Good afternoon, Mary Ann, 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 Florida, Italy, Business Travel, History/Heritage/Archaeology, Eating/Drinking the World, Eco/Sustainable Tourism, Travel Photography, Golf Getaways, our Italian language/culture club, 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/outlets, and more.

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 can cover us in any of your outlets, we'd of course be grateful, and if you feel you might want to occasionally blog for us, rates/guidelines 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! We'll be happy to follow you, as well.

Thanks much for joining us; we wish you an outstanding start to 2010, and it goes without saying that we look forward to seeing you online.

Cheers!