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Exciting news in Everlater-land: last week we announced a round of Series A financing from Highway 12 Ventures.

We’ve really enjoyed getting to know Highway 12 over the last few months, and are thrilled to have their help, support, resources, and expertise in making Everlater the travel application of our dreams. Want to see why they’re excited to work with us?

What have we been up to lately?

• Improving the journaling functionality across the site
• Working hard on developing our partner program
• Getting the Everlater iPhone app submitted

What are we doing with the money?

• Adding new and exciting functionality to your travel journals on Everlater
• Developing tools to take your travel memories offline through scrapbooks, photo albums, and postcards
• Furthering our sales, partnership, and marketing efforts

Thank you to everyone for their continued support, particularly Techstars, Highway 12 Ventures, the Boulder startup community, and our amazing community of travelers who continue to amaze us with spectacular travel photos, compelling stories, and amazing insights & ideas about our product.

The future is looking bright for Everlater and we couldn’t be more excited about improving the world of travel! Please contact us with questions, concerns, and ideas at feedback@everlater.com.

The final episode of “The Founders”, a weekly webcast chronicling our amazing summer in Techstars, aired yesterday. And without giving anything away, let’s just say that we attempted a prank that had the potential to cause a lot of trouble. Did we get away with it? Watch and find out:

The Founders | Reunion | Episode 14 from Megan Leigh Sweeney on Vimeo.

We’re sad that the summer is over, and we’re so thankful to have had the opportunity to work closely with so many amazingly talented mentors and entrepreneurs. Lucky for us, we’ll have all 14 entertaining episodes of “The Founders” to help remember the most intense, crazy, fun, exhilarating, stressful, and inspiring time of our lives.

(Thank you so much to Megan Sweeney of Alpine Light Pictures who did an amazing job filming and editing the entire series. It’s just not the same without you following us around anymore…)

If you’re like us at Everlater, your travel ideas and suggestions come primarily from the people you know. For years my family vacationed in Palm Springs, California (because we had a free place to stay) despite feeling as though we had exhausted most of the interesting things to do. We’d:

• Hung out by the pool
• Hiked the canyons
• Perused high societies retail options along El Paseo
• Hit up the enormous weekend street fair
• Kept cool at Oasis Water Park

My last two visits though have been with a new group of people - adventurous friends who had entirely new perspectives and ideas about what to see. I:

• Took the Palm Springs Arial Tramway to the top of the 11,000 foot Mt San Jacinto for some hiking and bouldering
• Finally visited Joshua Tree National Park. (Don’t be like my family and talk yourself out of visiting because it’s “just a desert”)
• Rode ATV’s on sand dunes
• Visited the Salton Sea. If you find beauty in decay - it’s a must.
• Saw the Imperial Sand Dunes (where scenes from Star Wars were filmed)
• Became strangely enamored with Salvation Mountain - a 50 foot desert monument, created by hand of paint, mud and straw by a truly dedicated man

My friend (and amazing photographer) Kip Gerenda documented our Salton Sea journey on Everlater.

In the end, this is just a long way of saying: don’t settle for thinking you know everything there is to do in a particular place. Sometimes all you need is to hook up with other travelers like you to find the hidden gems.

We can’t wait to start connecting people in the Everlater community to that type of information.

We’ve just created the very first Everlater Group - a mini-network of travelers using the JetBlue All You Can Jet Pass. The promotion, $599 for a month of unlimited flights, caused quite a stir amongst travel junkies - many of whom came to Everlater to record their trips.

The page highlights:

• Who is in the group
• Where those travelers are
• Their latest stories & photos
• The most popular destinations

Members of the group can also find other members with overlapping itineraries - in case they are looking for travel partners along the way. (For reference, my trip overlaps with others in the group 25 times!)

We’ve also launched a contest. The All You Can Jetter with the best online travel journal will win a bunch of great prizes (notably an exclusive Everlater Trophy and a custom badge for their trip). Details here. Voting begins October 12th.

This is the first time we’ve ever had Groups before, but it gives us some great ideas for the future. Take a look at the Everlater All You Can Jet Group. What else would you like to see added to groups? Can you think of some creative ways that travelers would want to utilize what we’ve built?

