I had seen photographs of the town so I knew there would be mountains and waterfalls. The sort of scenery Switzerland just, well, had. I had no idea that I would be walking onto the set of the Lord of the Rings.

I saw Staubbach Falls from the distance and immediately, I had the strange feeling that I had seen this place before. I went through the index cards in my mind. Where? Where?

Rivendell. Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit.

Staubbach Falls did not vaguely look like Rivendell. It was Rivendell. I made my husband stopp while I googled the scene. I had to know…and I found it. Lauterbrunnen was Rivendell. Literally.

Until that day, I had no ides that some of Bilbo’s journeys were directly influenced by the very spot I was standing. In 1911, when Tolkien was 19, he traveled through Switzerland. He walked from Interlaken into the Lauterbrunnen Valley, continued toward Mürren and then on to the higher elevations. Decades later, Tolkien wrote that his Swiss adventures had directly influenced Bilbo’s journey from Rivendell across the Misty Mountains.

Tolkien in Lauterbrunnen

Tolkien and his companions traveled mainly on foot, carrying heavy packs and following mountain paths. Sound familiar? His later description of the journey makes it clear that the landscape resonated with him. He wrote of the Jungfrau, the Silberhorn and the other mountains and valleys he encountered. The places he saw would eventually become part of one of the most recognizable imaginary landscapes in literature.

During my research, I learned that scholars are more wary about saying that Lauterbrunnen was the model for Rivendell, but Tolkien’s own words establish at least a connection. My own eyes saw the connection. And once you’ve been to Lauterbrunnen, if you are a Tolkien fan, the becomes even harder to ignore.

Then there is Hotel Oberland

Hotel Oberland sits in the middle of it all. It is a short walk from the train station. The original building is historic, with 24 rooms that retain an Alpine character, while a newer building across the street provides additional rooms.

This hotel’s history is not as dramatic as some others I write about. What draws me to this hotel and Lauterbrunnen itself is that people, even Tolkien, have been coming here for centuries to see the same view I couldn wait to see. Whether the Tolkien story is 100% accurate does not matter. It is accurate for me. I get the the chills every time I think of looking at Staubbach Falls that first time, knowing I saw it somewhere else.

The institution of trains during the 19th century made Lauterbrunnen more accessible than it once was. Now visitors can explore the surrounding Bernese Oberland by train, cable car and mountain path.

I didn’t come looking for Tolkien

My favorite part of the story is that I did not arrive in Lauterbrunnen knowing that Tolkien had walked through the valley. I wasn’t looking for a Lord of the Rings connection like someone looking for celebrity homes in the Hollywood Hills. I certainly wasn’t expecting to recognize a fictional place in an actual Swiss village.

But once I made the connection, I couldn’t unsee it.

I ran across a hotel called The Frame. The name intrigued me. So I dug deeper beyond location and number of stars and I learned an intriguing story. The hotel was connected to one of the most famous art thefts of the 20th century - the return of the Mona Lisa.

Before The Frame was The Frame, it was the Hotel Trivoli. In December 1913, a man named Vincenzo Peruggia checked in. He has the Mona Lisa with him and his intention was to return it to its “rightful” owner - Italy.

How the Mona Lisa disappeared

On August 21, 1911, Mona Lisa vanished from the Louvre. With today’s level of security, it is hard to imagine someone simply walking out of a museum with a painting, but that is essentially what happened. 1911 was apparently more relaxed when it came to museum security than things are today.

Our thief. Mr. Peruggia, was an Italian who worked at the Louvre. He quietly removed the painting without much fanfare and kept it hidden for two years. And where is was hidden is a hotel in Paris, aptly the name the Hotel Da Vinci & Spa.

The theft became an international sensation and can be credited with the fame the Mona Lisa has today. There was a large scale investigation. Newspapers reported the progress everywhere. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested and Pablo Picasso was questioned. And the entire time, the painting was hidden right in Paris.

Eventually, Mr. Peruggia decided it was time to return the Mona Lisa to its “rightful” owner - Italy. I am not sure if Mr. Peruggia understood that it was Leonardo da Vinci himself who brought the painting to France in the 16th century.

The story goes that Mr. Peruggia carried the painting, rolled up, from Paris to Florence and checked into the Hotel Tivoli, now The Frame. Once there he contacted an art dealer, Alfredo Geri, told him he had the Mona Lisa and wanted to meet with the director of the Uffizi Gallery, Giovanni Poggi. Mr. Poggi met with Mr. Peruggia at the Hotel Tivoli. Mr. Poggi informed Mr. Peruggia that he needed to take the painting back to the Uffizi to confirm its authenticity. Thinking he was a national hero, our unsuspecting thief agreed. Instead, Mr. Poggi returned with the police and the rest is, shall we say, history.

They met in a room that visitors can now stay in called the Gioconda Suite. I stayed in the room.

The hotel hasn’t forgotten

The Frame has incorporated the Mona Lisa into every aspect of the hotel, but in a modern way. The hotel itself is modern and stylish but maintains original stonework throughout. There are references to art throughout the hotel and many modern takes on the Mona Lisa itself are present, having been commissioned from artist Denis Ouch.

I loved staying at The Frame. Its only a few minutes walk from the Duomo, but it is the history of the hotel that is what fascinates me. This hotel is my inspiration for my newest project, Hotels With Stories. A beautiful hotel is wonderful. A hotel with history, count me in.

He’s also a solo traveler.

A few years ago, I had a bright idea. Could solo travel be a mechanism to help him navigate the uncertainty of daily life?

Travel brings us to new places, but travel can also be a challenge. This holds true for anyone, not just someone on the spectrum. Changed plans, unfamiliar people and different food are all items that any traveler must face. These realities can cause a lot of stress for someone on the spectrum.

Autism looks different for everyone. My son is fairly independent, but that doesn’t mean things are always easy. Travel is basically a collection of things not going according to plan. Changes in routine, unfamiliar social situations and sensory overload can all be harder for someone on the spectrum.

With the best intentions, I became very good at removing discomfort for him. I had a tendency to arrange things, anticipate problems and step in to avoid pain.

That’s partly why I realized that encouraging him to become a traveler was a useful practice. Trains get delayed. Airlines cancel flights. To travel, you have to ask questions, make decisions, and tolerate being uncomfortable. These are travel skills, but these are also life skills.

In our quest to try this experiment, he found a tour company that focused on travelers aged 18-35. In other words, he would be a solo traveler, but part of a tour at the same time.

His first trip was Italy, France and Spain - for seventeen days. That may have been a bit more than he should have done the first time around! Rome, Florence, Umbria, Genoa, Nice, Montpelier and Barcelona.

About halfway through the trip, he wanted to come home. The issues were everything I described above. He was on a routine dictated by others. He ran out of clean clothes halfway through the trip and had to find a laundromat. Many, but not all, of the travelers were traveling with friends, so he had to learn how to interact with people who already had a travel buddy - or five.

These situations are not just hard for someone on the spectrum. They are hard for anyone. But being uncomfortable and overwhelmed was the point of the experiment.

He quickly learned how to navigate the chaos. He couldn’t wait to go on another trip. It was Croatia this time. On a boat. I was a bit surprised he wanted to live on a boat for a week. Not a cruise ship. A boat.

I knew the experiment was a success when he told me he didn’t like the shower on the boat so one day he showered at an apartment of someone he met at a bar. Probably not the safest decision, but, at his age I also did not make the best choices. However I cannot say I ever showered at a stranger’s house in Split!

Since then, he’s made his way through Croatia, Spain (again), Central Europe and Greece. He still speaks to people from these trips. In Athens, he met up with the tour guide from his first trip. My son credits that tour guide for his travel success because that tour guide helped Andrew work through these initial travel challenges. The tour guides at this tour company have all been nothing less than fabulous.

I’ve watched my son navigate airports, trains, hotels, unfamiliar food, social issues and schedule changes with an ease that I never thought I would see from him.

At some point I stopped thinking of the travel as autism therapy. It is just travel. My goal was never to change him. My goal was to give him more opportunities to navigate a world that isn’t always predictable. I hoped he would discover what he could handle independently. Travel happens to be very good at creating those opportunities.

We all build routines because routines make life easier. I know where to find my favorite cookie in my local grocery story. I know where I like to go to dinner on the weekends. When we travel, this is all new.

As soon as we board the plane, travel removes familiarity. We land somewhere and suddenly the signs are different. The language is different. The train you thought you were boarding moved tracks 5 minutes before departure. You must adjust.

For someone with autism, that can be incredibly difficult. Difficult and impossible are not the same thing. Sometimes the only option is to take a deep breath and figure it out. And every time you figure something out, you have another piece of evidence that you can. This was what I wanted for my son.

A few days later, Metro interviewed me for a story about overtourism and the destinations I think travelers should reconsider. The interview happened because of the carousel, but I didn’t post the carousel to get a reaction. All I hoped was to start a conversation. I made the Internet mad.

To be fair, maybe I wasn’t as clear as I thought I was. A lot of people heard, “Rome isn’t worth visiting.” That wasn’t my point. My point was much bigger than Rome. My hope was to start a conversation about overtourism.

I’ve noticed that my own travel has changed over the years. When I was younger, I wanted to see the places everyone else had seen. I wanted to check the boxes. But now I find myself just as excited by the city a train ride away from where everyone else is going. The one without 5000 lookalike influencers telling you to go to the exact same place.

