It’s been a few years since I’ve had a nice long layover in downtown Chicago, so I’d forgotten what a truly wonderful city it is. You see, whenever I’m visiting the Windy City my crew and I usually get stuck at an airport hotel, if we even leave the airport at all. So when I got an invitation to speak at the travel blog exchange conference, I decided to make it a long weekend. I also decided to bring my mother along.

Our flight from New York departed to Chicago on Friday. Saturday we spent the entire day wandering around and exploring the city. More about that later. Because on Sunday, I, yours truly, actually sat on a panel with some of the most powerful travel bloggers around. In fact, I took a seat right between Sean Keener (co-founder of Bootsnall) and Nomadic Matt. And on the other side of Matt sat Michael Yessis (co-founder and co-editor of WorldHum). Honestly, I’m not even sure what I was doing there, but I was very excited about it and I do hope someone photographed it. Because we were there to discuss how to keep a blog lively, I won’t bore you with the details of “lively” blogging, but I will share a few of the questions and answers I think you might find interesting.

WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE STORY ON YOUR BLOG AND WHY: I couldn’t narrow it down to just one post, so I shared my three favorite posts…

1.THAT DAY – 9/11: This is the most serious post I’ve written to date. The best part was AOL featured it on 9/11 last year and it inspired millions of people to share their own stories of that tragic day, a day that not only took so many lives, but also completely changed the way we travel today. Some stories were so emotional they made me cry. Powerful stuff.

2.FLIGHT ATTENDANT PET PEEVE #1: ANSWER PLEASE – This is my very first Gadling post. Over 700 people responded and the majority of those comments were not nice…not at all! In fact, it felt like 700 drive by shootings. I learned very quickly I needed a tough skin in order to write about what I do for a living, and to shake things off, and not take the comments personally. That was a huge lesson. I now work hard to show that flight attendants are nice, good people, who are also smart and interesting. Because we are!

Continue reading GALLEY GOSSIP: A WEEKEND IN CHICAGO – TALKING ABOUT BLOGGING & A QUICK TRIP REPORT