Hi, my name is Andrew Collins. I live with my partner, Fernando Nocedal in Mexico City (along with two very friendly cats, Elliott and Nomi). We live across the street from Museo Frida Kahlo in Coyoacán, a quiet, historic neighborhood a few miles south of the city center. We also live part time on a lake in the rural Washington, New Hampshire, in the Lake Sunapee region, and I “commute” regularly to Oregon (where I lived previously for 10 years) and Washington (where I’m the editor of the State of Washington Official Visitors’ Guide, the Washington Wine Commission Official Tour Guide, and the twice-annual Visitor Seattle Official Visitors’ Guide). I’ve also lived in New Mexico (Santa Fe and Albuquerque) and New York City (Manhattan and Brooklyn) at various points over the years, and I spend a lot of time in metro Atlanta and western North Carolina, where some of my family resides and I have yet another ongoing project, as editor of the annual Asheville Official Visitor Guide.

Beyond moving between our home bases, we spend a lot of time traveling and road-tripping (I recently wrote a brand-new book about this very topic, Ultimate Road Trips USA & Canada, which you can order here or through your favorite local bookseller), mostly in Mexico, the United States, and Canada, but we try to get to a different continent at least once a year. Weird travel goal: To travel to every county in the United States. Currently, I’ve been to 2,518 out of 3,065 (including parishes in Louisiana and boroughs in Alaska) of them. You can track my progress here—and yeah, it looks like I’ll be spending a lot of the next few years traveling around the Upper Midwest if I’m ever to fulfill this dream.

We’re avid hikers and also love kayaking, and other strong focuses include movies (usually on the indie or at least unconventional side), architecture, art, gardens, and every manner of eating establishment (although I’m arguably even more drawn by interesting beer, coffee, wine, and spirits—and the places that produce them—than I am by the food).

I’ve written or edited more than 225 travel guidebooks for Fodor’s, and I’ve contributed to dozens of mainstream and LGBTQ magazines and websites over the past 30 years, including The Points Guy, Out, Travel + Leisure, AAA Living, and Four Seasons Magazine. And in 2017, the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association (IGLTA) honored me as Travel Writer of the year.

On these pages you’ll find my writing on a variety of travel-related topics—favorite places, tips on what to see and what to avoid, recommendations on where to eat and drink, thoughts on living as a nomad (and splitting my time between two countries), advice on writing (I teach both travel and food writing for New York City’s Gotham Writers Workshop), useful guidance for LGBTQ travelers, and whatever else feels worthy of sharing. If you’re curious about any topics in particular, or you’re interested in hiring me for your next writing or editing project, please drop me a line—I’d love to hear from you!

My Professional Background

After graduating from Wesleyan University in 1991, I landed a job as an editorial assistant for the long-running travel guidebook publisher. After a couple of years, and having been promoted to associate editor, I decided I’d rather be out seeing and writing about the world than seeing it through the windows of a Manhattan office tower. So, on a bit of a whim, I decided to quit my job and try my hand at freelancing. That was 1993, and I’m still happily working for myself.

However, making a go of it was tough at first. Unable to afford rent, I gave up my apartment in Manhattan (I would live as a nomad, without a fixed address, for the next seven years). Realizing I needed to come up with a way to make a living, I pitched my former employer with a proposal to write the first LGBTQ travel guidebook produced by a mainstream guidebook publisher. They accepted my pitch, and over the next two years, I wrote Fodor’s Gay Guide to the USA, which earned a 1996 Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award from the Society of American Travel Writers, and I followed this book with six miniature versions of Fodor’s gay guidebooks on Los Angeles, San Francisco, the Pacific Northwest, South Florida, New York City, and Amsterdam.

Since that time, I’ve authored or edited hundreds of guidebooks, both for Fodor’s and Moon Travel Guides (for which I wrote guides to New Orleans, Rhode Island, and Connecticut). And most recently, I wrote Destination Pride, a book about how and where to plan the perfect LGBTQ vacation, from Cape Town to Copenhagen, and Taipei to Tel Aviv.

I still write about much of Oregon (including Portland, the Columbia Gorge, Southern Oregon, and the Oregon Coast) and several parts of Washington (including the Olympic Peninsula, San Juan Islands, the Cascades, the Yakima Valley Wine Country, and most of the I-5 corridor beyond Seattle) in the Fodor’s Pacific Northwest, Oregon, and Inside Portland guidebooks; Santa Fe and Taos in Fodor’s In Focus Santa Fe; New Hampshire in Fodor’s New England; about a dozen California, Oregon, Texas, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming national parks in Fodor’s National Parks of the West; and portions of Fodor’s Utah and Fodor’s Montana and Wyoming. Some other fun titles I’ve recently contributed to: I wrote the Condesa, Roma, Coyoacán, San Ángel, Greater Mexico City, and Experience chapters of Fodor’s Inside Mexico City. For the new Fodor’s Bucket List USA, I wrote all of the chapters on New England and the Pacific Coast states (Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington). For Fodor’s Best Road Trips in the USA, I wrote a pair of cross-country itineraries (Seattle to Washington, DC, and Jacksonville to San Diego). And I recently edited several chapters of both Fodor’s Essential Caribbean and Fodor’s Paris.

I’m a longtime contributor to New Mexico Magazine, and I’ve written hundreds of travel stories for both mainstream and LGBTQ newspapers and magazines, including the The Advocate, Out Traveler, Canadian Traveller, and Sunset. I’ve created LGBTQ content for websites and visitor guides for the DMOs (destination marketing organizations) of more than 20 destinations, including Oregon, Albuquerque, Denver, Guam, Fort Worth, Kansas City, Portland, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Seattle, Sonoma County, and St. Pete-Clearwater.

In recent years I’ve served as the editor of LGBTQ travel magazines about Hawaii, the Pacific Northwest, Texas, and California. And for several years I served as the editor in chief and restaurant columnist of The Pearl, a quarterly lifestyle magazine about Portland’s trendiest neighborhood. Since 2004, I’ve also taught classes on travel writing and food writing for New York City’s acclaimed Gotham Writers Workshop.

A question I’m asked often: Hey, aren’t you the guy who writes LGBTQ content for TripSavvy?

Well, yes and no. Here’s the deal with that: for 10 years (from 2007 through 2016), I produced all of the content on About.com’s LGBTQ travel site. About.com parted ways with me in December 2016, and soon after the site became TripSavvy, which continues to run quite a few stories that I wrote for About.com prior to 2017. Although TripSavvy has the legal right to continue publishing my content and using my name in the byline in perpetuity, I have never written for TripSavvy, and I have no connection with the site. If you see a story attributed to me on TripSavvy and an indication that the story was updated after 2016, be aware that I had nothing to do with this update.