Social media changed how we travel. Years ago, we’d flip through guidebooks, read travel magazines, or get recommendations from friends. We’d wander into neighborhoods simply because they looked interesting.

Now millions of us save the same reels, bookmark the same cafés and stand in the same photo spots. Social media is giving us the same vacations, but it’s overstressing the same spots.

These locations are feeling the crowds more than ever. Barcelona recently made the news because it is imposing a short term tourism tax and is planning to ban short-term rentals. Housing was becoming unaffordable for residents so the local government had to step in. This is over tourism.

Over tourism does not happen because too many people travel. Over tourism happens because too many of us travel to the same places, in the same season, after watching the same reel.

This is why, on my viral carousel, I suggested Bologna instead of Rome.  My suggestion does not mean I am uneducated or uncultured like some comments suggested. I am simply trying to do my part, however small it is, to spread people out and help to avoid squeezing a city and its residents to maximum capacity.

In the same carousel, I suggested visiting other parts of the American southwest instead of the Grand Canyon. Not because the Grand Canyon isn’t one of the greatest natural wonders on Earth. It absolutely is. But millions of people fly across the world to see the Grand Canyon, while remarkable places a few hours away receive a fraction of the visitors.

The point wasn’t to replace one destination with another. The point was to remind people that there is more than one incredible trip.

Over tourism isn’t just about waiting in long lines. It changes the places we love and the people who live there. Apartments become short-term rentals. Neighborhood grocery stores become souvenir shops. Residents get priced out.

Sometimes we’re unknowingly helping create the very thing we’re hoping to avoid. I’m not suggesting you skip Rome, Paris or the Grand Canyon. What I’m suggesting is that our trips don’t have to end there.

Spend a few days in Rome. Then take the train to Bologna. Visit Paris. Then spend a couple of days in Lyon.

When I think back on my own travels, the places that stay with me most often aren’t the ones with the longest lines. It’s the tiny wine bar where I was the only tourist or the piazza where a lone man was playing guitar. The Colosseum may be the backdrop, but the memory is the small moment.

My post wasn’t about Rome. My post was to give others permission to look beyond the obvious. The world doesn’t need fewer travelers. The world simply needs us to spread out a little.

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I remember being in his house one day after he became ill with an aggressive form of dementia. Our reality was that he was never going back to that house. My job, among many, was to clean it out. The dementia came on so fast and was so aggressive that he went from the hospital to memory care without ever going back home. Everything was simply left as though he were on vacation and would be back next week.

My dad had this very large wine fridge, and I had no idea what to do with it all. Standing in his large kitchen one day, I opened it up. I was ready to scream at the wine because he left me with so many projects (not his fault, but I needed someone to blame), and 300 bottles of wine was one of them. Some names I knew. Most I didn’t. It was at that moment that I realized there must be something there beyond my rudimentary knowledge: “fermented grape equals good.”

It was then, staring at 300 bottles of wine, that I decided I didn’t want his knowledge to be for nothing. I wanted to learn. I now call it my wine journey.

Before I began my self-proclaimed wine journey, wine was always part of my scenery, whether at home, at restaurants, or while traveling. But I didn’t truly know what I was drinking. I thought I did. I was so naïve.

Initially, I thought learning about wine meant pretending to taste twenty-seven different kinds of fruit that nobody has ever actually eaten. Blackcurrant? Stone fruit? Blossom? I have the worst nose and palate. At wine tastings, when the presenter asks what we smell or taste, attendees call out things like wet stone, bread, and cooked fruit. Not me. I stare blankly and keep my head down.

So my approach to wine is different. I believe wine is more than calling out words like tree fruit, grass and butter. Wine is about people, history and culture. I believe we can all learn so much about the world through wine. Let me give you some examples.

When Monks Became Scientists

Burgundy’s vineyards are divided into tiny little plots. Why? Monks spent centuries figuring out that a few feet of dirt right here made better wine than the few feet over there. They took meticulous notes, compared harvests, and basically invented obsessive wine nerd logs. That’s why two vineyards right next to each other can produce completely different wines. Turns out “location, location, location” has always been a thing in Burgundy.

When the Pope Moved Into Wine Country

The Châteauneuf-du-Pape appellation in France literally means “the Pope’s new castle.” Why? The Roman Catholic pope moved to nearby Avignon in the 14th century and built a summer castle among the vineyards. That crest printed on every bottle? It’s the papal coat of arms—a reminder that even wine can get Vatican branding. It turns out the Church wasn’t just saving souls. It also had excellent taste in real estate. It still does.

The Bottles the Nazis Couldn’t Have

During World War II, some French winemakers hid their best bottles behind fake cellar walls or disguised them among ordinary vintages to keep them out of Nazi hands. They weren’t simply protecting inventory. They were protecting French history, culture, and pride. Wine was a piece of France that the winemakers refused to surrender.

The Widow Who Changed Champagne Forever

Veuve Clicquot isn’t just a Champagne label. It was a woman. Veuve means widow in French. Widowed in her twenties, Barbe-Nicole Clicquot took over her late husband’s wine business at a time when women weren’t allowed to run anything. She revolutionized champagne by pioneering the riddling table and turned a struggling winery into one of the world’s most famous champagne houses, proving that sometimes the most powerful person in the room is the woman everyone underestimated.

The Chicken That Drew a Border

Why is there a black rooster on every bottle of Chianti Classico? Legend says that in the Middle Ages, Florence and Siena settled a border dispute with a race between two knights. Each would leave when their city’s rooster crowed. Florence kept its black rooster hungry so it crowed before dawn, while Siena’s well-fed white rooster slept in. The Florentine knight got a head start, and the black rooster, the Gallo Nero, became the symbol of Chianti Classico, proving that sometimes history is decided by food and a chicken.

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None of these stories begin with a grape. They begin with people and a place. Wine forces you to understand history and culture because it forces you to ask why. Why this grape? Why this plot? Why this label? Why are there stone walls here and not there? Museums tell history. Wine allows us to live it.

I will never know if my dad collected wine simply because he liked wine or because he liked the history of wine. I would like to believe the latter.

Now that I’m starting to learn more, I wish I could have a conversation with him about why there’s a black rooster on every bottle of Chianti Classico or a crest on every bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. He knew. He just didn’t share. He was quiet like that. I like to believe he knew I’d eventually end up learning too.

I write a lot about slowing down while traveling and having white spaces in our itineraries. I’ve learned that when you travel to learn about wine, the wine requires you to slow down. You’re not rushing from one landmark to the next because your reservation is the classroom and destination. My museum is the landscape and the wine is the guide.

My dad gave me a reason to start asking questions, even if neither of us knew it at the time. I didn’t expect wine to become one of the ways I understand the world. But somewhere between his curiosity and my travels, wine became my favorite teacher.

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But one of the places I return to more than almost anywhere else isn’t across the Atlantic. It’s less than two and a half hours from my front door: the Florida Keys. When I need a break, I don’t always need a passport. Sometimes I just need to point my car south, put on some cheesy Jimmy Buffet music and keep driving until there isn’t much road left.

Here’s why I keep going back.

1. It Feels Like an Island Vacation Without the Airport

There aren’t many places where I can decide over coffee that I need to get away and actually be somewhere that feels completely different by lunchtime. That’s the Keys.

I throw a bag in the car, turn on some white girl reggae, and head south. The further I drive, the more everyday life starts fading in the rearview mirror. By the time I leave the chaos of Florida City and begin the drive on the Overseas Highway onto the Keys, my brain has already switched into vacation mode. In fact, as I am writing, can envision the exact spot this happens: when I see the sign for Gilbert’s Resort. If I have more time, I take the longer route to Key Largo via Card Sound Road and stop at the famous roadside grill and bar, Alabama Jack’s.

Just me, the Overseas Highway (or Card Sound Road), and the feeling that I’ve escaped, even though I technically haven’t left the state. This is the great thing about living in Florida.

2. Casual Isn’t a Style. It’s the Entire Culture.

I live in South Florida. South Florida and casual never belong in the same sentence. South Florida is where women wear stilettos to dinner and have had more plastic surgery than any one woman should. I live in the place where people want to be seen. It can become exhausting.

The Keys are different.

Nobody seems concerned about what you’re wearing. Flip-flops are acceptable almost everywhere. Hair is at the mercy of humidity. A T-shirt, shorts, and sandals are perfectly respectable dinner attire. Hair is wind swept and lightened by the sun. Skin is a wonderful shade of brown. Sand is likely still on your feet. It’s refreshing.

The Florida Keys operate under the assumption that everyone is there to relax amd there’s no need to make things complicated. I recall one night, actually it was the night before my wedding, where I was at my favorite dive bar in Key Largo (the Caribbean Club if you want to know). I saw a group of women in sequins dresses like they were in Miami. That’s not The Keys. The Keys are cut off shorts and flip-flops, if you can find your flip-flops, and if you can’t, barefoot is perfectly acceptable.

I wish more places adopted that philosophy.

3. It’s Not About the Beaches. It’s About the Water.

When people think of tropical destinations, they usually imagine miles of soft white sand. That’s not what the Keys are about. The water is the attraction. Beaches are almost nonexistent and if they do exist, it is more than likely they are man-made for the tourists.

Boats drift in and out of marinas all day. People fish before sunrise. Families spend entire afternoons tied up at sandbars. Divers head out to reefs. Paddleboards glide through mangroves.

