Journey of our Lifetimes - A Father's Encouragement

Journey of Our Lifetimes

Sometimes Together, Sometimes Apart

Memories, Transition & Change

To My Dearest Children,

As I’ve shared with you before, the reality of change is a constant in our lives, and as we embark on yet another new part of this “journey of a lifetime”, I want to share a few thoughts of encouragement and hope. While there has been unbelievable, almost unbearable amount of stress in the recent months, there is also intense joy and the opportunity to shape how we think about our circumstances.

Each of our lives is marked by transitions. Transitions are the markers by which we know change is either upon us, or coming. As I’ve done before, I again want to encourage you both to embrace change and learn how to think positively about transitions and to not have fear as you head into the unknown.

The home in San Bernardino where we lived from when you were born was a comfortable place where your Mom and I created many great memories of your earliest years. We loved to travel and used this home as a base from which to take some incredible journeys. Mom and I went on a delayed honeymoon to Australia when she was already pregnant with our baby boy. We ended up going on John and Shauna’s honeymoon to Europe when Mom was pregnant with our baby girl, and Grandma stayed in our home to take care of our boy. The time we spent together in the home were special moments of rocking you in the blue recliner, swimming with Pappa in the pool, riding the tractor around the deck with Grande’, playing with Midgy and Blacky and getting sticks of gum from George across the street. The imprinting of Sandy and Chrissy as nannies to you while your Mom went back to work was a large part of where you got rhythm and soul. We also experienced a transition and change in this home when we reached the decision to have Mom stop working so she could be home full time to raise you both. We started you traveling early from this home, including trips to Seattle for holidays, accompanying me on business trips and vacations where we took Grandma and Pappa to Hawaii where our baby boy took his first steps.

The first transition from one home to another in your young lives was the move from San Bernardino to Seattle when I was on contract for Weyerhaeuser. During that year, we packed up the whole house and moved into a little house in the woods on the land around the headquarters. It was tall pine trees, rainy and windy, with lots of visits to Grandma’s home for family gatherings at holidays, opening season for fishing, Propeller Club chow downs with Uncle Bill and Easter egg hunts with the cousins. We had rented out the house in San Bernardino, and moved back when my contract was done.

We got settled again in the home in San Bernardino and had gone through a lot of transitions during that year. When we got back into the one story rambler in Del Rosa Heights, there were great life events spent in a place that gave a framework for our memories. We have lots of pictures of a variety of events in that home, and they will always be etched in our memories. That home was the platform from which we created our memories and lived our dreams for that time in our lives. But we transitioned out of that home. The second transition in your young lives was the move from San Bernardino to San Diego.

When we started to see the decline of the area where we lived, and got tired of dealing with the commute for me to get to work, and were worried about the health impacts of living in smog all the time…we made a conscious choice to look for another place to live and we were just drawn to San Diego. We didn’t know anyone in San Diego; we had no family, no friends…just a few experiences of visiting San Diego and windsurfing in Mission Bay, bicycling around the Bay and Mom visiting the Jazzercise headquarters in Carlsbad.

It is hard to believe we bought the Lone Jack house in 1993. We moved in at the end of the year in December. In fact we flew up to Seattle for Christmas that year and came back after the New Year to start a new phase of our lives in a new town, a new home. We were excited to embark on a new phase of our lives, and we had many hopes for this new start. As you look at our family pictures from this time you can see the joy and excitement of going through all these new adventures.

Although you have a few formative memories of San Bernardino, the majority of your life memories are now firmly marked by the architecture of the home we shared together for almost 16 years. Most of your young life transitions have been supported and made safe by having this family dwelling. Your rooms were almost an extension of your personalities and knowing that you had that constant in your lives gave you incredible confidence and reassurance. As you have gone through various transitions, moving from pre-school to lower school, then graduating to middle school, and then moving into high school…each of those transitions was marked by some kind of change. Yet a constant throughout that time was our home. We used that home as a base camp from which to explore the world, literally and figuratively. We used that home as an Oasis to which we escaped and regrouped and regained our sense of balance. That home was the place where you temporarily transitioned from full time school at Santa Fe Christian and were blessed with probably the best three years of education when you had Mom as your teacher during the years where she home schooled you. I will never forget the times when Grandpa Ted was able to share those lesson times and how much he enjoyed just being around. Not only did our home protect us from physical storms, it also protected us from the storms in life: the school fights, the traumas of broken friendships, the final exams, the teenage years and the transition to young adulthood.

