Who Is Dick Jordan?

DICK JORDAN is an award-winning travel writer and filmmaker living in Eugene, Oregon, who publishes the online travel magazine, Tales Told From The Road.

Taking Off Traveling

Dick Jordan grew up in Seattle, Washington, spending summer vacations on his grandmother’s farm in Northern Idaho.

At age 7, he donned a suit and tie, climbed aboard a United Airlines DC-6, and took his first big trip: Up to Vancouver, British Columbia, for the day, then back to Seattle the same evening by train.

He hasn’t stopped traveling since.

During junior high school he “went around the world,” armchair-wise, listening to English language radio broadcasts on a shortwave receiver.

As a teenager at the end of the heyday of U.S. passenger train travel, he rode the rails from Seattle to Miami Beach and back.

Bouncing Around the Planet

A nearly four-year stint in the U.S. Air Force took him first to Texas and then Monterey, California where he studied Chinese Mandarin and hopped in his Alfa Romeo sports car to take weekend road trips to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Yosemite National Park, and down the Big Sur Coast.

Then it was back to Texas, a 17-month tour of duty on the Japanese island of Okinawa, and a return home to Seattle for summer school at the University of Washington, followed by a final assignment to an air base in Indiana from where he made four trips to California and back aboard aerial refueling tankers during an eight-month period.

Settling in California, Wandering Elsewhere

When his military service days came to a close and he graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, attended law school in San Francisco, and practiced law there for over 30 years before retiring in early 2008.

During the forty-five years that he lived near San Francisco, Dick and his wife traveled to Canada, the Caribbean, and Europe, and throughout the Western United States, visiting all of the best-known national parks and monuments, and much of California and Oregon.

In January of 2017, Dick moved to Eugene, Oregon and began exploring places he had not yet been to in his new home state.

Writing and Publishing Career

In his early teens, Dick got his hands on a mimeograph machine and published a newsletter for others who “tuned into the world” by listening to shortwave radio broadcasts.

While practicing law, he wrote articles for legal publications, published a newsletter for lawyers, and served on the editorial board of a national insurance industry magazine.

In 2006 he started writing travel blogs so friends and family could follow the vacation journeys that he and his wife embarked on each year.

One of those blogs covered a two-week journey through Southeast Alaska in June of 2008 which ended up launching his travel writing career when his first published story, about touring glaciers in the Alaska Panhandle, ran in the San Francisco Chronicle a year later.

His stories and photographs have also appeared in the Contra Costa Times, Dallas Morning News, Los Angeles Times, Marin I-J, Oakland Tribune, and San Jose Mercury News.

In 2009, he began publishing his online travel magazine, Tales Told From The Road: The Eclectic Online Travel Magazine For Independent Thinkers & Travelers, which has covered destinations, travel news, books and movies, photography and videography, and travel gear and travel technology.

While residing in the San Francisco Bay Area, Dick belonged to the Bay Area Travel Writers, an association of professional travel writers and photographers, and was a member of Left Coast Writers, a group that supports new and established writers in the production and promotion of their work in a stimulating atmosphere of creativity and community.

The North American Travel Journalists Association named him a “Featured Journalist” in January of 2015.

In 2016, he received a Bronze Award in the organization’s annual awards competition for his story “Spring In The Sierra: At Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks,” which appeared in the anthology, Travel Features and Photos: California’s National Parks, Monuments, Trails, Seashores and Historic Sites, published by Bay Area Travel Writers.

 The same year he was also a finalist in NATJA’s Online Publication award category for his series of stories on U.S. National Parks which he published in his online travel magazine, Tales Told From The Road.

He has been a guest on the award-winning podcasts This Week in Travel, Amateur Traveler, and NPR’s Journeys of Discovery with Tom Wilmer podcasts, FCC Free Radio in San Francisco, The Locales with Weston Moody, and the Azumano Travel Show broadcast by Portland, Oregon radio station KPAM.

Filmmaking Career

At the urging of a friend, in late 2012 Dick became a member of the Community Media Center of Marin where he learned the craft of filmaking and television production.

Since 2013 Dick has produced thirty films, nearly all of which are travel-related, that have aired on public access television stations across the U.S. serving millions of households.

Nine of his films have been selected by over 100 film festivals in Australia, North America and Europe and have collectively won over 30 awards.

His documentary film "Cuba, Libre?" alone has been in 82 festivals and won 27 awards including 9 for "Best Documentary.