Even if you never step onto a boat, you’re constantly reminded that you’re surrounded by water. You eat lunch overlooking it. You watch storms roll across it. You end your day watching the sun disappear into it.

4. Lazy Afternoons Are an Actual Activity

One of my favorite afternoons in the Keys involves doing absolutely nothing.

I’ll find a waterfront restaurant or bar, order a spritz, a smart choice when it’s as hot as the sun outside, and simply sit.

Eventually someone starts talking. Maybe it’s someone who’s lived in Islamorada for thirty years and has stories about hurricanes, fishing, and how much the Keys have changed. Maybe it’s someone visiting from Alaska who still can’t believe the water is actually THAT color.

The conversations are completely unpredictable. Nobody seems to be in a rush to leave. And after a while, neither am I. The Keys somehow make doing very little feel like a perfectly productive day.

5. There Is More History Here Than Most People Realize

Most people think of the Keys as tiki bars, fishing charters, and sunsets, but there is so much history tucked into these islands.

Long before tourists discovered the Keys, they were home to the Calusa and later the Tequesta people, who learned to thrive in an environment surrounded by water. In the 1800s, the Keys became famous for “wrecking,” which is a “job” of salvaging cargo from ships that ran aground on the reefs. It was such a profitable business that, for a time, Key West became one of the wealthiest cities in the United States.

Then came Henry Flagler, the man who first developed Palm Beach into what we know it as today. He looked at this chain of tiny islands separated by open water and decided the logical thing to do was build a railroad across the water. It was considered one of the greatest engineering projects of its time. Unfortunately, a devastating hurricane destroyed it in 1935. As you drive down the Overseas Highway toward Key West, you can still see parts of it running parallel to the road. It’s a constant reminder that Mother Nature rules The Keys.

There are stories of shipwrecks, hurricanes, wreckers, commercial fishing, opportunists and generations of people who decided that living on narrow strips of land surrounded by turquoise water was worth the occasional hurricane.

Even the old fish shacks and roadside restaurants seem to have stories. Many destinations feel manufactured for tourists. Where I live, everything is manufactured for tourists. The Keys aren’t. They are lived in. Every bridge, marina, and weathered dock has witnessed a hundred stories that will probably never make it into a history book.

6. Time Moves a Little Slower Here

I think this may be my favorite reason. The Keys run on a different clock. Lunch becomes the afternoon. One drink becomes sunset. A quick stop somehow turns into three hours. At home I’m usually looking at my watch, thinking about what’s next. In the Keys, I stop doing that.

Nobody seems to be hurrying, so eventually I stop hurrying too. It’s amazing how quickly your priorities change when the biggest decision of the afternoon is whether to order another spritz or walk down to the marina to watch the boats come in.

Why I Keep Going Back

The Florida Keys aren’t flashy.

They’re a little salty, a little weathered, often humid beyond reason, and completely comfortable being exactly what they are. Maybe that’s why I love them so much.

And every single time I drive back over those bridges toward the mainland, I find myself thinking the same thing: how can I move here?

An immigration officer would glance at my passport, look vaguely unimpressed by my existence, stamp it with unnecessary force, and send me on my way. Five seconds later, I was already flipping through the pages to admire the newest addition. There. I was in a different country. I was international.

Did the stamp accomplish anything after I’d been admitted into the country? Absolutely not. Did I immediately check to see where it landed in my passport? Absolutely.

Somewhere along the way, we decided efficiency was more important than ceremony. Now gates open automatically. Cameras recognize my face. A green light flashes. I barely interact with another human before I’m standing at baggage claim wondering if I accidentally skipped a step. Was I still in JFK or was I in Paris? There was no thunk, no customs officer, so how do I know? It’s undeniably faster but It’s also significantly less satisfying.

My passport used to tell a story. Every stamp was proof that I’d figured out another airport, another language, another currency, another excuse to order wine. The passport itself became a tiny travel journal written entirely in ink. Every thunk meant I crossed a border.

Passport stamps aren’t the only thing we’ve lost. Remember airmail envelopes? Those lightweight white envelopes with the red and blue striped border that somehow made international correspondence feel like an event. Whenever I had a friend living abroad, I’d make a special trip to the store, buy the envelope and carefully write out the international address. I felt so, well, international.

Now if I want to talk to that same friend, I send a text. Or I call. Literally all we have to do nowadays is pick up the phone. Was my friend next door? Or Was my friend in Switzerland? There’s no way to know. It’s infinitely more efficient, but the drama is gone.

Objectively, modern border technology is remarkable. I scan my passport, look at a screen and voilà a glass door opens and I am in France. Subjectively, it has robbed me of one of travel’s most unnecessary pleasures. The ceremony of the thunk.

No one ever asked to see my passport. No one flipped through it and gasped, “You’ve been busy.” But that wasn’t really the point. I liked knowing it was there. Every new stamp felt like a tiny promotion in an organization that didn’t exist. It’s like there is was a status competition. If someone happened to open my passport, I wanted the silent satisfaction of them thinking, Wow. She travels.

Today I breeze through customs in under a minute, which is wonderful and devastating all of the same time. My boarding pass lives on my phone. My customs declaration is electronic. My passport barely gets touched.

We’ve gained efficiency, but we lost a little bit of ceremony along the way. I don’t need immigration to verify my identity. I just need them to acknowledge my effort.

Thunk.

I discovered that completely by accident.

I’d been to Saint Martin before, but only on cruises, where your relationship with an island is usually limited to, “This is nice. I should come back someday.” Then you get back on the ship and never do.

Last year while on a cruise I decided to venture beyond the cruise port for lunch on the French side. I had done exactly zero research, which is occasionally my best travel strategy.

We pulled into Grand Case and suddenly…France.

Not “French-inspired.” Not “French-owned.” France.

The servers were French. The kitchen was loudly French. The wine list was French. The menu was French. Somewhere around the bread basket, I stopped believing I was in the Caribbean.

I’d visited plenty of Caribbean islands before, but none had ever made me feel like Dorothy after the tornado.

The funny part is that I’d been to the Dutch side on previous visits and never once thought, Wow, this feels exactly like Amsterdam.

The French side? I could have been in France. How had I never know this?

So I booked a return trip.

Grand Case sits on a tiny stretch of coastline on the French side of the island, and it quickly became obvious why people keep coming back. If France decided to open a beach office in the Caribbean, this would be it. There’s even direct flights there from Paris.

They use euros. They use Type C plugs. French is spoken everywhere. Everything about the place pointed to me being in France. My circadian rhythm respectfully disagreed.

Grand Case itself is full of contradictions, which may be why I liked it so much. It started life as a quiet fishing village. Today it’s considered the culinary capital of the Caribbean.

One minute you’re sitting in a polished French restaurant with an excellent Burgundy wine list. The next you’re eating grilled lobster at a lolo (low cost local food), which are open-air local restaurants, where dinner comes on a simple plate and the food is just as impressive as the French restaurants across the street. I actually think somebody’s grandmother was at the grill.

Then there’s Grand Case Boulevard. Calling it a boulevard is wildly optimistic. It’s a narrow street where parked cars, moving cars, restaurants, beach bars, and construction projects all appear to have signed a non-binding agreement to coexist.

And somehow…it works.

That’s really the story of Grand Case. Nothing quite matches, yet everything belongs. The French restaurants don’t compete with the lolos. The fishing village doesn’t compete with the fine dining. The Caribbean doesn’t compete with France. They all exist together as though this arrangement was the obvious outcome all along.

Grand Case is French food at its ultimate. The food is beautifully executed without being theatrical. The wine lists are thoughtful without being intimidating. Even ordering a single glass felt like someone had actually cared about the selection instead of ordering from the same distributor’s bestseller list.

I came home realizing I hadn’t just found another Caribbean island. I’d found a place where I could enjoy French food, French wine, and a little bit of the French way of life without an overnight flight or a week of jet lag.

I still love traveling to France. But every now and then, I only have a long weekend.

That’s when I will remember there’s a little fishing village in the Caribbean where the menus are in French, the wine is French, the plugs are French, and my phone charger spends the entire trip convinced we’re somewhere near Lyon.

I flew three hours. And somehow ended up in France.

Long before I ever became the one obsessing over airline schedules and hotel locations, she was already collecting passport stamps like they were grocery store rewards points.

She and I are going Saint Martin together soon. Which feels oddly appropriate because years ago, she was the one who showed me that the world was much bigger than I realized.

Saint Martin. Technically, it’s the Caribbean. Emotionally, it’s France. With a significantly shorter flight.

Three hours from Miami. French wine. French restaurants. Type C plugs. Euros.

Yet Eastern Standard Time so none of the seven-hour jet lag where you spend the first day wondering if breakfast is dinner. Meaning I can go to mini-France for a long weekend from Miami. This is one of my favorite travel loopholes.

Although now retired, her career was in the airline industry, which meant she had access to standby flights and had a passport that needed replacing more often than her driver’s license. We never knew where she was. Was she in China? Russia? Rome? Actually, she was probably in Rome. I think she’s been there about a hundred times. As a kid I remember there was no point asking if she was coming to Thanksgiving dinner because she was always in Rome on Thanksgiving.