That physical structure, more than just the structure of a house, but a home saw you both through a wide array of challenging life transitions, and you have come through all of them with your “selves” intact and ready to take on the next challenge. Although no where near the tragedy of losing your Mom in 2007, you have had exposure to other losses, including the loss of Blackie, the loss of Grandma Doris in 1990, the death of my cousins Donnie in 1992 and Stacey in 2002, the death of Grandpa Ted in 1999, and the passing of Pappa in 2003. Because you were so young, the impact of these losses were much less significant for you.

The transition of losing Mom over two and a half years ago now, marked yet another huge milestone for each of us. That was a transition and change that was out of order in the expected sequence of life. It just shouldn’t have been Mom’s time to go. Yet we trust in God’s timing for this change. Each of us has been changed in different ways and we are each working through what all this change means in our lives…but we were blessed to have been able to do that from the comfort of the home where we shared so much. Now that home is no longer ours. We have transitioned into a new home with many open questions swirling around us. As we struggle to figure out what this next phase of “normal” looks like, we are all about to face yet another transition which is going to require us to accept change and figure out how to think appropriately about what all this means.

As both of you experienced your first two years of college on a journey which took you away from home into the dorms at your respective universities, I can’t help but remind you about the physical framework around what you experienced. You took bits and pieces of your rooms and transplanting them into temporary housing were you figured out how to create a new sense of “place” in someplace that became your transitional home. How you thought about that change was in large part what shaped your experience for the first two years. With the financial uncertainties staring us in the face, I want to encourage you to shape your thinking about our current circumstances with optimism for all the great memories you have created in those first two years. It is okay to have reservations about what might be coming, and you will also need to figure out how to think about all this with an expanded knowledge of money, relationships and everything else life is throwing at us. The sadness can and does co-exist with the joy and excitement.

I want you both to always embrace any change in your life with a sense of optimism and excitement, knowing that we will always have each other, unconditionally loved, no questions asked and without judgment. That is the strangeness of unconditional love, that you can experience it, lose it, be overwhelmed by it and be in it all while keeping your perspective that whatever it is…it is just as integral a part of your life as your blood. You cannot live without it and you will always need it.

I am blessed to have shepherded you for this part of your journey. I hope to be a continuing resource and cheerleader for you as you experience more, different and new changes, and I will do my best to be available for as long as God intends.

As for me, I’m sure of one thing: No matter what happens in the future, regardless of the physical location where we happen to reside, you and your Mom will always remain inside me. Our lives together fill a very important part of my heart, and nothing will ever change what we have been blessed to share together during the time Mom was with us. We are now filling our lives with new memories, and they are being done around a series of “firsts” without Mom. Hard to believe I’m still saying that after two and a half years.

There will no doubt be additional transitions in my life, such as starting a new job (hopefully very soon) or deciding to risk exploring new relationships again. The relationship with a woman in my life has been an important one, and I am sure that you know there will never be a substitute for your Mom. Your Mom will always hold a special place in my heart, irreplaceable.

I want you to always remember that the way I can explain that to you is because of the way I’ve felt about both of you as you came into my life. When I married your Mom, I couldn’t imagine loving anyone any more than how I loved her. Of course I still loved my parents and sisters and extended family, but there was a whole new part of my heart that opened up to allow for a special and unique place where only your Mom could fit. That place became very large over the 21 years we were together, 19 of it married.

During our first year of marriage, our son was born and an entirely new place in my heart showed up, a special reserved place that was totally and completely about loving my son. It expanded my heart in a way that I hadn’t imagined I could love so much more, but it was a unique space and a unique love that was and is reserved only for my son. Just like with your Mom, the place for loving my son has continued to grow and deepen as the years have filled our lives with so much. Now that love is allowing for a transition for a young man to forge into the world as a well-equipped, free-thinking man. That love allows for the space to also provide room for the additions in his life of a life partner who will expand his heart in much the same way as Mom shaped mine. I imagine that there will be several relationships through which God will allow my son to grow, love, learn, and hurt before he will find that special love of his life. Eventually I know that God will bless my son with that life partner and that all our hearts will expand to not only accept that woman in my son's life into our family circle, but also the addition of his own children. I am excited in anticipation of all these great transitions, and will always wish that Mom could be with us to experience these life changes.

