined, with my heart in my throat, over drops of thousands of feet.
The 2012 Summit in Lucerne, Switzerland opened up with a cruise on Lake Lucerne on a paddle steamer on the way to the opening dinner at the Museum of Transport. The 2013 Summit in Swakopmund, Namibia was my favorite Summit of all. It began with an incredible PSA safari in Etosha NP, followed by an overnight DOA that involved driving a 4WD through the desert from Windhoek to Swakopmund. The highlight of the Summit itself was the keynote address by one of my travel writing inspirations, Pico Iyer, followed by an impromptu conversation with him the next day. My visit to Namibia ended with a mind-blowing 6-day fly-in safari in some of the most remote regions of the country.
There wasn’t much in the way of highlights at the 2014 Summit in Killarney, Ireland, since I got sick about half-way through and spent most of the Summit in bed within lunging distance of the bathroom.
The 2015 Summit in Puerto Varas, Chile was one of my most memorable Summits. The PSA was a small boat cruise through the Strait of Magellan from Ushuaia, Argentina to Punta Arenas, Chile. On my DOA I teamed with Norie Quintos in a double kayak on what began as a peaceful paddle down the northernmost fjord in Patagonia and ended with a harrowing 30 minutes of whipping wind and churning surf. To add a poignant, unnerving note to this experience, the keynote speaker, Doug Tompkins, founder of the clothing companies Esprit and North Face, died two weeks later during a similar, if more intense, kayaking trip about 350 miles to the south.
At the 2016 Summit in Anchorage, Alaska, I presented with friends and colleagues Kurt Kutay, Jake Haupert, and Michael Bennett at two standing-room-only sessions on “ The Transformational Power of Adventure Travel.” At the 2017 Summit in Salta, Argentina, I presented“ Geezers on the Move: What Boomers and the Silent Generation Want in Retirement” in two packed sessions with about 250 attendees at each session, possibly the largest audiences ever in my almost 60 years professional life.
In Montecatini Terme, Italy in 2018, I hiked with Richard Weiss, Edie Heilman, Norie Quintos, Barbara Banks and others in a PSA on the Via Francigena pilgrimage trail in Tuscany. The hiking was great, but the food and wine were the real highlights. After all, it was Italy.
The highlight of the 2019 Summit in Goteberg, Sweden was a drive through western and southern Sweden on a custom PSA to commemorate the 50th anniversary of my introduction to adventure travel, which began with my road trip through Sweden in the summer of 1969.
Because of Covid, the 2020 Summit was cancelled and the 2021 Summit was virtual. Despite the technical challenges, the virtual Summit was surprisingly productive Summit for me, albeit not as much fun as schmoozing in person with my ATTA friends. The Grand Train Tour of Switzerland, my post summit adventure, was the highlight of the 2022 Summit in Lugano, Switzerland.
My last Summit, in 2023 in Sapporo, Japan, topped off my short but rewarding career as an adventure travel writer. Shannon invited me to a small, exclusive dinner with Pico Iyer, the keynote speaker and my personal inspiration. My wife and I arrived early at dinner; so did Pico. We had him all to ourselves for at least 20 minutes. He sat next to us during dinner and was a personable, witty, and gracious dinner companion.
A Life Transformed by ATTA
The dinner in Sapporo with Pico Iyer, one of the most memorable experiences of my brief travel writing career, says a lot about my relationship with Shannon and my relationship with ATTA, in general. He knew how much I would treasure that opportunity and made it happen.
Throughout the 3 years or so of our collaboration, one of the most fulfilling of my life, Shannon has been thoughtful, considerate, and accepting of a guy who, at least on the surface, couldn’t have been more different. He embraced me as a good friend and colleague, much like the rest of the ATTA community.
The past 20 years of new adventures, new friends and colleagues, new projects, new destinations to learn about and experience, and new reasons for getting out of bed in the morning transformed my life. From this emerged a new career that combined my two childhood fantasies of being a full-time writer and traveling the far corners of the world. But more than that. Hanging out with lively, energetic, adventurous, value-driven, inspired and inspiring people many years my junior made me livelier, more energetic, adventurous,value-driven, and inspired. Most important, they made me feel younger, act younger and, perhaps, just plain younger.
At age 83, I can now look back and thank Shannon and all of my friends at ATTA and the members I have met over those years for a magical 20 years of adventure, friendship, and a life fully lived.
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