The internet travel world is on fire with people chattering about Jet Blue’s amazing promotion: Unlimited Flights for a month for $599. When I heard the news (via Twitter), I jumped out of my chair and started pacing around frantically while making hurried phone calls. I was sure they’d cancel the promotion in a day due to overwhelming response, and wanted to make sure my ducks were in a row before I bought it.

Then three hours later - I bought it.

Could this be the best flight deal the US has ever seen?

If you live in Boston or New York City (and to a lesser extent Long Beach or Orlando) - then the answer is yes. However, if you fly out of many other cities (like Denver), it’s somewhat less awesome because you must always fly through one of the hubs first, and then onwards from there. Well guess what? I’m doing it anyway. (And I know of at least 3 others also doing it from Denver).

Another great use case is if you want to do a clockwise or counter-clockwise loop around the country. (Use Jet Blue’s fantastic interactive map that shows where they fly to from each city)

Here is my proposed itinerary: http://www.everlater.com/ryanwanger/jetblue-all-you-can-jet-month

Other people have been documenting their proposed JetBlue itineraries on Everlater as well. Here are the best ones so far:
http://www.everlater.com/andrew/jet-blue-jetting-trip (Andrew Hyde)
http://www.everlater.com/audrey/all-you-can-jet-sept-oct-2009

If you are lucky enough to be able to take advantage of this deal (do read the terms first), use Everlater to document your JetBlue All You Can Jet experience. We’ll be compiling the info and sharing the experiences (and probably ending up on each others flights!)

This is an amazing chance for an action-packed month of traveling around the US (and lots of destinations in the Carribean, as well as Costa Rica, and Columbia…though for those flights you need to fork over additional taxes - which are most around $30-$100 per flight). Personally, I’m using it primarily to visit friends that I otherwise wouldn’t be flying to go see - and I’ll be doing a lot of work in airports and on planes!

Will I see you in the skies from Sept 8th - October 8th?

Today, all 10 companies in the Boulder Techstars program this summer presented in front of a few hundred investors, well wishers, family members, and others in the Boulder community. The energy was amazing, and the teams did a great job. We had the good fortune of presenting second, and Nate was for sure the most energetic person in the room. Pretty sure he didn’t need that mic!

The surprise twist in our presentation was the Everlater Makeover we did for Fred Wilson, who was in attendance (and didn’t know what we were up to). We took all of his content from blog posts, photo feeds, and tweets from his recent trip and combined it into a great travel experience to showcase Everlater.

Check out his trip to Europe: http://bit.ly/everlatermakeover

Within just a few hours, both TechCrunch and RockyRadar have posted coverage of the event.

Sadly, Twitter was down all morning and didn’t come back online till after our presentation. But, there has been some good chatter about Everlater since then.

We met a ton of great people after the event who are really excited about Everlater. Thanks to all for your support, advice, and encouragement. We owe a lot to Techstars and the Boulder community and can’t wait to show you all how far we can take this…

A few days ago, we quietly opened our doors and started allowing people to sign up for Everlater without needing a special code. What does this mean? Start using Everlater!

You can:

• Record travel experiences by writing stories, posting photos, mapping your trip and adding all the little details
• Share it with friends and family (your trip has a public url that you can post on your Facebook wall, Tweet, or email to whomever you’d like)

There are many things on the horizon including:

• A better way to follow the travels of your friends
• An iPhone app to make it even easier to record your travels
• Increasing ways to help get great travel ideas from your social network

Are we done yet? Hell no! Everlater is constantly changing (in the awesome kind of way, not the confusing kind of way) and we have lots of exciting things on the horizon. We are truly grateful for all of the amazing feedback we’ve received so far from the Everlater community - the more the better! And to prove we’re serious, there is a “Feedback” tab on every page. (In fact, so far you guys have reported exactly 99 problems, ideas, and praise. Whose will be #100?)

So if you haven’t already, go check out http://www.everlater.com

If you need extra inspiration, check out my trip to Chile and Argentina last December: The Great Tagalong.

There comes a time in the early life of every startup when they want to go big. For Everlater, that day was May 23rd. The Event: Iron Horse Classic. The hook: show off our startup, design skills, and cycling prowess in one fell swoop.

How? Brand spanking new custom kits straight from the long booty shores of Italy. The new outfits arrived roughly 48 hours before the event and like a group of greedy children at Christmas, we tore into the box and gazed upon our new outfits:

(Left to Right: Nathaniel, our friend Nathan, Nathaniel)

Lavender?!?

