Gallivanting through Iowa - and then some
'Iowa Gallivant' author's statewide sojourn is social-media sensation
IOWA CITY – Jayjay’s his name. Galivanting’s his game.
He’s Jayjay Goodvin, a paraeducator in the Iowa City schools. That’s his mild mannered alter ego. He’s known to a growing social media audience as the author, creator and major instigator of “The Iowa Gallivant.”
Come summer, or on school breaks, his natural habitat is a long stretch of open road, frequently with wife Monie and family. And, in his own words, “our favorite destination is the next one!”
Goodvin is the new bon vivant of Iowa travel — and of course by necessity, travel cuisine, doing a deep-dive on local delicacies — virtual victuals to awaken the appetities of his faithful followers.
He may not yet have achieved the status of award-winning longtime “Iowa Traveler” Cary J. Hahn on KGAN-TV in Cedar Rapids who rambled for viewers from 1983-2008, let alone the late great Anthony Bourdain or Charles Kuralt.
But let’s put it this way about Jayjay: Dude’s in demand. Like a hit song, with a bullet climbing the charts.
His acumen as a pitchman has been sought for destinations as far away as the Alabama Gulf Coast. And pssst, don’t tell anyone, but he’s also become “The Voice of Iowa Irish Fest” in Waterloo, according to fest president Chad Shipman. It’s a celebration of all things Irish held the first weekend in August of every year (Aug. 4-6 this year), drawing nearly 40,000 people who are Irish by heritage, heart or both to downtown Waterloo each year.
Goodvin, a father of three, says he came into “gallivanting,” appropriately, quite randomly – long before he knew the difference between Facebook and a facemask.
The Iowa Gallivant webpage started in 2014. "It started as a family scrapbooking project," Goodvin said -- a website documenting family history. "I was taking the summer off. My wife said, 'Go travel to some of those little towns you've been talking about.' "
And he began writing about them. “I've always been a writer. It was kind of my way to get that out. I really didn't know what blogging meant,” he said.
”I looked at the stats and we were getting thousands of views, just on our website. I realized people were really interested in small-town iowa; small towns in general.
"What really pushed us through, "and caught a lot of attention, "was a little writeup I did about Sabula, Iowa's only island city," on an island in the Mississippi River in extreme east-central Iowa, in Jackson County.
"People were just infatuated with that article,” he said. “They didn't know where the heck Sabula was; they didn’t know there was an actual island city. And the people who lived there loved it. "
He’s particularly popular with former and wish-they-were-again Iowans.
”The people who moved away and got homesick -- those are the folks that spread our contact better than anybody, calling their friends and co-workers about their hometown.
"And it's just basically morphed into this ‘thing,’ ” he said. “I love writing, but we do lot of video now; I do a lot of promotions," which led to his relationship with Iowa Irish Fest, doing advertisements and promotional videos.
"I'll interview people off the street or the bands, entertainers everything” he said. “It's been neat. Waterloo and the Cedar Valley has been one of the top fan bases we've had." He’s done promotions for entities ranging from meat lockers to the Waterloo-headquarted Silos & Smokestacks Natural Heritage Area, a consortium of ag tourism sites in a 37-county region generally north of Interstate 80 and east of Interstate 35.
He's been a regular guest contributor on Waterloo radio station KXEL, 1540 AM, since 2016.
"It's morphed into, I'm more of a promoter who blogs now and then," Goodvin said.
He's been hired to promote the tourist areas of Gulf Shores and Orange Beach, Ala., as well as "Kansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska. All sorts of places.”
He recently went on a very lengthy 20-state, two -country road trip. "For almost three weeks,” he said. “It was one of those road trips where you felt changed afterward. Which is a good thing. I went to places I was familiar with, and places I never thought I would ever go."
Ideally, he said, "What I kind of want to do is reach out to little local newspapers in all those areas and say 'Can I write an article in your local paper about my experience?’ " in the host community. “I’m in the process of wrting two books. I want to eventually do more of a freelancing thing with folks, I still want to do the videos, I still want to do the promotions, but I want to do more writing -- not so much for the website, but for these other folks. I really like doing that."
So the "Iowa Gallivant" phenomenon has come a long way. "I set up the website first, with no social media for almost seven, eight months. The Facebook page of the Iowa Gallivant launched on Christmas Day 2014. We were just hanging out at my in-laws' in Texas and my wife and I said, ‘Maybe I should do a Facebook page for the site.’ And the rest is history on that one. Now I know way more on social media than I ever wanted to!"
The other tourism destinations, like those on the Alabama Gulf Coast, liked what they saw of Goodvin's talent and enthusiasm online and reached out to him to promote their area.
"I keep thinking maybe we should rename it? But I like having the word 'Iowa' in it. it gives people a sense of who I am. You don't open a Kentucky Fried Chicken in California and take the 'Kentucky' out of it. So it's okay.
"I like word 'gallivant,' It isn't used much," he said. "It has kind of a wandering definition." He also noted the Iowa Gallivant logo has a paper airplane on it, floating with the wind; that was his wife's idea.
He got the idea for his website name from his youth, when his dad was taking a family trip through small towns in the state. His brother objected. "He said, 'I don't want to just gallivant through Iowa.’ I will never forget him saying that” Goodvin said. “He was in elementary school. I just kept that in my head. When he said that, it really just stuck with me"
Jayjay comes by the wanderlust, within Iowa and beyond, naturally. His folks were from Adams and Sac counties in western Iowa; he was born in Marshalltown in central Iowa but the family moved to adjacent Grundy Center, eventually settling in Iowa City. In 1999 he left Iowa and traveled widely for about 11 years as a cook and chef in the restaurant and resort business in the West, Midwest and South.
His father was in marketing and traveled a lot. "He liked to stop and smeil the roses too,” Jayjay said. “He loved to go off the beaten path. So that's were I got the itch, or the knack, for that.”
The gallivanting devil also has a knack for the romantic. There’s no question of that -except for the question he pops to Monie — again, and again, and again.
”I have a goal to propose to my wife in all 99 Iowa counties” he wrote on his webpage. “It will take a long time and that’s okay because I’m counting on having many decades to complete it. Writing is a true passion and I can’t imagine having The Iowa Gallivant without Monie by my side the whole time.”
Awwww……..
He also mentioned their kids — Charlie, 19; Leah, 17; and Gigi, 11 — have “helped me a lot.”
Goodvin’s exploits can be found at The Iowa Gallavant webpage, theiowagallivant.com and on The Iowa Gallavant Facebook page.
Pat Kinney is a freelance writer and former longtme news staffer with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and, prior to that, several years at the Ames Tribune. He is currently an oral historian with the Grout Museum District in Waterloo. His “View from the Cedar Valley” column is part of “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” a collection of well-known news and opinion writers from around the state who previously and currently with a host of Iowa newspapers, news organizations and other publications. Please consider reading and subscribing to them as well as “View from the Cedar Valley.”
The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative
Thank you for introducing us to Jay Jay!