This is the longest I've gone without posting on my poor neglected Cool Travel Guide. You want to know why? Drop by Grantourismo and you'll see that we've been a tad busy on our yearlong grand tour of the world, which we embarked on in February in partnership with HomeAway Holiday-Rentals. So far our trip has taken us from Melbourne via Dubai to London, Marrakech, Essaouira, Madrid, Jerez, Barcelona (pictured), Ceret, Perpignan, Paris, and now we're in Kotor in Montenegro. We're busy, but we're meeting some amazing people, having some extraordinary experiences, and we're generating some top quality content of which we're really proud: go take a look! I won't be neglecting Cool Travel Guide for much longer though... I have plans to re-launch the blog very soon, which I'll share with you shortly. In the meantime, do come and visit us at Grantourismo - even if it's just to drop by and say hello!

Terry and I have been dreaming about doing a grand tour of sorts for a few years - since way back when we wrote the Grantourismo blog for Charles and Marie. We started to seriously develop the idea of a reincarnation of Grantourismo about a year ago, but we hadn't yet begun to think about how to fund it. Our original plan was to stay in one destination for a month at a time, and to really try to get beneath the skin of the place, to get to know the locals, learn as much of the language as we could, to learn some things unique or special to the place, and to write a book about the project. We were over the moon when we discovered that HomeAway Holiday Rentals had a similar marketing exercise in mind, their idea being to send a couple of travel writers around the world to explore a more enriching and authentic way of travel that was possible through holiday home stays, rather than hotels. It was a godsend that they believed our project would fit, and we were happy to compromise a little (two destinations a month instead of one) to be able to make it work together. I'll tell you a little bit more about Grantourismo in coming posts.

Finishing writing projects (books, stories, reviews) and planning our exciting new project called Grantourismo, a contemporary grand tour of sorts, has kept us busy throughout December and January, and once again prevented me from updating this poor neglected little blog. Early this week we left Australia, where we went to spend Christmas and New Year with family and work at my uncle and aunt's beautiful house in Bendigo, for the UAE, our home since 1998, and the base for the intensive globetrotting we've been doing these last 12 years. Today we kick off Grantourismo with a little pre-launch party at a swish villa on The Palm in Dubai, on Monday we fly to London for the official launch of the project, and a week later we head to Marrakech to properly start the project. So what is this project then, you ask? Well, essentially, we're trading hotel rooms for holiday homes for a year (phew!) and partnering with HomeAway Holiday Rentals, who are sending us around the world to stay in their properties and write about the homes, the destinations, and the experiences they enable us to have. The aim is to inspire people to choose holiday homes over hotels when they're planning a trip, because we believe homes enable people to travel in a more enriching and authentic way. You can read more about the project on our pretty Grantourismo blog (which Terry designed) and here on the HomeAway site. And I'll tell you more about how the project came about and what it involves in another post. Because I have a party to prepare for now...

The posts I will be popping up on my poor neglected travel blog over the next few days have been a long time coming. Some I drafted back in Beirut in November, others I scribbled almost a month ago while I was recovering from bronchial pneumonia from a hotel room in Bangkok where we were working on a guidebook. That diagnosis, by the way, based on nasty symptoms like coughing up blood, came from my doctor uncle in Australia by email because I was too busy working to get to a GP. It would be an understatement to say that 2009 has been a hectic year of travel and writing for Terry and I - something I only recently appreciated glancing at all the books we've written which have been published this year sitting on the shelf beside my desk here at my family's house in Bendigo, Australia: Footprint Italian Lakes, Thomas Cook Northern Italy, and Thomas Cook Travellers Calabria, plus a handful of books I updated for AA and Thomas Cook. Then there are others we've written that I haven't even seen (like the Rough Guides Clean Breaks, which I contributed to) or are not yet published, like the new edition to the Rough Guide to Australia (for which we updated four and a bit states - half the country! - on a four month-long road trip from October 2008 to February 2009), and another first edition, Back Roads Australia for DK. I skim down this page scanning my posts, and while there have been few compared to last year or the year before, when I stop at In Print and Online and then take a look at that archive I see why. We may continually read the claims that print is dead yet we've spent more time writing for magazines this year than any other, and up until we returned to guidebooks in December we'd spent six months solid doing little else but write for magazines. The irony is that we've now been hired by HomeAway Holiday-Rentals for a year to travel the world, stay in their properties, and blog about the experience - something I never could have predicted. So the travel blogging that for me had been an escape from my 'day job' as a travel writer now becomes our main source of income. Print is still not dead, however - as much as our new client appreciates social media, they are still going to pay us bonuses for every article we get published in a magazine or newspaper. So I'm expecting it's going to be another busy year, but I'm pleased to say that we'll be slowing down considerably. No longer will I be envying a donkey his pace. More on our new project, Grantourismo soon.

Pictured? Fortune tellers in Bangkok.