Back then, I was the one listening to stories and she was the person who disappeared to another continent for a weekend. Her apartment in New York City was lined with photos of her travels. I never stopped staring at them. I remember a black and white one of a man looking at the camera in a coy fashion. From my memory, he was of Tibetan descent. That photo always drew me in. If that photo actually existed and the man was actually from Tibet, I don’t know. Unfortunately, all of her photos got lost in a move.

She was also the person who took me to Europe for the first time. Ireland. That was where she worked so she knew Dublin as well as her hometown of New York. At the time, international travel still felt like something other people, like my adventurous cousin, did. She even had friends in Ireland. Friends - in Ireland!

Now somehow…the tables have turned. She’s retired. We all live in Florida now. The standby flights are gone. I’m the one constantly looking at airline schedules, comparing hotel locations, and arguing with myself over whether I really need another trip.

(Spoiler: apparently I do.)

And now we’re going somewhere together. There’s something funny about realizing you’ve quietly become the person you used to admire.

It doesn’t happen all at once. One day you’re a child following someone else’s travels, staring at their photographs of random models from Tibet. The next day you’re sending them your itinerary. Life has a weird sense of humor like that. (By the way, I need to ask her if that photo existed or it’s something my brain made up.)

Saint Martin probably isn’t the place most people think about when they imagine France. But that’s kind of the point. Sometimes you don’t need to fly across the Atlantic.  France with better weather and less jet lag. And, if everything goes according to plan, an excellent bottle of wine.

Mine is Florence.

Here me out. I’ve been to a lot of beautiful places, but Florence somehow feels both impossibly famous yet surprisingly accessible given its compact size. Every time you turn around there’s another reminder that you’re standing in one of the most influential cities in history.

Here are six reasons I keep going back.

1. Leather Leather everywhere.

If Florence had an official scent, it might be leather.

Jackets. Bags. Belts. Wallets. Shoes.

You can’t walk more than a block without seeing another shop displaying buttery-soft Italian leather that somehow convinces you that yes, you absolutely needed another handbag.

Even if you don’t buy anything, window-shopping in Florence is practically a sightseeing activity. You start by admiring craftsmanship and end by mentally reorganizing your closet. Resistance feels less like a virtue and more like a sin. You’re in Florence. You must buy a bag!

2. It’s ridiculously walkable.

Have you ever been to Rhode Island? There’s a joke that no two places in Rhode Island are more than twenty minutes apart. That’s a slight exaggeration…but Florence feels exactly like that.

The Duomo? Twenty minutes.

The Ponte Vecchio? Twenty minutes.

The Central Market? Twenty minutes.

The Boboli Gardens? Probably twenty minutes.

After a day or two, you stop checking Google Maps because you realize you’ll probably get there before your phone finishes recalculating. At some point, you begin to suspect the city is quietly rearranging itself to keep everything convenient so you don’t have to constantly get on trams and metros.

3. History refuses to let you ignore it.

Some cities hide their history inside museums. Not Florence. Florence leaves it sitting on street corners.

You’ll walk out to grab a cappuccino and accidentally pass a Renaissance palace. Turn another corner and there’s a church you’ve seen in history books. Keep walking and suddenly you’re standing in front of a sculpture you’ve spent your entire life recognizing without realizing where it actually lived.

In Florence, “I’ll just go for a walk” somehow turns into a history lesson. You start to feel mildly underqualified to be there. The buildings seem to know more than you do, and they’re not subtle about it.

4. The Medici. What a family.

Honestly…Those Medici. Without them, Florence probably wouldn’t be Florence. The Renaissance definitely wouldn’t have been the Renaissance.

They bankrolled artists, influenced popes, shaped politics, collected masterpieces, and somehow managed to create enough family drama to keep historians employed for centuries.

Everywhere you go in Florence, you’re basically following the Medici family tree. It’s less a family and more the longest running soap opera with better art. You don’t need to understand all of it to appreciate how much the family influenced so much of history..

5. The food deserves its own passport.

Florence doesn’t need complicated food. It just knows what to do with the good ingredients.

One of my favorite places is the Central Market, where you can wander through vendors selling cheeses, cured meats, amazing sandwiches, fresh pasta, olive oil, and enough wine to make you reconsider your luggage allowance.

Then there’s the famous Florentine steak—massive, beautifully charred, and made from Chianina cattle that have been raised in Tuscany for centuries.

It’s the kind of meal that reminds you why Italians don’t rush dinner. You sit down expecting to eat and end up committing to an evening. Time becomes less important than whatever is currently on your plate.

6. Chianti is practically next door.

I may start an argument here, but I think Chianti Classico might be the best wine in the world.

And one of the best parts about Florence is that you’re sitting right on its doorstep.

Within an hour, you can be driving through vineyards, medieval villages, and rolling Tuscan hills that somehow look exactly like every calendar you’ve ever seen.

It’s one thing to order a bottle of Chianti at home. It’s another thing entirely to drink it where it was born. The wine tastes better, or at least you’re more willing to believe that it does. Either way, it’s a convincing experience.

People always ask me what my favorite city in Europe is.

I usually hesitate. I’ve been to so many beautiful places. There’s so many places still out there to explore yet Florence always finds its way into the conversation.

Maybe it’s the walkability. Maybe it’s the wine. Maybe it’s the leather stores quietly tempting my credit card.

Or maybe it’s because Florence somehow makes 700 years of history feel like part of an ordinary afternoon.

Whatever the reason, I can’t wait to go back.

I realized I was wrong about this when someone pointed out to me that my most popular posts aren’t really about travel at all. They are about permission. Permission. I had to let that sink in. Not destinations. Not restaurants. Permission to go alone. To stop rushing. To stay longer. To book the nicer room. To skip the thing “everyone” says you have to see.

I thought I was writing about the Eiffel Tower.

Wow. When I sat with my thoughts on this, I realized that “someone” was right. I wasn’t writing about the five star hotel I splurged on in Rome. I was writing about the fact that I did not have to ask someone permission to book it. Somewhere along the way, I had become the master of my own future.

Apparently (there’s that word again), I was writing about transformation and I didn’t even realize it. Apparently, I am a transition creator, not a travel creator. Apparently, I had this all wrong because I was working this out on planes, so I thought I was a traveler.

Which makes sense. You take off in one city and three hours later you’re somewhere entirely different, a place where nobody knows you and where the grocery shopping isn’t your problem. On a plane, there’s nothing to do but think about what you’re going to do when you land. That’s transformation, however small. If you plan to do a 2 mile hike, maybe you’re becoming a hiker. If you plan to go to a museum, maybe you’re becoming an art lover. If you’re taking a wine tour, maybe you’re becoming a wine collector.

When you land, you are the genuine you. You’re not running your family’s errands, picking up oranges for the soccer practice or ensuring that the presentation to be made by your boss, but authored by you, looks perfect, even though you don’t get the credit.

For me, I didn’t even realize that I used my time on a plane to think about who I was becoming. With each trip, I was taking micro steps to become the authentic me.

When I wrote “Things I used to think were normal on vacation — I was wrong,” people didn’t respond because they cared about my vacation habits. They’ responded because they started questioning their own rules. About work. About hobbies. About aging. About what’s supposed to come next. It was fascinating to read.

I thought I was collecting passport stamps. What I was actually collecting was evidence that it’s never too late. That people can grow long after everyone, including themselves, decided they were finished growing.

That’s why I keep going. Not because these places are beautiful, though they are. But because the world turns out to be a very useful classroom, and I am, apparently, a very slow learner who needed to get on a plane to figure myself out. There’s that word again. Apparently.

I didn’t plan this. I didn’t wake up one day and decide to reinvent myself at midlife. I just kept booking the next trip. Writing the next post. Asking the next question. And somewhere in all of that, I became someone I actually recognize. I’m less interested in where I go than what will I learn about me on the next trip.

So I’ll ask you directly: what have you been waiting for permission to do? And who told you that you needed it? Let me know in the comments.

The first time I navigated an Italian train station on my own, I did what any reasonable, mildly neurotic traveler would do: I checked the app, confirmed the platform and stood there with complete confidence. The platform was full. I was in the right place.

I checked the app one more time, felt briefly secure about it, and looked up. Everyone was gone.

Not fewer people. Gone. The platform emptied in the thirty seconds while I was looking at my phone. My train was arriving in three minutes and I was the only person standing there with any intention of boarding it.

I didn’t hear any announcements, either in Italian or English. The app still said Platform 3. The sign still said Platform 3. Yet I was alone on Platform 3.

I will never understand how everyone else knew to go to platform 8 with no announcement. This remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of my Italian travel life. This is not the first time this has happened to me while waiting for a train in Italy, but I now know better. I can’t explain this phenomenon. All I know is that there was a silent, collective and unexplainable migration to somewhere that was not where I was. I’m convinced there must be a separate Trenitalia app for non-tourists that gives Italians the right platform and Americans, well, something else.

The only concrete fact about Italian train travel is that the platform is not a fact. It is a starting point and a placeholder that exists to give you somewhere to stand while the actual information is being decided by someone who is not in any particular hurry. Someone who, very likely, secretly only wants to give some people the information.

The signs will tell you one thing. The app will confirm the sign. And then, quietly, without ceremony or apology, the board will update. Maybe. New platform. New reality. Figure it out yourself intrepid travelers.

None of this registers as chaos to Italians by the way. They are drinking espresso and glancing at the board with the mild interest of someone checking whether it might rain. It is a system that apparently works in Italy.