Then it happened again, along came my daughter. Another expansion took place in my heart and a whole new space opened up for a love which is now exclusively used to love my precious daughter. All of the unique experiences marked by the special bond of a father-daughter relationship have continued to blossom. I have faced the transition of having her affections shifted to another man, and had to bear from a distance the challenges of not being able to mend a broken heart or fix a relationship. This was a difficult change for sure, but I’m grateful that you continue to grow and mature in a way that is thoughtful and respectful. I don’t feel like you’re shutting anyone out for new relationships at the expense of existing love relationships, but that you, like my son, are figuring out what it means to create a whole new place in your heart for someone new. There is a whole new dynamic in your thinking and relationships which required all of us to change to accommodate this new phase of life. You continue to be challenged by some of your friends have not been taught how to deal with, expect or manage this aspect of their lives, so they’ve gotten stuck in what they thought their relationship should be with you instead of giving you the room to expand your heart and include them in the new growth areas of your heart. I am proud of you for sticking with it, for being a role model and for believing they will come to understand this in time. I know it has been painful, but that is part of what continues to mature and shape you as a leader.

Right now it seems hard to imagine going through another courtship like I’ve just been through, but I trust that in whatever years I may continue to be blessed with life that I will again find someone who will expand a whole new part of my heart. I hope that in my courtship you have seen a good role model. I hope you have felt that I treated this aspect of my life the way I should.

I don’t know what the future holds. The future might include the possibility of buying a new home down the road. The condo for now is a good transitional landing place for which we are truly blessed. I may need to go through a transition myself which may include moving to another home, maybe a villa in Tuscany or a penthouse condo above Pike Place Market in Seattle. It may be driven by the need to accept employment somewhere other than San Diego due to the current economic circumstances.

Whatever our ultimate physical location is, we will always carry the memories of our past residences with us wherever transitions and change take us. These are the bricks and mortar that surrounded us, but part of the tools we utilize, certainly not a reflection of who we are. I am so proud of who you both have become. You are my solid foundation in a world of chaos. Houses and money burn, but you two are eternally my kids.

Here’s part of why I’m writing this to you both. Though we have little choice in most of the transitions in our lives, I am so proud of how both of you are dealing with ongoing tough transitions. I thank God that we had the foundation He provided where we have stood together amidst a heavy storm and weathered the loss of Mom in a way that is honoring both to her and to God. We have sorrow for sure, but we have hope and confidence in our eternal destiny, and for that I will always be grateful. Although I’ve been through most of the life transitions you’re about to experience, you both already know what took me decades to learn. Life is about brief joys, those saturated moments and places etched in our hearts where we stand, shaky but upright, and find that overall we have a pretty good balance.

When you feel like that balance is teetering, always know that you can come to me for a hug, a conversation, my perspective, a glass of wine or just to cry together to reset your frame of reference and regain your balance.

Always remember how deeply I love you both,

Dad

Encouragement to Keep Writing!

Perseverance is Key

Encouragement to Keep Writing

by

Kendell Lang, New Media Consultant

For the writer in all of us we are inspired to write our thoughts on paper and express them to others. In some cases we keep a journal or a notebook of our thoughts and inspirations.  I write this blog to try and keep a clear thought pattern as I process a variety of ideas and issues in my mind. I am the future of myself, I am the writer and the future is mine.


I'm not going to worry about the rejection, I've had plenty of that. They say there are 99 “no’s” to every “yes” so I am looking forward to getting the rest of the “no” out of the way so I can get to a “yes”.  I am continuing to plug away at my regular job while I get my writing in as I can. I won’t give up and I will persevere.  I've learned that most authors who do it full time now had regular jobs once in their lifetime and they had the same dreams I do now. They didn’t give up and kept plugging away.

I won’t forget the Stephanie Meyer is a home-maker and Suze Orman used to wait tables. I see famous authors now and in the past who were teachers, consultants, garbage collectors and every other kind of career.

Sometimes I don't feel like writing, but I do it anyway. Sometimes I may be scared to write, but I do it anyway. Sometimes I wonder whether what I have to say is providing value, but I write it anyway. I just keep writing and I trust that I will find that what I am writing is getting better and better.

