In a time when everything around us is so fast paced & is only getting faster, there needs to be a place of respite. A time for calm, a time to realign ourselves with who we are & what we want.

Writing brings that to me, and there is nothing more enjoyable than sharing what life is teaching you with others.

Travel also does that – it can change your perspective, giving us the ability to step back from our daily lives & reevaluate our goals & what really matters to us.

My journey of self-discovery started years ago, but my willingness to share what I was learning about myself took a backseat to my fear of showing the world who I was – the real me I was discovering. Hidden behind years of living a story I was told I should be living, a story that aligned with who I grew up believing I was, was someone who knew that something didn’t fit. Like a square trying to fit into a round hole, something wasn’t right & the harder I tried, the more my edges got scraped until I finally gave up. I accepted that where everyone else thought I belonged was the one place I didn’t. It was a world that felt comfortable for a very long time, but never real – like a shadow that is always present, but never shows the vibrancy of what created it.

Travel, on the other hand, has been a long-standing love of mine. It was never something I had to hide from – the exact opposite. It allowed me to find myself. The struggle was – and still continues to be – how to bring that person back with me into my daily life.

I spent weeks in the summer with my family in Maine, discovering the joy of getting away – but college & adulting got in the way of further travel until my husband & I had been married for quite a few years. Disney became a mainstay of our vacations for years as we raised our kids, interspersed with a week off the grid in Maine when we could get there.

It wasn’t until my older daughter spent a semester at University of Leeds that I managed to get myself to Europe – which, if you’d known me growing up, is shocking. My mom was a big BBC fan & I watched so many British shows that I felt like it was a second home. 😉 London & Yorkshire were as familiar to me as Maine & NYC. So finally getting over there as an adult really began my love affair with travel across the pond.

I’m hoping this blog will help others who find themselves on a similar journey – one of self discovery, as well as one that takes them places that help them learn more about themselves. I’d like it to be a place of hope & inspiration that we CAN be who we were born to be, if we learn to listen to our heart, and that we can find ourselves when we step outside of what our daily lives hand to us.