About - Once More to the Shore

Once More to the Shore is a blog for people who can’t get enough of the water and coastal travel. Whether you get chills of excitement by thinking about kayaking the Atlantic coast, bobbing along on a river cruise or skimming the bay in a schooner, swimming in a best-kept-secret lake or pond, or even just sipping a tropical cocktail while the setting sun turns the sky ablaze over the water, you’ve come to the right place.

Why Coastal Travel?

I feel most at home when I’m on the water.

I could get all New Agey about this. I could say it’s because I grew up on a lake, pretending to be in the Go Go’s “Vacation” video while wobbling on waterskis behind my father’s speedboat, exploring coves in the neighbor kids’ rowboat, or lying on my stomach on a weathered dock, dangling my hands in the water to tickle the fins of passing white perch.

I could wax poetic about the many summer days my family and I spent on Rhode Island’s 40 miles of coastline, swimming, quahogging, and building sandcastles that we later stomped, Godzilla-like, into damp ruins. Or how on my first big solo trip, to Chile, I didn’t want to come home after I laid eyes on the exceptional white-sand beaches and the color-drenched, cliff-clinging houses of Valparaiso. Or I could tell you it’s because I’m a Pisces, with all the mystical yada-yada-yada that comes with it. But I won’t.

The simple truth is that I love being on, in, and near the water. I’m soothed by the sight of seagulls swooping around the crashing surf, lulled by the rhythmic clapping of wave against rock, energized by the smell of salt and damp cattails. After a day on the shore, I return home—my skin hot and tacky, grains of sand rubbing between my toes—feeling easy, happy, whole.

So these days, when I go exploring, whether that’s in my local region or halfway across the world, I always look for the closest river, lake, sea, or ocean, and the cities and towns that populate it.

Once More to the Shore’s Superhero Origin Story

The idea for Once More to the Shore was, to put it nicely, forged out of a perfect storm of opportunity. There are millions of travel blogs swirling around cyberspace, but few gave me the engaging coastal travel narratives I wanted. And while many are luxurious and aspirational, I found little in the way of expert guidance at a moderate or budget price point. I’m a writer, not a royal, after all.

I wanted a blog that addressed what is, for me, the ideal combination of culturally curious and active, but not extreme, exploration of nature and culture. While there are plenty of great adventure stories out there, climbing vertical cliff faces, slogging across the Australian Outback with a dog and a canteen of water, or traversing the English Channel in a bathtub? Hard pass.

I’d rather float on my back, face bared to the sun, in the warm Mediterranean embrace of Alicante’s waters. Or hike along the Napali Coast, my nostrils filling with the smell of plumeria and the ripe guava that carpet the ground and squish underfoot. While some folks are layering up and queuing up for a once-in-a-lifetime, heart-pounding trek up Mount Everest, you’ll find me in a glass-paneled private dining room in a middle-of-nowhere Spanish river village, eating a meal that I’ll remember till my dying day.

How Did Once More to the Shore Get Its Name?

That’s an easy one. E. B. White’s elegant “Once More to the Lake” served as my title muse. You can read more about why it stuck with me here.

About Me

Photo of Hudson Valley travel writer Robin Catalano, who specializes in coastal travel destinations. — That’s me. Photo by the lovely Jane Feldman.

I’ve been a professional print journalist and digital writer for 20-plus years. I’ve published more than 100 articles and 2,000 blog posts. I’ve taught writing workshops and classes. I’ve served as the travel editor of a local, independent news magazine. I’ve spoken at a variety of conferences, including the Women in Travel Summit. And I’m the 2020 Writer-in-Residence at Arrowhead, the former home of Herman Melville.

Although I’d dabbled in travel writing on and off throughout the years, as the travel publishing landscape began to tilt more sharply toward service journalism—“10 Things to See in Rome,” “How to Pack for Two Months in Europe with Only a Carry-on,” or “The Best Small Towns in New England,” for example—and the number of paying outlets began to shrink like a wool sweater in the dryer, I realized something I should’ve figured out eons ago: most print, and many digital, publications are beholden to investors and advertisers. They need to make money, or their investors happy, in order to survive.

This often means publishing and rehashing stories on destinations we’ve already read about hundreds of times. Or else tasking an SEO expert with finding exactly the right strings of keywords that will get their publication onto page 1 of Google search, even if only for a couple of days or weeks.

And you know what? More power to them for finding a system that works. This, however, isn’t the way I work. I care about the craft of writing. And I believe there’s more to the experience of coastal travel than pretty Instagram pictures and SEO-friendly tips. So I started this blog to share stories that I find intriguing, quirky, irreverent, and timely—no matter how small or unappealing to the search gods.

Eighteenth-century French writer Louis-Charles Fougeret de Montbron said, “The universe is a sort of book, whose first page one has read when one has seen only one’s own country.” My goal is to keep creating new pages of that book, for curious people who seek the enrichment of unfamiliar places and cultures that just happen to be on or near the water.

The water’s fine. Let’s dive in.