When I have a thought I try and write it out.  I do my research on whatever topic I'm working on and follow through being true to my idea. I study other works and read other authors to appreciate other styles and enhance my knowledge of the world through other author’s lives.

I am only writing what I know about.  That keeps me out of trouble most of the time. Well so to speak. I study life around me and what I see as stories in my world.  I don’t talk myself out of writing; thinking no one will ever read it. I forge ahead and write and stay positive. It can have a twist but will still be in my world.

So I hold to this virtual notebook and take it with me on my journey of a lifetime as a writer. I don’t give up, I study life, I research and above all things I keep writing. I will find my unique story and the world will find it with me. If I write about it well, people will read it and appreciate it as a unique contribution. I keep on writing and I don’t give up.

PROLOGUE - LIFE IS...Full of strange moments in time.

Prologue


LIFE IS…

Full of strange moments in time. Moments which become suspended in time, slowed down to almost exaggerate the intensity of what you’re about to experience. Moments which are similar to the dreams where you are trying to run but can’t get your legs to move. That brief second before the accident where the whole scene goes frozen for an instant, silent and you think to yourself, this is going to be bad. Then everything goes into fast forward and the crunching sound of metal spinning through the air as the truck flips over and all you see is the ground rushing up to collapse the hood of the cab before it crushes down on top of you, spitting you out the side and onto the ground. As you stare at the ground in disbelief about what you just survived, you are strangely focused on the gravel. Why am I just staring at the gravel? Get up!

So I survived, somewhat broken, but alive. Thanking God that I had been spared. Crazy, uncontrollable body shakes as the body releases the adrenaline dumped into the system, as if I’d just come out of an ice bath. But none of these kinds of life moments could have prepared me for what was about to happen.

We were having an early gift opening for our family Christmas before leaving on a ski vacation, just the four of us. My wife, Patti, my teenage son Kamden, my teenage daughter Kjersti and myself. Sitting around a warm fire, sipping a glass of wine and enjoying the brief quiet before the storm of finishing our packing. The kids are all excited about opening their gifts, but more excited about leaving in the morning for a winter adventure. I ask my wife a question, and I think I mishear her answer. I ask again, and I get the same strange response which makes no sense. I shake my head, look at the kids and they are as puzzled as I am. I cock my head a bit to the left like our little white bijon friche who tries desperately to understand what we’re saying, but just can’t seem to get it. The kids and I both think she is making a joke or kidding around with us, but when it happens again I get an immediate knot in my stomach. I know something is wrong…I just didn’t know how wrong. I call my sister, an orthopedic surgeon, and describe what we’ve just experienced. She tries to keep me calm, but I quickly grasp the gravity of the situation. After asking my wife who the current President is, and with a straight face as serious as can be, she disgustedly tells me, “geessh, purple cows can’t so there’s why I can tell you the President.” After randomly sampling the responses from a few other questions, my sister tells me that my wife is having some kind of brain attack and to get her to the Emergency Room…immediately.

It was one of those times when all of sudden everyone knows something is terribly wrong. The kids begin to cry in fear, not knowing what’s happening to their mom. We quickly load everyone into the car and drive a few short miles to the local ER. My wife is objecting the whole time, half the time making sense and arguing that she’ll be fine, the other half talking gibberish. The intake nurse is quick to recognize the urgency of the situation and immediately gets my wife on a gurney and back into the ER. I sit the kids down and make sure they are situated. Then I join the group of doctors working on my wife back in the triage area. As they start to do testing and asking her questions, I see a blank stare come over her eyes and she stops responding. Like a tidal wave rolling in, the gran mal seizure starts as her eyes roll up into her eye sockets and her body becomes overwhelmed with what’s going on inside her brain. The doctors immediately recognize the onset of the seizure and do their best to assure me that they know what they are doing. How can you know what to do for something as awful as this? The doctors are amazed that we were lucky enough to get her to the ER before the seizure began, as most victims usually lose consciousness and fall down. The first few seconds of the seizure are marked by complete rigidity in every muscle in her body. She stops breathing completely. I cannot fully describe the grotesque contortion that happens to the body when it goes into this state where every limb is seemingly completely hyper-extended, but yet in total constriction. Shortly after the complete rigidity comes the convulsion, violent and rhythmic. All of her extremities are slapping wildly against the gurney, pretty much like Darryl Hannah having a death seizure in one of my all time favorite movies, the Blade Runner with Harrison Ford. I will never be able to watch that movie in the same way ever again. The experts can only watch and make sure her airway is open and that she doesn’t bite her tongue. This is when it hits me that this is why they call it “practicing” medicine, as they have no solution for this. The seizure lasts for what feels like an eternity, but in reality is probably about 3 minutes. The convulsion weakens and just like a submerged diver coming up for air, her respiration starts again with a huge gasp as she gulps for fresh air.