The way I see it, at least Italian trains are honest. Amtrak will sell you a ticket, update an app, and still leave you stranded on a platform in Philadelphia for four hours.

More than anything else, Italian trains have taught me to pay attention to my surroundings. If my train is arriving in five minutes and my platform is empty, I am probably in the wrong place. It does not matter what the app says. The app does not care.

I pack lighter now too. I can’t pack everything into a carry-on and I have made a separate peace with that. I want to be that girl, but I can’t. Yet the enormous bag I used to wheel around has been replaced by a medium. One I can sort of lift, swing and hustle on my own so when your platform changes, you will want to be nimble. Note that I said when, not if.

A medium bag is nimble. Well, a carry-on is the ultimate freedom, but I can’t do that.

There are two kinds of travelers. Italian trains will find out which one you are.

The first kind stares at the app, stands on Platform 3 with absolute certainty and only sees that the crowd quietly dissipated while they were staring at the app. This is the kind that misses the train. The second kind has been burned enough times so they know to stop outsourcing their awareness to an app, sign or announcement. They watch the platform. They move when things feel wrong, even when the data says otherwise.

I used to be the first kind. Italian trains made me the second.

Flexibility isn’t an inconvenience. Flexibility is the point. This is what makes you a traveler.

Which kind of traveler are you? Tell me in the comments.

Unfortunately, while I was living in my dream world, my husband was living a life where he liked alcohol more than me. Apparently, he liked alcohol more than he liked living. I did not know about his addiction until he almost died. The end of his drinking life wasn’t fun for either of us. For me, I learned that for several years, I was living a different life than I thought I was.

He’s on his own journey now. And I’m on mine. Maybe our paths will cross again but for right now we each need to be on our separate journeys. I’m not sad. I’m in the processing stage.

I have three trips planned for the year, two of which were supposed to be with him.

Suddenly, I have no travel companion.

I should clarify: this is not an article about addiction. I’ve been involved with it for exactly one week. This is an article about solo travel, which I’ve also been involved with for exactly one week, but here we go.

So, my first solo trip in my life. Saint Martin. A trip my husband planned around restaurant-hopping on the French side, the food capital of the Caribbean (allegedly). He called this trip our “non-jet lag trip to France.”

For a week I went back and forth. Cancel it. Keep it. Cancel it.

I decided to keep it.

Alone, it’s just you, a blank afternoon and the unsettling freedom of going exactly where you want with no one to consult.

It turns out the best thing to do when your life implodes is to already have a trip booked. Planning this trip solo had been a preoccupying task that had helped me to avoid being in my head and obsessing about my husband’s hidden alcoholism.

Before I go, here is what is keeping me up at night. Intellectually.

1. What to do with my face.

Yes, my face. This trip was planned around restaurant hopping and I intend to keep my reservations. At a table for two, you have someone to look at. At a table for one, you are either staring at your food, staring at other people, or staring at your phone like you’re waiting for a very important text. None of these are good looks. I need a strategy. I think I will bring a book. Maybe if I bring something by Voltaire or Diderot and pretend to read it while I’m eating, I’ll look like the most interesting person in St. Martin. Maybe something a little less intellectual? I cannot believe I’m contemplating a prop book. Maybe if I bring a Danielle Steele novel, it will less obviously look like a prop book.

2. How to order wine alone.

This trip was all about the wine and a bottle is meant for two people. I’m on a wine journey, as I call it, and wine was the center of this trip. Apparently, for my husband wine was the center of this trip for reasons very different from mine. Ordering a bottle as a solo announces something. Well, it announces two things: either I’m an alcoholic who could drink 4.3 glasses of wine in one sitting or I planned a trip around being a pair and now I’m a pair of one. I haven’t decided if I care, but I’d like to decide before the sommelier stands over me. Sure, I can order a glass, but the whole point of the trip was the bottles. The good bottles. In the end, I will probably order the glass.

3. Whether to tell people why I’m alone.

Strangers will ask. I do not yet know if I’m going with “just needed a break,” or the truth, which is both more interesting and significantly more complicated. I was trying to think of a witty way to say it, but I think I will stick with the vague. I just needed a break. And then return to Voltaire….or Danielle. It will probably be Danielle.

4. How to eat slowly when there’s no conversation to fill the time.

Dinner in French-adjacent St. Martin will take two hours.  I am now the only entertainment at my table. I know that how to fill time alone is the point of solo travel just as these restaurants are the whole point of my trip. Enter Voltaire and Danielle stage right I guess. Fill the time with a prop book. Or eat at the bar, if there is one.

5. How to fill a day that has no one in it.

I have never had to narrate my own itinerary out loud to myself. With someone else, the day has a natural shape. You negotiate, you compromise, you end up somewhere neither of you planned. Alone, it’s just you, a blank afternoon and the unsettling freedom of going exactly where you want with no one to consult. I am not sure if this will be freeing or lonely or maybe a little of both at the same time.

6. What it feels like to arrive somewhere and have no one to turn to and say “look at that.”

Traveling with someone means you have a witness. Alone, you see something extraordinary and it just sits there reminding you are alone. In my case it is going to remind me that my husband chose a bottle over us.. Others try to remind me that it was the disease that chose and not him but, frankly, I see it differently. Every day he had a choice to pick up the bottle or tell me what was going on so I could get him help, but he didn’t want help. He chose the bottle every time. Now the only person I can save is myself.

I don’t yet know if being solo is going to be beautiful or just lonely. it will probably be both. Maybe that’s the point.

“Part 2: The Results” will arrive sometime after this trip.

Before my first trip to Switzerland, I traveled to Europe the way I think many Americans do: fly in, take a taxi to a city hotel, spend five or six nights eating, walking and feeling very cultured, and leave the same way I arrived. Paris, Rome, Madrid. I saw some great places this way.

I’ve had friends that did Europe on coach busses: 45 strangers, six stops in seven days, breakfast and dinner included. It sounded horrible, but also an unnecessary travel evil. I mean, how else would you see places other than the major cities without a tour?

I’ve done cruises where Europe is served to you in four-hour increments from the comfort of a floating buffet. It’s better than a coach bus with 45 other people, but just as non-immersive.

I never thought about the fourth option: loading luggage onto a train and navigating myself across a foreign country - or two or three. To be frank, the train option seemed like so much work, it never even crossed my mind. That was something other people did. Presumably with different luggage. Come to think of it, I didn’t even know anyone that hopped trains around Europe.

Switzerland did that. A concert in a city I never heard of, in a country I never planned to visit and somehow I came home a completely different traveler.

I’m being honest in my naivety here. Until I experienced the wonders of European train travel, I really thought I had seen Europe.

Enter Switzerland, stage right.

I stopped traveling internationally in 2010. My marriage began falling apart, and for a few years after that nuclear explosion, I was too busy reinventing myself and my career to think about travel. Starting over and paying my mortgage were the only things on my radar.

By 2019, I was ready to leave the country again. Paris, obviously. It was my third time there for me. I took my daughter. It was her first time.  We did the touristy things. Next up: London in April 2020.

We all know what happened in March of 2020. Covid grounded the world for two years, just when I was starting to get the travel itch and was stable enough to finally get out there.

A Concert in a City I’d Never Heard Of

In the summer of 2022, my favorite band announced a world tour, and I told my husband — then fiancé — that I wanted to see them in Europe. I had wanted to do this since I began listening to their music when I was a teenager. I was up at 4 a.m. to watch the tour announcement streaming from across the ocean. I pulled up the European dates and brought him the list. I was interested where he wanted to go.

He pointed to Bern.

Me: Bern? Where that?

Him: It’s the capital of Switzerland

Me: I thought the capital was Zürich. Also, Switzerland? The most expensive country on earth? With the Alps? The Alps are for wealthy people, not for me. How are we even going to see the Alps? Are there tour buses? And how are we going to get to Bern? Is there an airport?

Him: We’ll take the train.

Me: The train? Trains mean Amtrak. Amtrak means suffering.

Three days later I bought two concert tickets to a city I had never heard of, in a country I never imagined visiting, for a show that was eight months away. I spent approximately 7.5 of those eight months coming up with reasons to cancel.

Fine. Switzerland.

We landed in Zürich and my husband, who had been watching YouTube videos about Swiss rail, decided we should take the train from the airport to our hotel. He was really into the train idea. This was a mistake I will never make again. My rule, which I have since codified and will never again violate, is that when I arrive in a new European city, I take a taxi to my hotel. I am tired. I have a suitcase. There are cobblestones.

But once we cleared that particular disaster, everything else was extraordinary.

Getting back to Europe after four years away felt like something I didn’t have a word for. Calming and euphoric at the same time. Standing in Zürich, jet-lagged and slightly lost, I felt more like myself than I had in years.

Bern. The European capital that I never heard of. From Zürich, we navigated the Swiss train system to get there and discovered, almost immediately, that Swiss trains are nothing like Amtrak. The app worked. The trains ran on time. They were clean. By day two, we were train people. Just like that.

After the concert, we went to see what people actually come to Switzerland for: Grindelwald, Lauterbrunnen, Zermatt, Lucerne. We took trains, trams, and cable cars, not to mention funiculars and ferries. We found restaurants on the sides of mountains. I learned that Switzerland makes wine (apparently excellent wine) and simply keeps all of it for themselves, which is a decision I respect.

