Born to travel, Dennis Callan has been on the road for much of his life and is now sharing his adventures on television, in print, and on tour. His varied experiences have helped create a new book about Europe's exciting cities. His first eight years as a military dependent kept him moving from Ohio to Long Island, then to London, to California, and back to Long Island. After graduation from Brown University in 1967 with a degree in English Literature, he moved to Hawaii and has been there ever since, living in Honolulu with his wife June.
Dennis earned Master of Science degrees in anthropology and political science at the University of Hawaii in the 1970s. He also did further studies there in journalism and urban planning, followed by sales and marketing work in the early 1980s. Then, in 1985, he experienced a life-changing trip to Europe -- traveling six weeks on a Eurail pass, shooting 3,000 slides, and coming home to launch a career in travel.
He spent five years writing a monthly travel series for one of Honolulu's major dailies, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, creating long, detailed articles about how to spend three days in some of the world's most wonderful destinations. These articles served as the basis for Rome on Foot and for an upcoming series of similar video guidebooks about walking tours in Europe's great cities.
With over 800 travel movies on YouTube, he has gained nearly 5 million viewings, establishing a world-wide audience. These videos are listed on his main web site, tourvideos.com, which averages about 300 daily hits.
Dennis has been president of the Hawaii Geographic Society since 1986 and led his first two Europe tours in 1987. Since then he has formed his own travel company and conducted over 85 tours throughout Europe, as well as 9 tours in the Americas, doing most of the lecturing and coordinating the logistics while shooting video and stills every step of the way.
During his non-travel time he keeps busy producing episodes for his travel series on local cable TV -- honored as the longest-running program (twenty years) on Hawaii Community Programming. His photographic work has been recognized with an exhibit at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, a Grand Prize in Honolulu Magazine, showings at numerous art exhibits and publication in local books, calendars and magazines. Dennis is also a graphic artist very familiar with designing brochures and newsletters, and has the skills to create epub books. Normally it would take a team of professionals to make a book filled with videos, photos, maps, graphics and text, but Dennis has the ability to do all these tasks with aplomb. He has been leading tours to Europe for 25 years, developing skills and collecting information that were useful in creating this ebook on Rome. This is the first in a series of video ebooks Dennis is working on now.
He can be reached at: callan@hawaii.rr.com