As she stabilizes, they wheel her off for X-rays, CT scan and PET (positron emission tomography) scans. I learn later that PET is a major diagnostic imaging modality used predominantly in determining the presence and severity of cancers. It is currently the most effective way to check for cancer recurrences and it offers significant advantages over other forms of imaging such as CT or MRI scans in detecting disease in many patients. Being an engineer and always wanting to understand root cause, I learn that for the PET scan she is given a radiopharmaceutical, such as FDG (fluorodeoxyglucose), which includes both sugar (glucose) and a radionuclide (a radioactive element) that gives off signals. She is injected with these contrast elements, and the emissions given off are measured by a PET scanner. A PET scanner consists of an array of detectors that surround the patient. Using the gamma ray signals given off by the injected radionuclide, PET measures the amount of metabolic activity at a site in the body and a computer reassembles the signals into images. Cancer cells have higher metabolic rates than normal cells, so they show up as denser areas on a PET scan.

I will never forget when the radiologist and medical oncologist called me into a small room lined with little white light boxes all around the walls. They turned off all the lights in the room except the light boxes and then jammed the slides up into the metal clips to hold the scans. This is when it happened again, that out of body slow motion experience just like the accident. I was literally floating up in the corner of the room, watching this bizarre scene unfold in front of me. I looked down at these two lab-coated geeks and said to myself, that poor bastard is going to get some really bad news. As I said that to myself, it hadn’t even hit me yet that the dude was me. When I realized that was when everything went into fast forward high speed mode. It was like my whole life flashed before me and all I could do was sit there in shocked silence. I vaguely remember hearing the doctors talk to me, sort of like how the adults talk to Charlie Brown or the other kids in Peanuts with a “wa-waa-waaa” muffled voice sound, but not intelligible. I do remember crystal clear the sentence, “You see that little black node in her frontal lobe? That is a brain tumor. You need to put your wife’s affairs in order because she will not be here in a year.”

You cold-hearted bastards! Didn’t anyone teach you bedside manner in medical school? Are you such a social retard that you have lost the ability to have any compassion whatsoever? What ever happened to just the politeness of saying, “I’m really sorry, I’ve got some bad news which is going to be really hard to understand. Would you like anyone to be here with you as we talk about this?” This was like these guys were the purveyors of bad news as sport, just trying to see how callous they could be. I knew a guy like these guys before, a forensic pathologist who dealt with death all day long. A life that was tainted by the gore of seeing every imaginable type of death and figuring out how to survive without being scarred for life. The reality was that dude was twisted by his profession. How could you not be affected when you’re the person pulling body parts out of the plane, train and auto wreck or trying to figure out how a man could kill himself using a trapeze hung above his bed and a sharpened fence pole nailed to the wall and impaled up his rectum? That is some twisted stuff. But to be fair to this pair of dumb and dumber, I’m sure it was just a reflection of their own badly honed coping skills, or more realistically their denial of having to interact with real human beings. How could someone survive in a profession where every day you are telling people their loved ones have cancer and are going to die? It’s no excuse for these idiots, but at least I can rationalize why they were such moronic communicators.

Journey of a Lifetime: Young Adult Travel Adventures

Book Proposal Query Letter - Title

Journey of a Lifetime: Young Adult Travel Adventures

Summary

The companion travel guidebook to the web-based Reality TV Travel Show "Journey of a Lifetime" is all about building a framework for a social network of like-minded young adults who crave travel adventures and want to experience their own Journey’s. Just like the contestants who have submitted their video online and won their dream travel adventure, young adults can learn through this companion travel guide how they too can experience the very same adventure they’ve seen on the show, or create their own travel adventure. This companion travel guidebook will compliment the Reality TV Travel Series where submissions by contestants highlight personalized stories, often emotional tear-jerker reunions, about connecting young adults and their families with their heritage across continents. Each chapter will coincide with the actual itinerary of each week’s contestant winner. This guide will include easy reference to all the resources compiled for every aspect of the week’s show.

