Larry Olmsted is an award-winning travel journalist who specializes in golf, skiing, adventure travel, luxury travel and all things culinary. A three-time Guinness World Record breaker, he writes a travel and lifestyle column, The Great Life, for Forbes.com, and reviews unique regional restaurants around the country for USA Today’s Great American Bites column every week. He has published thousands of articles in publications from Golf Magazine to Playboy to Popular Science to Men’s Health, and for major newspapers from the New York Daily News to South China Morning Post. He lives in Vermont.
Cheapflights: How did your passion for travel, golf and adventure fuse – and develop into travel writing?
Larry Olmsted: The best advice I ever got was “Do what you love, love what you do,” so I have always focused my writing on subjects I feel passionate about, which include travel, golf, adventure and cuisine. If I had to write about technology or finance or something else, I probably would not write for a living. I was fortunate that one of my first regular gigs was a lifestyle column for Investors Business Daily called “News For You,” and I got to address just about any topics I wanted to, so I started focusing on these areas and it took off from there.
CF: Golf, food, leisure, adventure … What would be your ideal travel assignment or press trip?
LO: All of the above! I like to play great golf in unusual places that have much more than golf to offer, like Australia or China. Of the trips I haven’t done yet, South Africa would be ideal for me, with golf, great food and wine, wildlife safaris and more.
CF: You’ve golfed with some of the world’s top pros, with celebrity chefs and with rock stars. Who was the most memorable?
LO: Canadian singer Tom Cochrane, front man for Red Rider (Lunatic Fringe, Life is a Highway) was the best amateur celebrity I have played with, beautiful swing, but also a really nice guy, one of the few who actually wanted to hang out after golf, having a drink and smoking cigars. In general I have found the less relatively famous people are, the better their company, and the same is true for PGA Tour players. JJ Henry and Kevin Streelman were a lot more fun the big name players like Geoff Ogilvy, all of whom I have played with. Personally, one of the highlights is that I got to play with three of the five guys who have shot a historic low 59, Al Geiberger, Chip Beck and Stuart Appleby. I need David Duval and Paul Goydos!
CF: How does it feel to have been ranked the “10 Most Extreme Journalists” by the Society of Professional Journalists”? What do you have to do to get that honor?
LO: I was glad to have been recognized for the extreme diversity of the topics and stories I cover, especially since golf can be rather staid, and I’ve done lots of other more exciting things, from heli-skiing to diving with sharks to ultra-marathons. I think the main reason they gave me that particular award was because I am one of the only journalists who has actually set Guinness World Records in the course of my work, for travel, endurance and most recently skiing.
CF: What’s a must on your packing list?
LO: Rental movies for the flight, on my netbook, iPhone or iPad, along with Bose noise cancelling headphones. Lots of magazines. I can’t work on planes, I need distraction. Airline lounge memberships are well worth it, really make traveling much less painful. Usually a blazer, wherever I am headed. Also, I also bring a reusable water bottle and fill it at the airport. Lots of frequent travelers brag about packing with only carry-ons, but I rarely take more than my small backpack and I almost always check, because I usually have golf clubs or skis or something. Also, I like to dress well when traveling. People today, especially Americans, look like hobos, and I don’t want to promote that image of our country, so I figure I’m checking anyway, might as well have anything I would want. Dragging a big roll aboard through airports and from flight to flight and worrying about overhead room is the opposite of liberating, which is what I want travel to be. And the truth is stuff rarely gets lost or delayed, I can count the times that has happened to me, and people make way too big a deal about checking bags. Of course, now that they charge high fees I understand it more.
CF: What’s your routine before you fly?
LO: I check my flight status before I leave home but it rarely matters because it always says on time and then it changes. If they have an airline lounge I belong to, I go there and have coffee or a cocktail, depending on the time, read the papers, fill my water bottle. I try to stay away from the gate or the terminal in general until close to my flight. Even though I usually have preferred status, I only board early if I have to worry about storing carry-ons, which is usually only when I am skiing and carrying my boots. If it’s a long flight and I am in coach, I shop around for something to bring on the place to eat, because you rarely do better buying on board than in the airport, and airports sell much better food than they did just a couple of years ago.
CF: Any tips on researching a new destination before taking off?
LO: I’m old fashioned, so I still buy printed guidebooks, and read them because you get a more complete picture than researching specific things online. I use the web to help find vendors, restaurants, specific tours, things like that. If I do, I make sure only to believe ratings based on very large numbers of respondents. Whenever possible I take the advice of locals who live there, but rarely do I take the advice of another visitor. In cases of cultural or historic interest, like Easter Island or Machu Picchu, I read more academic books so I understand more about what I am experiencing and seeing – tour guides tend to make stuff up. I also am very interested in regional food, so I tend to read specialized books about that.
CF: How do you recommend anxious travelers stretch their comfort zone?
LO: Unfortunately, I have found that it is nearly impossible to get nervous people to stop being nervous. I recently tried to convince a friend that Mexico was the best choice for her vacation wants, but she worries about crime and ended up going to some characterless Caribbean destination instead. Interestingly I think that in a weird way package tours or great deals on airfare are a great way to push your comfort zone, because it makes it easy to commit to a place you wouldn’t otherwise go. Grab a package to Croatia or Guatemala or Vietnam and go someplace you wouldn’t go if you had to do the research and planning. Anyplace can be an adventure. Or if you are a more confident traveler, go someplace with no itinerary, like buy a ticket into one city and out of another a week or two apart and wing the details in between when you get there. Getting off the plane at night in a strange place with no hotel makes you focus. The most authentic and memorable travel experiences are rarely planned in advance.
CF: How do you discover local or off-the-beaten-path places?
LO: There is usually one particular attraction that starts the ball rolling, like I find out about a highly regionalized food or offbeat attraction. I once went to great lengths to detour to Sion, Switzerland because I read that you could visit Europe’s biggest subterranean lake there. I went to the Central Valley of California because they have a very specific and unique kind of barbecue there. It’s usually something like that gets me started, and then from there, like I said, anyplace can be an adventure. I read a lot.
CF: Is there a destination that without fail (barring floods and famine) you visit regularly?
LO: Italy. It’s my favorite place. Nothing special about that, it is lots of people’s favorite place. Great food, architecture, history, art, countryside, cities, wine, but most of all, the perfect balance between living and enjoying life. The country is small but very diverse and highly regionalized, everyplace you go it’s like a different country, radically varied cuisine and accents, but still unified by this underlying “Italianess.” They take things just seriously enough, which means not too seriously.
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