How to Contribute to DirtRoadTrip

Sometimes you read something, and you almost feel compelled to jump out of your chair, wave your fist in the air and shout “Right on, man!” A recent open letter written by Christophe Noel over at Expedition Portal almost did that for us.

You can read it straight from Christophe here, but the gist is about how crowd-funding (kickstarter, go fund me, etc.) have become avenues for shameless travelers to solicit (beg for?) funds to finance extravagant overland travel.  He ends it by asking, and implying that we “erode the spirit of travel when we make it a foregone conclusion that we are entitled to travel.”

We couldn’t agree more, and that’s why you won’t see us asking for donations, gas money, “$upport,” or anything like that, even when it has become relatively common for other people in the community to essentially practice panhandling.

We started DirtRoadTrip in December of 2013 with the intention of creating and sourcing cool write-ups, building and running our own website, and having a little fun along the way.  We also hoped that it would inspire people like us, those that work for a living and don’t ask for handouts, to see that they can fit 4×4-based adventure travel into their lives.

It’s been a fulfilling but challenging journey for us trying to balance our full time jobs and personal lives with the beast we only refer to as “the blog.”  Yet at the end of the day we still get excited to work on it because not only are we passionate about outdoor adventure, but we also know you guys are reading it!

We like to think that most of we do here at DirtRoadTrip is attainable by all of our readers and fellow adventurers. We both work full time jobs with limited vacation, and plenty of other time constraints, but we manage to make it work. Sure sometimes we are pulling 1,200+ mile weekend trips that have us rolling in super late on a Friday night and then rolling back into our office Monday morning bleary eyed and smelling like campfire, but it’s always worth it.

Every so often at an event, local meet and greet, or via e-mail, we get asked “how can I contribute to DirtRoadTrip?” We’ve been asked this by everyone from our own mothers to random people we didn’t even know had heard of our blog, but our answer is always the same:  Hit the trail, get outdoors, take your family somewhere they haven’t been before and if you really insist on doing something, submit a write-up!

The point is that we don’t want reader donations to fund our adventures and we’re not entitled to travel any more than anyone else.  We’d much rather see you spend any money you would have donated to us or some other blog/website on a tank of gas, set of tires, or even a case of beer to pass around the campfire.

At the end of the day, we hope all of you get out there and find your own adventures. It’s the stories we hear from all of you that continue to inspire us, and it’s what motivates us to keep hitting the dirt, one road at a time.

Alex & Ben