We did it! With your help, encouragement, and financial support we made it through Year 1 on Substack and finished in the top 15 of Travel Newsletters on the platform WORLDWIDE! We are truly grateful to our friends, family, and new friends from around the world for helping us to share our Travels Across America and Lessons in Life essays. For 2021, we hoped to write one essay per week with a few extra here and there and we accomplished our goal! In all, we wrote 47 Travels Across America essays about different destinations and 8 Lessons in Life reflections for a total of 55 posts!
When we started this writing adventure a year ago, we said we would consider trying to produce a Year 2 on Substack if we felt like we could do it and that enough people enjoyed reading the posts and were inspired to create travel adventures of their own. The support from folks has been wonderful and we feel like we have enough stories left to share to give it a go in 2022! Substack has also added an audio podcast feature that we are thinking about dabbling in a little bit in 2022 as well!
For those of you who supported us financially with a $5 a month or $60 a year subscription to Travels Across America and Lessons in Life…thank you! We want to continue keep the publication free and available to anyone who wants to read it and our paid subscribers make that happen for everyone! If you feel you would like to continue to support our efforts again financially that would, of course, be wonderful. If you tried it for a year for free and now you say hmmm I think this effort might be worth a $1.00 an essay, we would love your new support! Many of our subscribers’ yearly bills are set to renew over the next few weeks, so we hope you will renew or start a subscription.
For 2022, after soliciting advice from our readers, here is what we aim to do:
Provide a BEST OF VIRGINIA essay each month. Many of our subscribers are from Virginia and would like to get recommendations of travel destinations within the state of Virginia that are affordable and educational.
Get to 100 posts published by the end of the year!
Use the PODCAST feature on Substack to read aloud some of our original Year 1 posts and expand on them with thoughtful conversations.
Expand our social media presence to TikTok to promote our essays/newsletters and perhaps a few podcast episodes.
Go INTERNATIONAL this year with a trip to Great Britain where Henry will play some of the best soccer academies in the world and report with live updates to our subscribers from England.
Thank you again for all of your support! We can’t wait to bring you more stories that we hope will get you out on the road making wonderful memories for you and your family.
Great goals!