We moved hotels so many times that at a certain point I had to take a full day off from moving and just sit on a balcony and stare at mountains. I don’t regret this. This constant movement was the beginning of my decision that fast travel is not the way to go. Slow and steady wins the race every time.

The trains were the star of the show. Every connection, every transfer, every time we ended up on the right platform going the right direction, we were succeeding. Plus, the views! You haven’t seen the Alps until you’ve seen them from a train. Something shifted in me during that trip that I can only describe as quiet confidence. If I can get myself around Switzerland with a suitcase, a phone and zero German (or French, Italian or Romansh) I can get myself around anywhere. Well, about that suitcase. I learned very quickly to pack lighter.

That trip didn’t just introduce me to the Alps. It changed the entire architecture of how I travel. I stopped waiting for someone to hand me Europe in a package through a tour, a cruise, or private driver and started just going. Train tickets. New cities. Figuring it out. Me, the woman who couldn’t imagine loading luggage onto a train now books multi-city rail trips the way other people book Ubers. Switzerland did that. A concert in a city I’d never heard of, in a country I never planned to visit, and somehow, I came home a completely different traveler.

The Part Where I Became This Person

I’ve been back to Europe many times since. I take trains now. I move hotels. I’ve traveled with my stepdaughter and my son navigating on my own. They are willing to lift the suitcases. Later this year, I’m doing my first solo trip. Part land, part cruise. I can’t wait.

I also, somehow, have a friend in Zürich now. We met standing in a concert line. She sat with us at dinner. We kept in touch. It’s so fun to say “my friend in Zurich sent me this picture today.” I send her pictures of palm trees, and she sends me pictures of mountains. It’s all about balance. I’ve seen her in Miami since this trip, and I must get back to Switzerland soon.

Switzerland, of all places. I never saw it coming.

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Although I didn’t start traveling to eat, I quickly came to realize food is the travel you absorb. Not metaphorically. Literally. Food becomes part of you in a way that a photograph or a checked-off landmark list never will.

Food engages all five senses more than any monument can. Food is not just about the taste. It is about the sight, texture, smell, and even sound. Yes, even the sound - the hiss of a grill, the pop of a wine cork, the chatter spilling out of a crowded restaurant - it all becomes part of the experience.

So now, when I arrive in a new city, the first agenda item is a food tour.

Bologna, or: The Food Capital of the Universe

To properly explore food tourism, you must start in Bologna. On my last trip to Italy, I decided to add this off the beaten path location to my agenda. Emilia-Romagna is the gastronomic center of Italy and if Italy is the gastronomic center of the world, boom, I literally landed in the food capital of the world. To this day, I still have not been to Venice or Milan, but I am proud to say I’ve been to Bologna.

Into the Quadrilatero

As usual, I started with a food tour. Specifically, we started in the Quadrilatero. Located just off Piazza Maggiore, this famous market district is a medieval network of narrow, cobblestone streets and has been renowned for centuries as the city’s premier food and artisan hub. Prosciutto hung from the market ceilings. Wheels of parmesan cheese were everywhere. I saw glass cases filled with every shaped pasta waiting patiently to be purchased by the hungry.

For our first stop of the tour, our guide brought us into various shops and purchased whatever it is he believed we should be trying that night: Mortadella, the signature meat of Bologna, Prosciutto di Parma, the famous sweet, delicate cured ham from nearby Parma, Parmigiano Reggiano, the king of all cheese and Squacquerone, a soft, creamy cheese that I never tried before this tour.

After he collected his food items of choice, he brought us to a nearby trattoria that I first thought was a typical tourist spot until I went inside. It was filled with locals and I immediately recognized it as a trattoria I saw on Stanley Tucci’s Searching for Italy (Season 1, Episode 3). I think I may have even sat at the same table he did! I suspect this was all planned, but it felt authentic, nonetheless.

Once we sat, our guide opened up the various containers filled with the meats and cheeses and handed out cardboard forks and paper plates. We were literally having a picnic in a trattoria in the middle of Bologna. Why have I waited so long to come to this glorious city? He then purchased a bottle of house wine for the table with some glasses (real, not plastic, of course) and we all dug in. Six strangers who never met before chatting over wine, meats and cheeses on paper plates while our foodie guide told us about Bologna’s deep connection to food. I am not a food writer so I have no words to describe the sensations, but I have never tasted anything like I had that night.

The Pasta That Broke Me

Next, our guide took us to a local pasta restaurant for two things that Bologna is known for: tagliatelle al ragù and tortellini. What arrived was not what I expected. It was, frankly, transcendent.

You’ve never had tortellini until you’ve had tortellini in Bologna. It’s the signature pasta of the region. Tortellini in Bologna has survived centuries without the need to add foam, fancy smoke or micro greens. Here, tortellini are delicate golden parcels of hand-folded pasta, traditionally filled with a rich blend of pork, prosciutto, mortadella, and Parmigiano Reggiano.

Then there’s the ragù. The ragù was not red at all! Tagliatelle al ragù, real bolognese, bears little resemblance to the bright red spaghetti dishes many of us grew up calling “Bolognese” in America. Here, family recipes passed down for generations rely on a slow-cooked mixture of meat, wine, and patience, with a small amount of tomato, well maybe tomato, depending on the family recipe. Some families don’t use any at all.

Food Is the Only Souvenir You Actually Keep

Hear me out. Food is the best souvenir. After few bites, centuries of local tradition are suddenly traveling home in your mind forever.

I don’t understand food tourism skeptics — people who say things like “you can get good Italian food at home.” Or “I don’t trust food I cannot pronounce.” You cannot truly understand a place if you ignore the food because what you’re eating isn’t the food. You’re eating the specificity. The intention. The culture. The history.

How I Actually Plan Trips Now

I’ve started structuring trips around meals in a way I didn’t used to admit. Now I am proud of it.

I don’t mean I plan around restaurants, necessarily — though yes, sometimes restaurants. I mean markets, neighborhood bakeries, food trucks and festivals. It’s the place a local friend texts with no explanation except “go here, get the thing.” It’s the café across from the church where you have a glass of rosé at 11am because that’s what the table next to me is doing and I’m in France and this is apparently what happens.

These are not guilty pleasures. This is the point.

The best meal I had in Paris this year was jambon on on a baguette. I ate it while sitting on a bench in a park. What I was tasting was more than the sandwich. I was tasting the fact that in Paris, bread is the center of the universe and parks people’s living rooms. These standards are embedded in the culture so deeply that even the most ordinary boulangerie on a Tuesday morning produces something extraordinary. You can’t replicate that or import it to anywhere else. You have to go there.

Skip the Museum. Go to the Market.

Traveling to eat is the fastest way to understand a place.

If you want to know something real about a city, don’t go to the museum on the first day. Go to the market. Watch what people are buying and what they argue about with the vendor. Watch whether they bring their kids and whether they stop to taste something before buying it or whether they’re in a hurry.

These are not small observations. They are dispatches of the actual culture, which is not located in the guidebook.

My Only Metric

I’m not a food writer. I don’t have the vocabulary for it and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I can’t tell you about flavor profiles or technique or whether the chef trained under someone is impressive.

What I can tell you is whether something made me stop talking. Whether it required my full attention. Whether I thought about it later, back at the hotel, after two glasses of wine, as a kind of benchmark against which all future versions of this dish would now be measured.

That’s my metric. Does it become a reference point? Absolutely.

The tagliatelle in Bologna changed what I expect. So did a plate of sardines in Sicily. So did a croissant in Paris that made me understand, for the first time, what a croissant is actually supposed to be.

This is what travel is doing when it’s working. It’s recalibrating you. It’s showing you what’s possible.

Food just happens to be the most efficient delivery mechanism for that.

If this resonated, forward it to someone who eats like they mean it. And if you’re not subscribed yet — what are you waiting for?

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Quite simply, I was bored. I was no longer fulfilled by my 9-5, well, 9-7, life. Also, to be frank, I got tired of watching other people post their adventures.

So I started an Instagram account. And then a Substack account about a year later. And now I am what is apparently called a “microinfluencer.” Strange how that happened.

I still have my actual job, which I need. I am not abandoning a career with a steady paycheck for a life of aperitivo and cobblestones. I have bills to pay. Plus, I don’t want to abandon my career. I love it…most of the time. I just want to use my non-work time doing something I enjoy.

My story is not about reinvention. I’m not teaching yoga on a cliff in Santorini. I’m still sitting at the same desk I’ve always sat at, just with slightly more consideration with what I do during the hours that belong to me.

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The number I didn’t say out loud (meaning age)

It goes without saying that travel content skews young. Only recently did I mention my age in my posts. Not because I was lying about it. I just wasn’t volunteering it. I posted content and let people assume whatever they assumed about my age, if anyone even cared.  It felt like a reasonable omission. The content was the content. Why make it about age?

Except my content already was about my age without me even knowing it. Everything I was drawn to writing about — the pace, the comparison, the food and wine, and the wanting something different — was completely inseparable from where I am in life. You don’t notice the same things at 25 that you do at 50. Aging changes your relationship with time and urgency.

So I started saying it. My age, I mean. Right there in the hook and in the caption. I took a chance. Fifty. (Fifty-two, actually.) Was my idea going to flop? Was I going to get nasty comments from an angry mob of people calling me old, fat and ugly? Or were my posts going to resonate with people? I suspected that my idea would flop with some nasty comments sprinkled in. The algorithm pushes out the 25 year old who looks beautiful in every photo, not a 50 (ummm…52) year old who colors her hair monthly.

