Around the time that I was struggling to hold down my breakfast, hiking at a clipped pace across the wild Kyrgyz countryside and up a mountain, I realized a few things needed to change. Having just finished hiking 500 miles of Spain’s Camino de Santiago a few weeks earlier, I was fit enough for the …
Finding a way to stop traveling has been an evolving process. When I booked that one-way flight ten years ago, a year of travel loomed before me, an epic round-the-world trip that would fulfill my dreams to see more of the world while also preparing me to contentedly return to Los Angeles at the end. …
After months in Africa this past spring, which was a tough trip for me, I spent summer on a hiatus from A Little Adrift and instead headed to the beach with my nieces and nephews, hiked a bit in the Pacific Northwest, spoke at convention in Atlanta, dinner-ed with friends in Florida, and lost myself in the …
It’s been a wacky ride these last few months. In late June, I returned home from traveling through Panama with my dad and my niece and I entered a transition period … or I extended the transition I talked about earlier this year. I hunkered down here in Florida to refocus on projects I have had …
Somehow, two and half months have passed since I moved to Mexico and moved into a studio apartment in the tiny town of San Pancho. Life is zipping along. When I started writing this update, I planned to lament that I still haven’t learned how to relax, despite my decision to use my time here in …
Traveling through Guatemala was an unexpected pleasure; I landed in Central America with the vague idea I would travel south from Mexico and stop in every country for a few weeks, a month if I loved a place. And then I crossed the border into Guatemala and instantly fell a bit in love. Over the …
I turn 29-years-old today. This birthday is already going a lot better than last year … last year my lovely friends in Chiang Mai came out to celebrate with me at a Mexican restaurant and instead of enjoying it, I spent much of the night sick in the bathroom (that was the first day of …
Writing this book over the past nine months functioned as a perfect mirror for my own personal fears and vulnerabilities—my book about volunteering ended up with so much of me exposed in the process that the thought of publicly launching was overwhelming. When I left the United States in 2008 on what became my open-ended …