I wrote Midwest Living's first accessible travel piece. Here's how I chose the destinations.

And it's now live!

Hello from NYC!

I am in a GREAT mood today. I got great feedback from Tuesday’s Ask Me Anything Live Q&A, my first Midwest Living piece published today, I filed my business taxes, and I’m going hiking in the Catskills tomorrow. Win. Win. Win. Win!

What makes the Midwest Living piece so exciting wasn’t that it was my first piece for them, rather, it was because it was the first accessible travel piece they’ve published. As exciting as this is, it’s also shocking and disappointing considering it’s 2024, so I was thrilled to learn that the editors definitely want me to write more accessible content in the future.

On that note, let’s talk about how I chose the four destinations for this piece.

Cassandra

P.S. The pic above is of my nephew pushing mom at an accessible nature center in Milwaukee.

---

How I chose destinations for my first Midwest Living piece

I was pleasantly surprised to receive dozens of pitches from publicists for this piece, as I learned a lot about accessible attractions and initiatives across the Midwest that I was previously unaware of.

Initially, the piece was going to include 8-10 destinations, but I thought a more in-depth piece that could really show the diversity of attractions within a single destination would be more valuable to disabled readers planning their vacations. I thought that I had chosen all of the destinations, but then I received an amazing pitch from a publicist I had never worked with, about a city I had never visited.

Why do I mention this? Because as important as relationships are and as much as I rely on tried-and-true publicists who I’ve worked with for years, and as much as I tend to prioritize destinations that I’ve visited and experienced first-hand, I’m always open to working with new publicists and previously unfamiliar destinations if the pitch is that good.

Shout out to Rachel McAllister of Rachel McAllister Consulting and the Cleveland Tourism PR team. Here’s the pitch and what I liked about it: