The favourite places of Adam Groffman

I’m a professional travel writer, blogger, and influencer based in Brooklyn, NY. In 2010, I quit my job as a graphic designer and spent a gap year travelling around the world during which I started my travel blog – travelsofadam.com – and have since turned it into my full-time career to travel and write! As an early/original blogger, I’ve grown my site into one of the few that regularly still covers LGBTQ travel around the world.

I started as a writer; it’s what I had studied for a while in college, but these days I’ve gotten a lot more visual. Blame Instagram for that! Gay travel is still a bit of a strange industry for me to be covering because I don’t see a lot of the stories or images I identify with, in most other publications; that’s why I put it up on my own site.

To be honest, I pretty much hate Instagram! I find it very toxic and very limiting in its perspective on travel. In LGBTQ travel, it’s come down to staged photos of couples in luxury hotels, but LGBTQ travel is so much more interesting than that! The travel industry has become so commercialized and objectified, it’s hard to cover it any other way. I am hoping the influence of Instagram on travel/tourism will diminish over time, and there’ll be a resurgence in storytelling through words ~ with imagery.

I’m lucky that I grew up with a lot of travel opportunities in my life. My dad works in the airline industry so we got to fly on planes quite a bit as a kid – nowhere too exotic when I was that young, but being able to fly regularly definitely made me grow with a love and appreciation for airports and airplanes. While travel days can be really stressful getting from point A to point B, I also really enjoy those moments of transit – that excitement you feel on the way to a new place, the sadness of a trip ending. My best childhood travel memories are from taking very early flights or having to sleep in an airport because of a missed connection. That’s what made me realize travel isn’t all glamour, but it’s exciting!

India is a very special place for me; I first visited in 2010 and stayed for three months. It wasn’t always very easy to travel there, but the more time I spent there, the more respect I had for the place. I returned to India about two years ago for another 6-week vacation, and it’s pretty much always the country I dream of returning to again and again. There is just so much to see and experience there.

Ha! I once stole the sheets from a hotel because they were just so damn comfortable and I didn’t think they’d notice.

I’ve met so many interesting people while travelling it’d be hard to pinpoint one. I’ve found myself in strange and lucky encounters, where I had tea once with Sir Ian Mckellen, and I’ve shaken hands with at least three prime ministers of foreign countries, but the best people I met were other travellers who you end up bonding over a shared travel experience.

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