Have Blog,
Travel
A Native Oak Parker goes on an
adventure of a lifetime.
By Stacy Gittleman
"An interactive travel writing
and reading site"
S
ome travelers leave noth-
ing to chance. They book
an entire itinerary to
the second, down to the
restaurant and the hotels,
long before they hit the
highway or the runway.
Then there is Oak Park
native Carole Rosenblat, an intrepid
single woman traveler and founder
of a unique interactive travel blog
called www.DropMeAnywhere.com.
It is one of the only travel blogs
that asks followers to vote on where
Rosenblat should travel next and
to read all about it as her "virtual"
travel companions (who will hope-
fully offset her travel expenses with
some donations of "real" frequent
flyer miles).
Before each journey, she sets
up a voting poll, open for almost
a month. Within days of the close
of the vote, she packs up, books a
ticket and lands wherever her read-
ers take her. She worries about the
details — like where to stay and eat
and play — when she gets there.
36 March 2015 I
Mum
"Think of Drop Me Anywhere as
Eat, Love, Pray meets the blog Ju-
lie & Julia, as written by columnist
(of Sex and the City) Carrie Brad-
shaw," Rosenblat, 49, said as she
was interviewed over Skype from
a Budapest flat she was renting in
the city's Jewish quarter. After the
interview, she planned to venture
out for a night on the town to check
out a burlesque cabaret show with
some new friends she made while
volunteering for an organization
that feeds Budapest's hungry and
homeless.
In Budapest, she wrote both
about the evidence of the darkness
of the Nazis' massacre of the city's
Jews, to the vast restorative ef-
forts to preserve and renovate the
Dohany Street Synagogue, Europe's
largest synagogue
"I see my heritage in cities like
Budapest," she said. "It is nice when
you are living out of a suitcase to
feel touches of Judaism:'
Though she said she does not feel
afraid, even with the rise of anti-
Semitism in Europe, traveling solo
can feel a bit isolating. It was most
pressing during her recent stay in
Berlin where "it was hard to strike
up a conversation because even
though people do speak English,
they choose not to over German,"
she said.
A LIFE JOURNEY
This kind of travel, where one lives
on the edge of her comfort zone and
perhaps the end of her finances, is
more of a life journey than a vaca-
tion. She is constantly working to
keep her readers, whom she calls
her "virtual traveling partners,"
updated on her blog with detailed
journal entries and many photo-
graphs. She couples the Drop Me
Anywhere project with work she
does on a second blog called Rebel-
With-a-Cause. For this blog, she
writes about the tikkun olam work
she does for local causes in each
country she visits.
In St. John's, Newfoundland,
Carole volunteered with Spirit of
Newfoundland Productions at the
Mount Pearl Frosty Festival and
helped serve dinner. She also helped
sell bricks to raise money to restore
the group's home in the historic
Masonic Temple.
In Germany, she volunteered in
the Bremer Story house museum,
which employs the homeless as
theatrical historic actors.
Rosenblat is no stranger to
traveling. Before she launched
DropMeAnywhere.com, she had
more than 20 years of experience in
international tourism, had visited
more than 52 countries, and most
recently clocked in 80-hour weeks
as manager of youth activities for
the Disney Cruise Line.
For many years, print and online
media sought out her writing or
wrote about her travel experiences.
So much so that after a while, she
wondered if she could document her
worldly travels and eventually write
a book. She bounced the idea off
veteran travel writer Christopher El-
liott, author of How to be the Worlds