Good afternoon, Ernesto, and welcome to Tripatini! It's great to have you with us -- and we think you'll find our site productive as well as interesting and enjoyable.

To get the most out of Tripatini, we recommend you take a moment to join several of our many groups which you may find of particular use, such as Media Only, Florida, destinations throughout Latin America, Eco/Sustainable Tourism, Adventure Travel, Resorts Corner, Airfares/Air Travel, Hotels/Motels, Eating/Drinking the World, our Spanish and Russian language/culture clubs, and plenty of others covering many other topics and most destinations across the globe.

FYI, on your profile you'll see a green bar marked "Text Box," which you can turn into a box containing not just text but also photos and even videos about yourself, your travels, your writing/broadcast work and outlets, and more. And if you have any books in print, we'd be happy to feature them on the site and sell them in our online shop.

Finally, if you would, please be so kind as to spread the word among your travel-interested friends, family, colleagues, associates, and audience. It's fast and easy to use our "INVITE" function above left on the navigation bar to enter e-mails (even your whole list at once!). If you have the opportunity to cover Tripatini in any of your outlets, that would of course be great, and if you might be interested in occasionally blogging for us, guidelines/rates are available upon request. Finally, if you have a Facebook or Twitter account, please join our fan page and follow us (see front page info box), and tweet us!

Thanks much for joining us; we wish you an outstanding start to 2010, and of course we look forward to seeing you online.

Cheers!