Unconventional travel strategies for freelancers

We freelancers are always bumping into obstacles. Like, how to pay for our reporting trips. This piece looks at two creative approaches to freelance travel.

Freelancer Amber Nolan has come up with jethiking, or really Cessna hiking. She’s used that to bum rides to 13 different states. I love the idea, though I’m not sure it’s a great way to cut your expenses for freelance work. Her site shows that the last piece she did was in May, and involved travel by kayak. But she appears to have a TV show in the works, based on her travels. If there were a network of pilots offering up rides like this, there might be some way for freelancers to actually leverage this sort of thing, especially for travel writers.

Chris Killian, a freelance political journalist, spent two months covering the presidential campaign in the swing states by living out of an old van. He set up his own site, SwingStateStories, where he published the bulk of his reporting, which was supported by Kickstarter funding. But he also landed this meaty cover story in the Christian Science Monitor‘s Weekly. The numbers do keep this in perspective: he raised $4,472 on Kickstarter, and that’s what had to support him for two months on the road. But it is a sign of how unconventional methods are viable, depending on your costs and your interests.