The JOAL guidebook is different because each chapter tells a unique and compelling story, all immersively tied to the visual anchors of that week’s episode on video, as well as logically and easily navigated on the web. The guidebook is designed to be the back-pocket easy reference for the traveler’s favorite episode. For those traveler’s who were mesmerized by the events portrayed on the show, the guidebook will insure that they know exactly where to go and what to do if they want to replicate that experience.

Author

I am a global media Entrepreneur who captures the cultural change of young adults seeking purpose in their life by producing compelling travel adventures leading to self-discovery delivered precisely the way this generation receives its content: thru their iPhone, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. You can see the show’s website at http://www.journeyofalifetime.com/ which includes videos about the show and submission videos by contestants.

One of the key elements to consider when evaluating whether to represent me and this book is the considerable momentum the author can contribute to the overall marketing of the book through a comprehensive distribution strategy which supports and enhances all the traditional book distribution opportunities. In addition to developing traditional and interesting publicity hooks and novel selling approaches, the author is uniquely qualified to bring about a new distribution method for this guidebook, including;

HyperDistribution (social networking)

DVD Distribution

Broadband and Viral Distribution

Search Engine Distribution

What Qualifies Me? I am a technical entrepreneur and have been published in numerous industry and trade association publications and technical white papers. I am currently writing two other books, one non-fiction titled “Hyperdistribution: How to Market to Young Adults” and one fiction titled “Gardner’s of Eden”. I am a subject matter expert in online marketing and have obtained industry recognition for Search Engine Optimization, including having written extensively about search engine ranking. I am credited with coining the phrase “hyperdistribution” which is a new online method of marketing which is described in detail in my proposal and the subject of one of my other non-fiction books. I have authored numerous internal company publications, dozens of business plans, executive summaries for successful investor offerings and numerous policy manuals. I have written for numerous websites, including writing the website www.pattilang.com, a six year journey chronicling my late wife’s battle against brain cancer. I am a published author for a cookbook titled, “Cicciotti’s Kitchen” Italian Family Favorites, featuring Gaetano Cicciotti.

Audience

The emerging market of Youth and Student Travelers, ages 18 to 35, is becoming a highly prized demographic.

We provide travel content for the Traveling Young Adult and Student Community and have created effective online revenue generation strategies through this vehicle. We create unique location-specific, travel oriented websites to educate and inform youth travelers.

We believe that traveling youth between the ages of 18 and 35 are one of the principal driving forces behind the growth of the Internet and that as of January 2009, individuals in the age group of 18 to 35 made up 45% of the online population. We believe that traveling youth between the ages of 18 and 36 also represent an attractive demographic group for advertisers and businesses, controlling or influencing over $1.6 trillion of the $3.0 trillion in annual travel spending in the United States.

We have one of the most demographically targeted online communities on the World Wide Web. Our business will be the largest online travel content provider for young adults, with more interactive travel connections and more unique visitors to our Web sites in a given month than any competitor. Our network, built around our core community website "JourneyofaLifetime.com", provides an easy-to-use, comprehensive and immersive travel community experience tailored to the interests and needs of traveling youth aged 18 through 35. We provide advertisers and merchants with targeted access to traveling youth using the Web.

We are an online travel content company that enables our target Young Adult and Student customers to not only immerse themselves in the video content of our uniquely formatted travel shows, but to also search for and purchase a broad array of proprietary travel products, including direct sales of in-house Travel DVD productions, travel guidebooks, as well as referral coordination of airline tickets, lodging, car rentals, cruises and vacation packages through our website and strategic partner websites like Travelocity.com and Orbitz.com. We sell these travel products both individually and as part of packaged trips to our target customers located primarily in the United States. We also offer access to travel news, travel weather, travel delays, security alerts and other information of interest to travelers on our website.

Although there is currently more revenue to be earned from Baby Boomer travelers today than Gen Xers or Digital Youth, that won’t be for long, according to research conducted by TIA’s new strategic partner, DK Shifflet & Associates. Gen X travelers have been on a faster trajectory than their older boomer colleagues as far as growth in hotel room-nights goes.

