Hello Hivers! Since the @pinmapple team decided to extend the [writing contests](https://peakd.com/hive-163772/@pinmapple/2000-hive-contest-to-celebrate-reaching-1000-digests), I'm grabbing the chance to join the contest at the last minute. I've already posted my entry to the $1000 writing contest where I featured my dream destination--Ireland. Do check it out if you're interested :) I heard about @pinmapple and the #Haveyoubeenhere community when I posted my first travel series, after my intro post. That was July 2020. It took me more than a week to draft all 5 parts of the series before nervously clicking the PUBLISH button for Part 1. To my sweet surprise, my post made it to the Top 2 of [Travel Digest #910](https://peakd.com/traveldigest/@pinmapple/travel-digest-910-qdj7ib) which earned me a Pinmapple badge! Not bad for a beginner haha! Ever since, the lovely and hardworking curators of pinmapple team have featured 10 out of 13 of my travel pins (excluding my 14th pin in Ireland because I haven't been there YET). Every time I'm featured in their travel digest, I make sure to read posts from other featured travel bloggers, as well. This ingenuity is so timely especially during the COVID-19 pandemic where traveling is discouraged. Reading travel experiences from all over the world gives you a glimpse of the "outside world". This is the perfect opportunity to give my warm congratulations to everyone that make up the Pinmapple team 👏 The #Haveyoubeenhere community has really given a lot of support to travel bloggers like me. And in the Hive platform, support keeps the content coming.

Paper Towns

 Ever since 2018, I have kept a travel map in my journal. But I only got to really do it properly last 2019. I won't even show what my 2020 travel map looks like coz it's lonely. It's just Cebu, Manila, and Japan. That's it. Anyway, 2019 was a blast, I really had fun going to a lot of Philippines' provinces. It's what makes me tolerate working and look forward to the coming days where I'll travel again. This reminds me of Paper Towns. I don't remember much from having watched John Green's *Paper Towns* starring Cara Delevingne, except for the push pins on a map. I learned that a paper town is a fake location added by mapmakers as copyright. If they see other maps containing those paper towns, they'll know that they've been copied. But in the story, for me, paper towns symbolize the places we go to to escape from our reality. Paper towns aren't fake places, but they're places we go to experience a different version of ourselves. To have a much-needed break from who we're supposed to be in our homes and our workplaces. So when I joined Hive and learned about Pinmapple, I thought, this map shows the ***Paper Towns* of all Hivers around the world**! How cool is that? 😍 What's even cooler is every pin on the map represents a story from a wandering stranger. To be honest, I haven't really used the Pinmapple map other than pinning my travels, until the first #pinmapplethousand writing contest. The instructions included giving a shoutout to someone who has been to the place you want to go to. For me, that was Ireland. I did not know anyone personally in Hive who has been there so I had to use the Pinmapple map. I simply filtered the map to show posts with the #ireland tag. And voila!  In my short time that I have been pinning my travel posts in Hive, it wasn't only until then that I filtered the map for my own author name. My collection of pins still look underwhelming which reminds me to draft my travels from the past years. It's one way of keeping an online travel diary where I can read my previous accounts of the places I have been to.   That's about it for my Pinmapple and Haveyoubeenhere experience. I hope I can pin an experience in every continent around the world. But for now, there are enough paper town stories to read through. 

✨END✨

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