After our youngest left for university, the house got very quiet very fast. My partner and I looked at each other over dinner one night and said, almost simultaneously, “So… where do you actually want to go?” We’d been living in Dubai for years, marveling at the skyline from our window, but somehow never truly … Read more
Three weeks after my relationship ended, I did the only thing that made sense: I booked a solo trip somewhere I’d always wanted to go but had been waiting for the “right time” to visit together. Provence had lived on that list for years — the lavender fields, the crumbling hilltop villages, the markets piled … Read more
When I turned 35, I made a deal with myself: no more saving the good stuff for someday. The trip I’d been pinning photos of for four years finally had a departure date — Paris, and not the postcard version of it. Sure, my feed was full of the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre’s glass … Read more
My boss handed me a bonus check and said “invest it wisely.” I invested it in a round-trip ticket and two weeks somewhere I’d been dreaming about since a geography class in eighth grade — the French Riviera, that sun-drenched stretch of coastline I’d stared at in a textbook map, tracing my finger from Menton … Read more
My passport sat blank in a drawer for two years after I got it — I kept saying “soon” until a friend called me out at dinner. We booked flights that night. I barely slept. That impulsive decision landed me on a slow boat drifting through Bordeaux and Burgundy, a glass of something extraordinary in … Read more
We eloped on a Tuesday with three friends and a bottle of champagne, telling ourselves the real trip would come later. “Later” arrived 18 months after our wedding when we finally stopped waiting for the perfect time and booked a flight to Athens. With just one day before island-hopping pulled us south, we had to … Read more
For our tenth anniversary, I asked my partner what they actually wanted — not a dinner, not jewelry. They said: somewhere we’ve never been, somewhere that feels like a story we haven’t told yet. We were already staying in Athens, a city that had already blown us away with its history and restless modern energy, … Read more
The school year ended and I sat in an empty classroom for twenty minutes just listening to the silence. Then I went home and looked up flights. Teaching summers off exist for a reason — and somehow, within an hour, I had a one-way ticket to Greece and a vague but burning need to stand … Read more
I spent fourteen months putting money into a travel fund that everyone else called frivolous. When it finally had enough zeros in it, I spent about forty-five minutes looking at destinations before I bought the ticket — because honestly, when you close your eyes and picture sun-bleached whitewashed walls tumbling down toward water so blue … Read more
After two years of looking at the same four walls, I made a list of every place I’d told myself “I’ll go when things settle down” — then I started at the top. Croatia’s Blue Cave, or Modra Špilja, had been sitting near the top of that list for longer than I could remember, tucked … Read more