But something different happened: people responded like I’d said something meaningful. I was shocked. The comments were a flood of love by people looking for someone to notice our demographic. The responses weren’t even the generic “good for you.” They were “me too,” “I’m glad I found you,” and “finally someone hears me.”

My audience understood. They too could not relate to the 25 year old wannabe model, but they could relate to me. Average me. The messages were specific: we are not being heard, we are invisible yet we have the buying power. So why are we being ignored?

What Europe had to do with it

It turns out Europe has everything to do with my content. I’ve been traveling to Europe well before I started documenting it. But by documenting it, I started looking at Europe more than a place to see a pretty cathedral. I saw the way nobody in a park in Paris looks like they’re trying to optimize their afternoon. Or the way an Italian lunch is a two-hour commitment with phones away. I saw that in Europe, public spaces are used as if they belong to everyone. Frankly, I saw natural health and wellness.

It’s these comparison posts that fueled my reach and how initially women of like age and mindset found me. So Europe has everything to do with my content and why I’m here. I wouldn’t be here without Europe.

The comparison observations are thoughts about wanting a different pace while genuinely loving the life I have. It’s meant to be comical. Some people take it that way. Others get enraged. Rage fuels engagement. Engagement fuels online growth. The algorithm loves rage.

Even before I started documenting my trips, I kept coming home with the same low-grade restlessness. Not dissatisfaction, exactly. More like the feeling of having eaten well on vacation and then returning to my regular rotation of meals that cause my stomach to rise up against me. The melancholy of a weekend of sitting on my couch to recharge instead of recharging while lounging in a park with a book. The anger of eating lunch from a drive thru while traveling to my next court hearing instead of eating at a proper table.

Please don’t mistake my intentions. I love living in America. I’m lucky to live here and even luckier to live in Florida. I live where people vacation. I am not sure if I can say we are the greatest nation, but we have a lot of great attributes.

The funny thing is I’m not trying to get people angry. I’m simply trying to encourage my followers to realize that there are other ways of living, and none are wrong. They are simply different. And maybe if we take a little bit of that Italian lifestyle and add in the great things about the American lifestyle and then sprinkle in some Japanese wisdom, we will have an entirely new view of life.

The posts about my age and lack of modeling finesse are done to remind the world that marketing external beauty may get someone to buy a new shade of lipstick, but life is more than lipstick sales. What if we, as a society, encourage the newly divorced woman (or man) to get on the plane solo? What if they shed years of cobwebs and sameness while on that trip? Well then, we, as a society, just changed someone’s life. How great is that?

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The part nobody posts about

There is a part of content creation that nobody talks about, except, maybe people trying to sell fake courses on the subject. It’s the audience that may not materialize. You have a great idea for an article on Substack and you think you’re going to get a ton of views. Turns out, you get 5 views and four of them are from your family. Or,  you come up with what you think is a great reel for Instagram. You spend three hours creating it, and you get 200 views and one comment from a 19 year old in Nebraska.

This is the very slow, very undramatic reality of building something from nothing, which mostly looks like showing up consistently for longer than feels reasonable before anything happens. And “it” may never happen. It meaning being noticed by the algorithm. It’s funny how the word algorithm has turned into the wonderful and powerful Oz.

I didn’t know what I was making at first

My output has gotten better. Not because I’ve cracked some code, but because I’ve done enough of it to know who I’m trying to be and what I’m actually trying to say. I’m now more than “look at my pretty pictures from Europe.” The early content was fine. The current content is more specifically mine. It’s showing others that our generation is not invisible, with a little humor built in about cultural differences. I like how my specificity evolved. I guess you just have to make things until you know what you’re making.

What growing me actually means

Growing me as a brand means not quitting.

It means building a body of work that exists outside of my career, my résumé, and the professional identity that I’ve spent decades constructing. It means building another Dana that belongs to me in a way that a job title never can.

At 50 (well, 52) I’ve watched enough happen to know that nothing stays the same indefinitely. The question isn’t whether things will change. It’s whether you’ll have something of your own when they do.

I didn’t reinvent myself. I just finally made room for the rest of me. And then I filmed it. And wrote about it.

Thank you for noticing.

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There are definitely things I don’t love about cruising, such as bingo and organized dancing. Putting the negatives aside, because of a cruise, I found the most wonderful destination in Italy: Cinque Terre.

A few years ago we planned a Mediterranean cruise that involved a port called La Spezia in Italy. When we chose this itinerary, we had no idea where that was or what to do there. It seemed like an afterthought port: those ports where you get off the ship, walk around the town for a couple hours and get back on before lunch.

Knowing nothing about La Spezia, I went to my good friend Google to figure out what to do. Maybe now it would be AI, but a couple years ago, it was still Google. From there, I learned that you could take a train to a place called Cinque Terre. Having never heard of Cinque Terre, I then asked Google to show me some pictures.

I knew those photos! Cinque Terre was the magical place on the Italian Riviera with cliffs, colorful buildings and fishing boats. I never knew where it was and even if I could pinpoint it on a  map, I would never have any reason in my life to go there. Until now! Check mark in the column why I love cruising! (Although I’m still not sure if I can ever get over my dislike of bingo and organized dancing.) I was going to a bucket list destination that I never even knew was on my bucket list!

And that’s cruising. You think you’re docking in some no name port and the next thing you know, you are in a place you always dreamed about.

Cinque Terre is not elegant like the Amalfi Coast or Portofino. Cinque Terre is rugged - cliffs, colorful buildings and crashing waves. Almost immediately, you feel like the area wasn’t even meant to be inhabited.

Inaccessibility wasn’t a flaw - it was the whole point. Cinque Terre was originally settled by people who wanted to be hard to reach. The dramatic cliffs made the coastline a natural defense against pirates. As the threat of pirates faded, the inhabitants grew the economy based on fishing, olives, and grapes. Residents carved terraces into the steep hillsides for farming, building an entire economy around an almost impossible terrain. The isolation kept the villages self-sufficient and tightly knit for centuries, which is arguably why they still look the way they do today.

Cinque Terre means “five lands” - five separate villages strung along the Ligurian coast of northwestern Italy, each one clinging to the cliffs like gravity doesn’t even exist. The five towns are Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore. The whole stretch is a national park and there are hiking trails between the villages. I am sure the hiking trails are technically the correct way to experience Cinque Terre, but not me. I took the train.

The train is its own experience. It deposits you - I can’t even think of another word - into these tiny villages like you’re being dropped into another dimension. At 10 AM you are at a train station in La Spezia, gritty, industrial La Spezia. Then, you hop a train and travel through a tunnel and by 10:15am you are deposited in the first village, looking around, squinting and wondering how you landed on another planet in such a short amount of time. I felt like Dorothy when she landed in Oz. I was literally deposited into pictures I have seen my whole life, scene change from black-and-white to technicolor immediately.  There was no graceful arrival. We just appeared like our house was picked up by a tornado. I would not have been surprised if I saw Munchkins.

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The buildings are painted in colors that I cannot even describe because I don’t have names for them. I’m not sure if Pantone does either. Over saturated terracotta, ochre, gold and coral. These are colors that exist in Italian fishing villages and nowhere else on earth.

The buildings are stacked on top of each other up the cliffs in way that looks structurally improbable while being totally intentional. You cannot have suburban sprawl when you live on the side of a cliff so - build up.

Below the buildings is the Ligurian Sea. Some days, it crashes into the cliffs like it’s angry at the world. Other days it’s as still as glass. Either way, the light bounces off all of it and you can’t stop looking.

Then there are the boats. They’re colorful and, frankly, they don’t even look like they should float.

What got me, though, wasn’t only the scenery. It was the grandmothers. Yes, the grandmothers. Although there are tourists everywhere, this is more than a tourist destination. Locals are working and existing alongside the tourists. Look up at a building at any given time and you will see a grandmother up above, looking at the scene below while her laundry is hanging from the window, sheets drying in the ocean breeze.  She will be smiling and waving - almost wanting to get her picture taken because she knows that she is the model in the scene. It reminded me that people actually live here, inside this postcard, going about their Thursday while the rest of us stand below with our phones out trying to capture something we already know we won’t be able to explain.

The food in Cinque Terre is quite different than the rest of Italy. In Italy, food is regional. I don’t know how else to describe it. For example, never order Carbonara in Bologna. Cinque Terre is its own food oasis. Pesto is everywhere. The basil grown on the Ligurian coast in this particular sea air and light, is famously different from basil grown anywhere else. Seafood is the other constant - shrimp, mussels, calamari - eaten standing up out of a paper cone, which is the correct way to eat anything in a place like this. The wine is made from various local grapes which produce crisp and slightly mineral whites that taste like the land they come from. This is the highest compliment you can give any wine.

That’s Cinque Terre. Five lands, five villages, one coastline that looks like it was designed by someone who had never heard the word restraint: rugged, real, chaotic, and completely impossible to overstate.

Go, especially if you hadn’t planned to. And take the train. The hikers will judge you, but they will also be exhausted, so consider the source.

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My father was an oenophile.

He wasn’t a professional sommelier, master of wine, or anything of the sort, but he knew as much as these people. In fact, he knew as much about fermented grapes as sommeliers in some of the finest restaurants.

