Every trip deserves the perfect playlist. For me it doesn’t get better than having a travel soundtrack. It’s like having familiar friends in my pocket to keep me company amidst my adventures. As the self-proclaimed “world’s biggest U2 fan” it was a great excuse to compile my favorites for my first international solo trip. And so the tradition began with Ireland back in 2013. Not all his movies have aged well but if John Hughes did one thing spectacularly well it was marry a m

Biking makes me feel most myself and when traveling it makes me feel at home wherever I am. One of my favorite pieces I’ve written for this blog is about how I fell in love with biking and the experience of biking in  eight of the ten countries I lived in while on Remote Year (see A Sort of Homecoming ).   If you told me back in 2018 on Remote Year that one day I would go on a biking trip with Mary, I wouldn't have believed you! Mary is Ohana: one of my constant companions th

I am a self-professed word nerd. I love words in all their forms: spoken, written, sung. It’s one of the reasons I’m such a reader and rabid music fan. I love their ability to take me places and make me feel deeper than I already do.  It’s also why I love languages. I love learning words in other languages, like calcetines (my favorite word to say in Spanish) or dentifricio (my favorite word to say in Italian) and learning how mundane things such as socks and toothpaste sound

So the lady at the gate wasn’t wrong…Amsterdam was the coziest city in the world. Its reign lasted two whole days. After our brief stay in Amsterdam, Mary and I headed to the newly crowned coziest city I have ever visited - Alkmaar - 25 miles northwest of Amsterdam, where we stayed for the remainder of our time in the Netherlands. Alkmaar made me feel like I was in “Belle,” the opening number from Beauty and the Beast,  in the best way! I felt like I was in a storybook, surro

I remember thinking “this place better be worth the wait” as my flight delay hit five hours and counting and its third gate change from Chicago to Amsterdam. Just as the thought crossed my mind, I overheard someone near me say enthusiastically, “Amsterdam is the coziest city in the world!” I live for cozy vibes as a natural born homebody and a big fan of wintering. Her words were the injection my weary body needed to stay awake. A few hours later we finally took flight and he

MY DISABILITY JOURNEY Here’s the TLDR on my disability story. I was born with cerebral palsy and came to find out my diagnosis at 28 by happenstance. I spent the next decade working through all the feelings that came with that revelation (anger, sadness, and betrayal just to name a few) and the label of being disabled. To be clear, I always knew I was different but I didn’t have a name for my different way of walking and moving through the world, literally. Disabled is a word

My last post was all about my experience with chronic pain ( Humble Quest ). What I didn’t mention is how the unpredictability of my pain kept me from my favorite pastime, travel. Travel is a way of life because it gives me life. Every time I go somewhere it restores my spirit. See any Remote Year  post for evidence. I stopped traveling when I lost trust in my body. Or more specifically when my right leg started spontaneously dropping out on me. I often travel solo so it simp

A doctor recently told me that he admired my grit as he walked out the door and left me to change. On the one hand an incredible...

Some people set resolutions each year. For the last few years I have focused on a word of  the year (self proclaimed word nerd over...