Keeping our trip alive financially has been a roller-coaster – we can certainly qualify as poster children for the saying “believe it and it will happen”.
Our original intent was to write travel articles for publication. That was superseded by a contract we landed to help develop a real estate website, but only two months into our trip the website group lost its funding. We turned to a small amount of rental income we had, which disappeared several months later when the real estate crash hit south Florida.
Throughout the subsequent two years we’ve done a wide variety of odd jobs; we’ve set up an affiliate income program on our site; we created an Amazon store on our site; we had a small amount of income for a few months from my youngest son renting rooms in our house; and we’ve lived as frugally as anyone can imagine.
Throughout all of it we’ve had cash donations and product donations trickle in, often just when we really needed it. The kindness and generosity of total strangers has been astounding to us, and made continuing the trip possible, especially during our really tough times.
We’ve been offered water, food, transportation, and places to stay, again and again and again. We’ve even been treated to meals out, movies in theaters, festival admissions, and groceries. The number of truly wonderful people in this world is just astonishing.
As of this writing we are on a short break from riding, downsizing to get ready to leave the country for eight or more years. Over the last two years we’ve collected enough material to write a number of articles and several books, so Rosemary is now doing the writing. By the time we leave we intend to finish at least one book, several articles, and several e-books.
We’ll get our publication sources and relationships set up before we leave, so perhaps we’ll have come full circle to our original intent of supporting ourselves by writing.
Meanwhile we prefer to look at this time as our “starving artists in Paris” phase.
We are often asked if we need help, and so far the answer is yes, we’d love help. There’s always the very straightforward cash donation, but you can also use our Amazon store, buy from our affiliates by clicking through our site, or you can put a regular monthly ad on our site. If you’re interested, just click on one of the links below.
Make a Donation
Movie Letter
Use Our Amazon Store
Use Our Affiliates
Advertise On Our Site
Find Us A Place To Stay
Current Supporters
Make a Donation
We’ve had people ask if they can help us by giving cash, so we put a “donate” button on our site. It’s a PayPal link, so they take their fees out first, but we do receive the cash in our PayPal account immediately.
Movie Letter/ Fundraising
In late autumn of 2007 we wrote a letter telling our story, liberally lacing it with movie quotes. Our idea was to ask for a $30 minimum donation and to give away a t-shirt to each person who could identify all the movie quotes hidden in the letter. When we realized how time and cost intensive it would be, we scratched the t-shirt idea, but we really liked the movie letter.
We had so much fun with it that we decided to keep the letter on our site. Let us know if you can identify any of the movie quotes! click here to read the full letter.
Use Our Amazon Store
We would love to have you use our Amazon Store. Every time you purchase something from Amazon, using our online store, or by clicking through our store, we get a small commission, which helps support our journey, at no cost to you. We’d love to have you tell your family and friends to go through the Amazon link on our site as well, because every little bit helps.
Use Our Affiliates
Like with our Amazon store, every time you purchase something from one of our affiliates by clicking on the link from our site, we get a small commission. And again, each purchase helps support our journey, at no cost to you. Little bits and pieces all add up, so tell your family and friends to use it too.
We are choosing only affiliates who have products that we ourselves use. So if you are interested in any of the products we talk about, or want to buy something from any of the websites, we’d love to have you click on the links on our site.
Advertise On Our Site
We are looking for companies or individuals who would be interested in advertising on our site. If you have products that would be interesting to our readers, and you would like more information, please let us know.
We can be reached by email at advertise@travelingroses.com.
Find Us A Place To Stay
If you can offer us a place to stay along our route, please let us know; it saves a great deal on our daily budget.
We are trying to keep our route updated, and we have a list of towns we’ll be heading through on our Route Schedule, so check it out and see if you know of anyone in the area who may take us in for a night or two. You can contact us at travelingroses@gmail.com.
Current Supporters
We’ve been amazed at the support we’ve received so far, both big and little.Check out our current supporters page to see a list of our gifts and supporters.