Travel Chakra

Another fantastic weekend spent at the Adventure Travel Expo with the GoNomad gang and my beautiful film Producer friend Miss Angela. The Adventure Travel Expo stirs your travel juices for the year ahead by rapping with reps at hundreds of fancy booths - many offering door prizes, freebies, cool swag and discounts. Unlike last year, or the year before, the party was not held at the Jacobs Javits Center but rather Pier 94 way uptown. But that gave Miss Angela, a friend I haven't spoken to in many months, time to rattle off all the amazing projects she's been working on. Movies and documentaries that should be debuting any day now. At the Expo, I scored business cards for press junkets in Florida, Montana (again) and Maine. Angela got a sugar buzz off samples of free salt-water taffy and Organic Açaí superjuice. Paul, Max and Kent signed up several more GoNomad brethren with passion for travel. The Adventure Travel Expo truly is THE place to find your travel chakra - the epicenter in everyone's consciousness that energizes our physical, emotional and mental states.

Following the show the party carried on at a pizza place called Patsy's on the East Side at 200 East 60th S. One Insalata, 2 bottles of red, several large pizza's and 2 pasta bowls later and I was ready for bed. But Angela had other ideas. She invited me to a friend's cockroach-infested apartment in Chelsea for an all-night poker party. I sat wedged between a plug-in volcano (not the kind that spews lava), a guy a shade away from being "Silent Bob" and 3 dudes with more tatoos than nose hair. Yuck, definitely not a pretty site but an experience akin to my college-beat years. Oh, and I learned Poker.