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I love my job. Imagine being able to do the two things that you love best-travel and writing-and be able to be paid for doing it. As the editor and Internet publisher of Journeywoman, the e-zine for women who love to travel, I am able to do just that. After five years of hard work, unyielding perseverance and a lot of support from thousands of women around the world, my Internet publishing business is today alive and well. I thank the Internet gods for watching over me.

Journeywoman’s saga began in 1982. Divorced and alone for the first time in my life, I began tackling those aspects of single living that frightened the heck out of me. Solo travel was one of them. At age 42, I put a backpack on and set out on a five week European journey to test myself. I remember crying a lot but I also recall laughing a great deal. Naturally, as we’re all prone to do, I survived the trauma and unknowingly I had taken the first steps to becoming an expert in the field of ‘women and travel.’

Wandering the world and studying abroad at the Sorbonne, in Oxford, Edinburgh and Provence helped me to build connections with local women in a myriad of cities and countries. These acquaintances helped me out with the "girl stuff"-which supermarkets to shop at, introductions to their female doctors, where to buy underwear, which areas of the city to avoid after dark and names of modest neighbourhood restaurants where a woman alone would not be hassled. I filled notebooks with observations I made from day to day. It was the beginning of an informal network connecting travelling women around the world.

In 1994, I named that network "Journeywoman" and published a 24 page paper quarterly newsletter. Faxes requesting subscriptions arrived from all over the world and soon it was being read by 6,000 women travellers internationally. Without understanding it, I had tapped into a vast niche market - females who loved to travel. The news spread like wild fire. Journeywoman was written up in over 100 publications around the world—in Canada, Hong Kong, England, United States. Advertisers signed on. I was invited to do radio and television interviews and Foreign Affairs Canada invited me to be their consultant on ‘women and travel.’ Journeywoman had taken on a life of it’s own and was growing faster than I could work. I no longer had time to travel. Big changes became very necessary.

Though I knew little about cyberspace, publishing on the World Wide Web seemed like an excellent option to me at that time. Since my mandate was to inspire women to travel safely and well and to connect female travellers internationally, what better way than to use the Internet? There was only one big problem. If readers were no longer paying for subscriptions, who would pay the bills? Advertisers? Sponsors? I decided to take a chance investing a good deal of my own time and money. I had to believe that if my readership became large enough, the financial support would eventually come.

Domain names, servers, file attachments and graphics were Greek to me. I thank the Internet gods who put Iain Smy, a wonderful webmaster and cyber technician, in my path. I hired him and asked him what seemed like a thousand questions. He answered every one of them in a way that I could understand. He was able to translate into design and graphics the vision for Journeywoman that I carried in my imagination yet didn’t know how to make my computer create. He suffered through endless changes until I was happy with the look and feel of the Journeywoman website.

In a way, perhaps being a novice helped me to design a site where all women, even women with little experience could navigate easily and could feel at home. I kept the size of the font large enough so that it could be read by anybody of any age. Color was kept to a minimum—orange and black. The site had to load easily and quickly-that meant no travel photos. I would offer bold black line drawings and cartoons that would stimulate the reader’s imagination.

In terms of content, I included categories designed to make any travelling female’s heart sing-features such as solo travel tips, eco adventures, spa stories, female-friendly city sites, JourneyDoctor, tips on what to wear, where, dining alone-all the things that I looked for when I first started travelling solo and had no mentors to teach me.

Journeywoman believes that the best information for women comes from other women’s insider’s tips. So we’ve invited travellers around the world to join our international cooperative. Anybody can visit the site free of charge, leave a tip as well as benefit from the thousands of tips and stories that are already posted there. To date, we’ve welcomed 170,000 readers from around the world.

At our homepage, readers are given the option of subscribing to Journeywoman Online, our free quarterly e-mail newsletter that includes the top travel tips we receive at the site. A good example of the womanly advice found in the newsletter comes from Teena, a reader in Australia who writes: "When travelling in hot and sweaty climates, try putting underarm deodorant under your breasts. A bra rubbing on your skin when you perspire can cause chaffing and uncomfortable rashes but the deodorant under your breasts eliminates this problem." In other words, Journeywoman features those tips that mainstream travel magazines never touch.

This March, Journeywoman E-zine will welcome a "baby-sister" site. HERmail.net is a directory listing women travellers around the world. Through this new website any traveller setting off on a journey will be able to make Internet contact with other females at her destination. Think of the benefits-she can be advised about the proper clothes to pack, inexpensive hotels, her e-mail pals might even agree to meet her for coffee when she arrives.

Who would have guessed when I was crying about travelling solo seventeen years ago, that today, Journeywoman E-Zine and HERmail .net would be sponsored by the likes of such weighty organizations as The Royal Bank of Canada, Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, Liberty Health, Tourism Toronto and the Toronto Transit Commission? As well, our classified section now features over 100 ads offering one stop travel shopping for women of the world.

Is there time for me to travel now? You bet. This year, I celebrated my 58th birthday hiking in the Red Mountains, I reported from Oprah Winfrey’s favorite cafe in Chicago, I delighted in a thermal spa in Tuscany, and experienced the absolutely wonderful Galapagos Islands in Ecuador. You see, the Internet gods really do exist.

Safe journeys,
Evelyn

Journeywoman Travel E-zine