Sonoma travel writers living the dream, together

Risa Wyatt and Peter Schroeder honored for their outdoor reporting|

A local husband and wife who frequently compete against each other for the most sought-after freelance travel writing assignments, recently tied for first place for Best Outdoor Internet Article by the Outdoor Writers of California (OWAC).

Risa Wyatt and Peter Schroeder were honored by the nonprofit, which held its 2017 annual conference in Sonoma County in May. The location was a part of concerted effort by OWAC to “talk about the resurrection of Sonoma following the October fires,” said Schroeder.

Wyatt won for “Bora Bora: Sailing into Paradise.” Schroeder won for a piece entitled “Time Passes a Different Way in the Austrian Alps.”

Both Schroeder and Wyatt have garnered more than a lifetime’s worth of travel experience throughout their careers, with each having traveled to upward of 70 international destinations. Among these include trips down the Moselle in Luxembourg and Germany; an African wildlife safari in Tanzania’s Selous National Park; skiing outside of Changchun in northeastern China; and scuba diving in Palau.

When asked, Wyatt paused to think and mentally catalog the seismic record of travel in her head.

“This year I believe I got five new countries, Bulgaria, Israel, Czech Republic and Luxembourg and the Netherlands,” she said.

After listing countless countries and bodies of water, Schroeder faltered, “I can’t think of where I haven’t been actually.” Both made their first forays into the world of globetrotting in late adolescence.

Wyatt grew up in the Bronx, a borough of New York City, in a family that “never got too far,” said Wyatt. “We had a lovely beach house on Fire Island, off of Long Island. That’s where we’d spend the summers, but I had never traveled widely. My parents were the very stay-at-home type.”

Finally out of her parents’ nest, at age 19 and before her junior year at Barnard College, Wyatt spent the summer traveling to England, Denmark, Italy, France and Spain, visiting friends from college and meeting new friends along her route.

“The travel experience, in general, links you to other people,” she said. “I’d meet students who would also be traveling around by train. So whatever the next city was, where we’d get off. We maybe stayed in the same hotel or met up for dinner or went sightseeing the next day. I kept thinking to myself, ‘This is where I want to be.’”

After graduating from Princeton University at age 21, Schroeder delivered cars to the West Coast and hopped freight trains to get home to Louisville, Kentucky.

“I was meeting hoboes along the way, colorful characters; learning how to hop on to a freight train versus a box car versus a cattle car,” he said. “It’s a great way to see America and be on your own, no obligations.”

He also loved the thrill of catching the (free) ride.

“The trains are long, about a mile each, and once the locomotives start going past, you grab onto a ladder of whichever cart you want and you get up on the box car and lay out on a bed roll and just enjoy being up there on the top of the world,” he said. “All of a sudden I was totally by myself, going up the Sierras, and then the Rockies and all the way to the Appalachians, and across the Great Plains.”

Schroeder’s mother worked at the Louisville Times, and after hearing about her son’s illicit escapade home, they wanted the story. Quite fittingly, Schroeder wrote his first travel article about his first real travel experience: hopping freights across America.

And with that first piece, he plunged headfirst into what would become a lifetime of once-in-a-lifetime adventures.

He feels strongly that travel transcends class in a remarkable way.

“Once for fun, I went around the world with only a passport and a hundred dollars,” he said. “I’d get somewhere, and I wouldn’t have any money and so I’d offer to wash dishes or do a little electrical work or do some odd repairs, cut someone’s grass, just enough to get the next leg of my trip. I’d just bum myself around the world,” he said.

“Many people who want to sail or travel around the world think they have to save up all this money, but they miss the point if they save up money to do it, because the real adventure is being a shoestring traveler or a shoestring sailor.”

Published in numerous media outlets, he now predominantly writes about three distinct areas of travel: scuba diving, skiing and sailing.

Wyatt has also written for dozens of publications, from Wine Enthusiast to the Chicago Tribune to Forbes Life, just to name a few. She is also the former travel editor of Modern Bride, the founding editor of Specialty Travel and the creator of Seattle Essential.

About her writing, Wyatt says, “It’s not simply recounting. I went here and then went there, it’s really trying to get down to the essence of an experience; what are a people or a culture truly about. As I’m traveling, each night, I like to go back to my notes and reflect on my day, thinking about what surprised me the most.”

Both agree that the freelance writing lifestyle is absolutely the best lifestyle in the world.

“You travel the world, you don’t pay for anything, and you get to have adventures and then come home and write about them,” said Schroeder.

Wyatt and Schroeder met while on assignment in Italy and have been loving, living, and traveling together ever since.

“I found my wife on a ski trip at Courmayeur, which if you translate, means ‘Big Heart,’” said Schroeder. “We were the only two journalists. We spent a week skiing together, we had wonderful dinners together and everything was provided: the food, the wine, the ski lift tickets.”

This culture of comping that Schroeder speaks of is pervasive in the field of travel journalism. Following a recent trip to Israel, he and Wyatt reflected on how it affects the process of their travel writing.

“As freelancers, you don’t have a lot of money,” he said. “You rely on people to sponsor you. On this trip, the Israeli government sponsored us, so we flew into Tel Aviv, went up to Acre, all these towns around the southern part of Lebanon. We went to the Syrian border and we were looking down at the tanks, and there was fighting going on with ISIS. We continued along to the Golan Heights and visited a winery, stayed in a kibbutz and went back to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. A wonderful trip.”

Wonderful, indeed. And yet, upon their return, the stark contrast between violent conflict and indulgent leisure did not appear all that wonderful to some.

“When we got home, we were severely criticized for that trip, and I said ‘Wait a minute, just because I went into occupied territory doesn’t mean I’

It’s a hard line to straddle, the couple explained: remaining impartial about a place when you are being wined, dined and hosted.

It can also be challenging writing about travel in places that make newspaper headlines.

“Last fall, I was in Israel, scuba diving in Eilat, and I looked to one side, and I saw this humongous Jordanian flag flying, and three miles away, I looked and saw the Saudi Arabia peninsula shimmering in the distance, I looked to the other side, and I saw the resort hotels in Egypt,” she recounted.

“And you realize just how compact the Middle East is, and you gain more perspective for the difficult politics that are going on there – it makes you realize that these countries are really neighbors,” said Schroeder. “What you also realize is that people are wonderful all over the world.The governments get strange and ugly but the people, they’re just people, like us.”

For Wyatt and Schroeder, there is no better way to “get that soft underbelly of a place” than in Sonoma. It is the reason they keep coming back, the reason they have called Sonoma home since 2011.

“There’s not just wine here, we also have the coast, Dungeness crab, goat cheese. We have hiking trails, Bodega, and the Armstrong redwoods, and there’s Laguna de Santa Rosa. Just driving Highway One along the coast...” said Wyatt.

“Every town has an economic base but most economies require building factories, office structures, but our base here is wine, and so we have none of these things; We have rolling hills of vines,” said Schroeder. We have very much a country lifestyle here, except most country lifestyles, like where I grew up in Kentucky, you have refrigerators and broken-down cars in your front yard.

“But here, we have the beauty of country living without trashy rednecks and angry dogs. Also, the people who are here tend to be interested in all of the city things, like food festivals, wine festivals, film festivals, art – all of those things that are found in cities without the negatives of cities, which are crowds, and homeless people, and noise and sirens. So we have the best of a country lifestyle and the best of an urban lifestyle together in Sonoma.”

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