The Office of Travel and Tourism Industries (SOURCE: U.S. Department of Commerce, ITA, Office of Travel and Tourism Industries, "In-Flight Survey," May 2005. http://tinet.ita.doc.gov/) produced a report showing that there were 27,351,000 total U.S. Residents visiting overseas destinations in 2005, with 22,373,000 or 81.8% of those total overseas visitors doing so for Leisure as well as visiting Friends and Relatives. Applying 24% youth/student travelers to the total overseas visitors shows that there are approximately 5,369,520 youth and student travelers who went abroad in 2005.

Competing and Related Titles

There are literally thousands of travel guidebooks published around the world. A quick visit to your local bookstore is likely to confuse and overwhelm a would-be reader with the plethora of “me-too” travel books. Most of the existing works focus on basically the same thematic formats which bludgeon the reader with statistics, facts and maps.

The JOAL guidebook is different because each chapter tells a unique and compelling story, all immersively tied to the visual anchors of that week’s episode on video, as well as logically and easily navigated on the web. The guidebook is designed to be the back-pocket easy reference for the young adult traveler’s favorite episode. For those traveler’s who were mesmerized by the events portrayed on the show, the guidebook will insure that they know exactly where to go and what to do if they want to replicate that experience.

The JOAL guidebook is part of a comprehensive social networking strategy designed to foster loyalty only associated with high affinity groups. The traditional TV Travel Show Industry (discussed later in more detail) and the Travel Guidebook Industry have missed a fundamental connection which we address because we are creating a Primary Affinity Group. There are signs of this emerging market trend to focus on the Young Adult Travel market, for example:

• YoungMoney.com (http://www.youngmoney.com/) has targeted the Young Adult market demographic, but treats travel as a narrative adjunct for the traditional task list of articles like; dealing with theft while traveling, top safety travel tips, save money while traveling and other equally non-compelling topics.

• Student Travel Association (http://www.statravel.com/) targets the right audience, but regurgitates the same old tired travel information; the world's largest student and youth travel agency, beats any price…wow, what a difference! They get you (student, teachers & anyone under 26) the cheapest, most flexible flights and top-rated accommodations.

• Student Universe (http://www.studentuniverse.com/) is basically a repackaged reseller of online booking and reservation systems linked in from other providers.

• Student Traveler (http://www.studenttraveler.com/) comes a little closer, but still doesn’t hit the mark.

Special Marketing and Promotional Opportunities

Embedded Advertising (branded alliances) is becoming more and more sophisticated. Theatrical release of the most recent James Bond movie embedded everything from Omega watch advertising to Ford. The restaurant chain Cheesecake Factory now embeds advertising from sponsors in their menus! We are proposing a novel approach to partner with our publisher and to obtain upfront embedded advertising from select Product Sponsors.

Seven main Product Sponsorship areas of focus (not including ancillary product placements) are priorities for SIP operations: Airlines, Hotels, Rental Cars, Search Engines, Computers, Beverages and Clothing. Please see the Product Partners section for more details about each of these opportunities.

In addition to the Product Sponsorship, we are working with a highly specialized Media Services organization which is helping us prepare a sophisticated and comprehensive viral and hyper distribution marketing strategy.

Most 18-year-old students, our Digital Youth, entering the graduating class of 2010 this fall were born in 1990. They grew up with a cell phone in one hand, a mouse in the other and a computer screen as part of their worldview. They learned to surf the internet as they learned to read. While they were still in their cribs, the 20th century started to close as the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet bloc disintegrated, and frequent traditional wars in Latin America gave way to the uncontrolled terrors of the Middle East. For them: Billy Carter, Lucille Ball, Gilda Radner, Billy Martin, Andy Gibb, and Secretariat have always been dead. This year’s entering students form a generation that has always been ‘connected’ and is used to things happening in ‘real time,’ like live satellite coverage of revolutions and wars, instant messaging and movies on demand. They expect solutions for every problem, from baldness to diseased organs. To the chagrin of traditional media outlets, they’ve developed their own generational means of communication.

HyperDistribution: a distribution channel which is even more efficient than broadcasting. If you don’t know what HyperDistribution is, then you don’t know about YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. If you’ve never checked out online content forums and social media sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us and Newsvine, then you’ll need to explore those to understand what’s going on.