Dine Drink Travel is an outgrowth of the John Brawley Tophat West Texas Bourbon Society started in 2016. The Society, by extension, is a bunch of married guys with wives and kids and mortgages who desperately need to get out of the house more often. The Petroplex (Midland and Odessa) is a lovely place to live, and vacation is still a very good thing. Anyway, we created this blog to catalog our travels and hope it will be useful to many of you. Our goal is to answer the travel questions we always had.
While we originally wrote about a wide range of travel topics, we noticed that people were most interested in what we wrote about our cruises from and trips to Galveston. So for a while we re-focused this blog on cruises from Texas. We reviewed ships, talk about shore excursions, and share our experiences with staying in Galveston. Then COVID was a thing, and our kids got older, and reasons, so we started taking fewer cruises. We still review them when we can, but we noticed that we started taking more trips to Vegas (without the kids). We are increasingly writing about those trips.
This page tries to catch all of those trips. You can also connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. We also have two YouTube channels which feature relatively short and focused videos to give you the information you need to plan your next trip. Please check us out on Dine Drink Travel Vegas and Dine Drink Travel Cruise. As of April 2023, we have also started a new podcast called Dine Drink Vegas. In every episode we talk about Vegas news, the drink of the day, and take a deep dive into a particular Vegas topic. Come check us out!
So who are our people?
The principal editor of the site is Bill. He has an ordinary office job and used to work abroad. He still likes to get in an airplane, or cruise ship, or whatever mode of conveyance, and go to new places. He also thinks that writing about himself in the third person isn’t healthy, so he is now going to start saying “I.” I travel a lot for work and as often as I can for pleasure, and I am going to write here the things I tend to look for when I travel.
John Brawley Tophat himself has also started posting tales of his Southern Caribbean cruise. If you like his work, post in the comments section so we can hear more from him. The Notorious P.I.G. was working on podcasts about whiskey. Unfortunately, the nature of those podcasts means that, well, they didn’t all happen. He wrote about the AirBnB before our cruise last year. He is active on our YouTube channel and is the host of the Dine Drink Vegas podcast. Join us for the ride, because you too deserve to dine, drink, and travel.
Two Rules for Dine Drink Travel custom reviews
Sometimes we get requests for custom reviews. We are happy to talk to you about those, but we want everyone to know what our policy is. First, about requests that we review particular destinations or travel products. If we know something, we are happy to share it. If we don’t know something, we aren’t going to make it up. When you ask for our thoughts and we have something to contribute, please know that we are very likely to turn that into a blog post. We would love it if you would share that post far and wide.
If you want to pay for us to go somewhere or do something and write about it, we are absolutely willing to entertain that proposal. Just know that we will still write an honest review based on our perception of that experience. We would love to spend money that isn’t ours to travel and blog. If that ever happens, we will clearly post that as part of our review. Dine Drink Travel has built an audience based on being regular folks who review normal travel experience that married people with kids and mortgages and, you know, spouses, are likely to have. If we are doing a sponsored review we will certainly consider it, and we will disclose it.
Second, we fairly often receive requests to cross-promote posts on other blogs. We are also happy to entertain those requests. However, they have to be a good fit for our audience. We won’t fill this page up with a lot of junk that isn’t useful to our readers. There also has to be some sort of link or promotion of our page. You’d be surprised how often a simply blog based on regular people who travel gets random requests like this. We got one in May (and again in June) 2018 which asked us to promote a Tex Mex chicken taco recipe from New Zealand. Let’s set aside for a moment that we are from Texas. That makes us suspicious of Tex-Mex recipes from New Zealand. We don’t post unhelpful stuff clearly written by robots.
Legal stuff
Dine Drink Travel, LLC, is a corporation registered in Texas. We really hate having to exist as a corporation, but we live in a complicated world. Galveston Cruise Reviews, Dine Drink Vegas, Dine Drink Cruise, Dine Drink Travel Vegas, Dine Drink Travel Cruise, and Dine Drink Travel are all marks of Dine Drink Travel, LLC. While those sites, blogs, and vlogs may sometimes operate independently, they are owned by Dine Drink Travel, LLC. Our privacy policy is available here.