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

Things I’m going to miss about Mexico City The weather. I was there in February and the weather was perfection. Similar to Goldilocks...