I did not grow up as a diver. Honestly, the idea of breathing underwater through a tube while surrounded by open ocean was not exactly on my radar when I was guiding tourists around Manhattan skyscrapers. But travel changes what you think is possible. And somewhere between teaching English in Thailand, hiking across China, and…
There is a particular kind of silence right before a paraglider lifts off. The world is still moving below you, but for a few seconds you are suspended between two things: the life you were living on the ground and something completely new. If you have ever wanted to know what that feels like, the…
There is a very specific kind of nervous energy that builds in the hours before you do something you have always told yourself you would do “someday.” I know that feeling well. I felt it standing at the door of an overnight train in Europe before my first solo overnight journey with nobody waiting for…
For most of my life, I associated the word “safari” with one image: a dusty Land Rover crossing the Serengeti at golden hour. Africa. Always Africa. And honestly, that image is not wrong. But it is incomplete. The Americas are home to some of the most extraordinary wildlife concentrations on the planet, places where you…
There’s a version of this trip that sounds slightly terrifying. Flying into a country where you don’t speak the language, hauling gear through an airport, taking a bus into the mountains, and then trusting your body to a wall of rock you’ve only read about on forums. I get it. When I was planning my…
I have stood at the edge of a crater in my imagination more times than I can count. There is something about a volcano that pulls at you in a way that a mountain or a beach simply does not. It is not just the scale or the drama. It is the fact that the…
Here is something I love about being a traveler: the moment you realize a place you assumed was out of reach is actually completely possible. For a lot of people, a snowboard trip is one of those things. It lives on the someday list, quietly waiting while life stays busy and the “perfect moment” never…
There’s a specific kind of silence that only exists in the desert. Not the silence of an empty room or a quiet street at 3 a.m. Something far bigger. The kind of silence that makes you suddenly, sharply aware of how small and loud and complicated your regular life actually is. I’ve chased that feeling…
I remember the feeling of standing at the edge of something that has existed for centuries longer than you can truly comprehend. The size of it, the silence, the weight of human history pressing in around you. That feeling is exactly what the best UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the Americas are capable of giving…