Secure enough in our masculinity to wear kits representing our future custom white-labeled site http://lady.everlater.com, we rode on with pride. Rumor has it that the group of riders who broke from the pack to stage a competitive push (in what is otherwise a friendly ride) were led by Natty himself. Not until the very last stretch did he graciously let others pass and share in his glory.

The corrected colors should be in our hands soon.

As for the misprints…anyone have any spare blue ink laying around?

If you haven’t been following along with “The Founders“, a weekly documentary about the Techstars experience, you should. These videos tell the story of our summer better than we ever could.

The latest episode, Skills & Persistence features the KKO Poker Night. Bonus: you get to see our man Charlie engaged in an epic arm wrestling match.

The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 4 “Skills & Persistence” from Andrew on Vimeo.

If you missed some of the other episodes, you find them all in one place:
http://www.techstars.org/thefounders/

Last summer, I traveled to Peru and Bolivia for 5 weeks. The weekend after I returned (to Boulder, my new home), I drove to Crested Butte, CO. While stopped atop the continental divide, I wondered: Why did I fly halfway around the world when there is such amazing natural beauty in my own backyard?

With that in mind, check out some of my favorite places that you probably haven’t heard of:

#1 - Havasu Falls, Grand Canyon, AZ

(Photo courtesy of TeecNosPos)

Pros:

• Beautiful waterfalls (the larger Mooney Falls is just a mile or two downstream)
• Incredible swimming (the best I’ve ever had, anywhere)
• Impossibly tropical water in the Grand Canyon
• The hike to Mooney Falls climbs down chains and through tunnels in the cliff face

Cons:

• 12 mile hike one way to get there
• Must book weeks/months ahead
• Scorching hot in the summer
• Will likely be crowded

Summary: A must do for anyone who loves hiking, swimming holes, and adventure.

Door County, Wisconsin

(Photo courtesy of WisDoc)

A longtime vacation spot for locals, Door County (that thumb that sticks out from Wisconsin) is a cheaper, less preppy version of Massachusetts’ Cape Cod.

Pros:

• Fantastic sandy beaches
• Relaxed Pace
• Lakeside houses hidden in the woods along unpaved roads
• “Sick road cycling” adds @mudandcowbells

Cons:

• Mostly a summer getaway

Summary: A fantastic way to spend a laid-back summer vacation with nature.

Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado

(Photo Courtesy of SC Fiasco)

Pros:

• 700 foot high sand dunes at the foot of 14,000 foot, snow-capped peaks
• Camping allowed ON the dunes!
• Can easily ditch the crowds on even the most crowded days of the year

Cons:

• Hiking in sand gets old. Even the hikes that skirt the dunes are mostly sand.
• Few safe options besides car camping when there is lightning
• No water in the dunes

Summary: If hiking, sand dunes, and mountains are your thing - you can’t go wrong. Even seems like a good place for kids.

Letchworth State Park, Western NY

(Photo courtesy of Zhang Yuan)

Ever heard of the Grand Canyon of the East? Me neither, but somehow I ended up stopping here on a cross country road trip.

Pros:

• This huge canyon appears out of nowhere in otherwise flat terrain
• Lots of camping options
• Great (mostly flat) hiking along the gorge and through dense forest
• Lush

Cons:

• Probably only worth a two day visit

Summary: Good hiking and forests, but also good if you just want to drive from view to view. A huge, scenic gorge/canyon in nowheresville New York - who knew?

Black Hills, South Dakota

(Photo courtesy of dclamster)

South Dakota, no offense, is mostly pretty flat and boring. But in the southwest corner lies both The Badlands and Black Hills.

Pros:

• Mostly undeveloped, yet with the right amount of tourism
• Check out two of the longest caves in the world (Jewel Cave and Wind Cave, plus 6 others)
• Easily day trip to/from Badlands National Park

Cons:

• I didn’t know how much there was to do, and so I didn’t plan in enough time!

Summary: Caving, hiking, and rolling mountains enthusiasts rejoice!

Traveling to faraway lands is an enlightening and valuable experience. But don’t forget, there is plenty of natural beauty in your own backyard. Any suggestions for places I might have missed?