His brain was an encyclopedia of wine. Above all, he loved Burgundy — the region, the wine and the mythology of it all. He was why I came to love Pinot Noir. Not California, he would tell me. Oregon. Why Oregon, I would ask? Trust me. So Pinot Noir became my grape. Oregon, of course. He said so.

For most of my adult life, my approach to wine was fairly simple: fermented grape equals good. Red? Sure. White? Maybe. Burgundy? Isn’t that a color? Bourgogne? Now I’m lost.

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But when you are around someone who talks about grapes the way other people talk about religion, something starts to absorb. So after my dad died too young from an aggressive form of dementia, I realized that I wanted to know more about wine. I needed to know why he was driven to wine - not cigars, not whiskey, not golf. It was wine.

Thus, I began my self proclaimed wine journey. Wine tastings at local wine shops. WSET lessons. Picking the brains of local shopkeepers. Talking to sommeliers at restaurants. And, because I am always off to somewhere, wine travel.

My dad had travel anxiety — the kind that kept him close to home his whole life while his mind traveled freely across wine maps, vintage charts and appellations he would never visit (by choice). Until I began my own wine journey, I could not understand how he knew, actually knew, a wine when he never visited the region. Not just the nose or taste, but the elevations, the slopes, the terroir. How did he know that the grapes in that particular bottle were grown on the southeast slope of the hill if he never saw the southeast slope of the hill?

My first wine travel experience was a single day in Tuscany during a visit to Florence. That trip was a way for me to dip my toe into this new world without a lot of investment, in case I didn’t like it. Well, I did. So I recently did a second day trip to Tuscany, but this time, since my wine knowledge had expanded, I was more targeted with my tour choice.

The holy grail of wine for my dad was Burgundy. Before my dad got sick, he promised me once he retired, he would go to Burgundy. Whether he would have gotten on that plane to France, I will never know since dementia saddled him soon after social security started rolling in. We work our whole lives for the golden years, but for some, they are anything but golden.

I wasn’t sure if I was fully ready for several days in Burgundy so I decided, quite impulsively, to go as a day trip while I was recently in Paris. I dragged my 19 year old step daughter along with me. (As an aside, after my day in Burgundy, I am definitely ready for several days in Burgundy.)

This trip involved some effort. First, we had to pull ourselves away from beautiful Paris for a day. Second, we had to take an hour and 45 minute TGV train from Paris to Dijon just to meet up with the tour group.

In the weeks leading up to the trip, I decided to really dive into the world of Burgundy. Well, so much as someone can dive into an appellation with almost a thousand years of history. Burgundy is intellectual. It’s historical. It’s more than fermented grape equals good.

In Burgundy, unlike other wine regions, the grape is almost beside the point because it’s almost always Pinot Noir for red and Chardonnay for white. The variable is the “where,” and in Burgundy, the where changes everything. A wine from one side of a road tastes different from a wine from grapes grown on the other side. The same producer, the same vintage, the same grape — and they’re telling completely different stories.

We’re talking about a region that has spent centuries mapping its vineyards. Where individual plots — called crus — are ranked from regional wines all the way up to the holy grail of Burgundy, Grand Cru, where bottles of wine cost as much as someone’s mortgage payment.  Beginning almost 1,000 years ago, Cistercian monks (yes, monks) observed that specific plots produced different wine qualities - so they began mapping the regions. They built walls around the best parcels, thereby creating vineyard enclosures, called clos. They figured out, by hand, over generations, that “this” row of vines made something completely different from “that” row of vines.

And once you set foot in Burgundy, if you like Pinot Noir, your interest may become obsession. That’s what happen to me. Now, I need to absorb all the knowledge.

Terroir means something here. Terroir, loosely, means the way of the land, or a sense of place. It’s more than the dirt. There is no English equivalent. It is how the soil, the slope, the microclimate and that specific patch of earth can cause a wine to taste completely different from a wine made from grapes grown down the road. In essence, terroir imprints itself on the wine and Burgundy takes terroir more seriously than anywhere else.  This is the kind of information my dad had memorized.

When visiting Burgundy you will also learn how Napoleonic inheritance laws affect who owns what and how one family came to own only one row of vines.  You also learn the Burgundy classification system and that in Burgundy Grand Cru are the best wines in the world, but in Bordeaux, Premier Cru is the top tier and Grand Cru is number two. Finally, you learn that climat is different from clos: a clos is a walled vineyard and a climat is a precisely delimited plot that is not necessarily walled. And, for me, I learned - finally learned - how my dad knew all this without going there - because Burgundy is quite simply the intersection of geography, history and taste.

I’m a beginner, like a complete beginner, who showed up in one of the world’s most intellectually demanding wine regions because my dad loved it.

I’m not going to pretend I can tell you the difference between a Gevrey-Chambertin and a Chambolle-Musigny because I cannot. I probably never will. I’m not going to act like I’ve cracked the Burgundy code because Burgundy is not something you crack. It’s something you spend a lifetime with. It’s the wine world’s most patient teacher — and also its most demanding one. It will not dumb itself down for you. It will not meet you where you are. You have to come to it, bring your curiosity, and be willing to feel small.

I felt small the entire tour. I also felt close to my dad in a way I didn’t expect. I encourage you to do the same.

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Dana Kaplan writes Off to Somewhere. She covers travel, food, wine, and the general chaos of figuring out how to live. She is a work in progress on all fronts.

I was sitting at a café in Rome. It was 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. I had nowhere to be. The waiter had brought me a glass of wine I did not ask for — a small pour, just because — and then disappeared without any discernible plan to return. The table next to me had been occupied by the same couple for what appeared to be several hours. Nobody was looking at their phone. Nobody was anxious. Nobody had asked for the check.

I, meanwhile, had already Googled the next café. I had a list. I had a schedule. I was, in the truest sense of the word, missing it.

This is the story of how Americans travel — and why Europe keeps making us look slightly unhinged by comparison.

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We Treat Vacation Like a Productivity Sprint

The American approach to travel is, at its core, an optimization problem. We have a finite number of days, a finite budget, and an infinite number of things that Condé Nast has told us we must see before we die. So we build itineraries. We color-code them. We set alarms.

I once met a woman in Florence who had allocated forty-five minutes to the Uffizi Gallery. The Uffizi — which contains Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Caravaggio’s Medusa, and roughly 6,000 years of Western civilization — was a forty-five-minute stop between lunch and a cooking class.

She was not a bad person. She was American. We are trained from birth to equate busyness with success, and we bring that energy — anxious, efficient, forward-leaning — directly into our leisure time.

The result is that we return from two weeks in Italy exhausted, slightly sick, and unable to remember if we liked it.

We Confuse Visiting a Place With Experiencing It

There’s a specific kind of tourist behavior that I’ve started calling “proof of presence.” You go somewhere, you photograph it, you check it off. You were there. The algorithm knows. You can move on.

This is not the same as being somewhere.

Being somewhere looks like: eating lunch in the same plaza two days in a row because you liked it. Taking a wrong turn and ending up at a bar where everyone seems to know each other. Sitting with your coffee until it gets cold, then ordering another one, not because you need the caffeine but because you’re not done yet.

Europeans — and I will paint with a broad brush here because I have footage — seem to understand instinctively that a place is not a checklist item. They go back to the same restaurant. They have a regular café. They return to cities they’ve already seen because they liked how the city felt, not because there were remaining attractions to complete.

Americans discover a destination. Europeans inhabit one.

We Are Afraid of Doing Nothing

Here is a thing that is deeply uncomfortable for the American traveler: an unscheduled afternoon.

It feels like failure. It feels like waste. It feels like you flew all the way to Barcelona and now you’re just… sitting somewhere. Doing nothing. Not even meditating about it.

In most of Europe, an unscheduled afternoon is called a Tuesday. It’s not a problem to solve. It’s the point.

The Spanish siesta — frequently mocked by Americans who cannot fathom closing a business in the middle of the day for rest — is not a logistical inconvenience. It is a philosophy. Rest is not what you earn after you’ve been productive enough. Rest is part of the rhythm. It’s built into the infrastructure of the day.

We don’t have that. We have “hustle culture” and the ambient guilt of the to-do list and the vague sense that if you’re not optimizing, you’re falling behind. We take this on vacation with us. We pack it right between the travel adapter and the overpriced neck pillow.

We Don’t Eat Right

I don’t mean nutritionally. I mean structurally.

In America, eating is often something that happens while you’re doing something else. You eat at your desk. You eat while driving. You eat a sad airport sandwich over a trash can because you’re between gates and this is your life now.

In Europe — particularly in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal — a meal is the activity. It’s not fuel before the museum. It’s the thing. You sit. You order slowly. You do not ask for substitutions in a way that suggests you have read the menu as a starting point for negotiation. You finish one course before thinking about the next. You linger.

The concept of the “quick lunch” is viewed in much of Europe roughly the way we view someone eating in the car — technically possible, but a little sad.

I have eaten three-hour lunches that cost less than an American fast-food combo meal. I have had dinners where the waiter brought a complimentary digestif because we had stayed long enough to suggest we were enjoying ourselves, and this pleased him. I have had cheese courses arrive with no preceding discussion because the restaurant simply believed I should have one.

This is not a luxury thing. This is a values thing.

We arrive with pre-loaded opinions developed by You Tube

Travel planning has become its own form of content consumption, which means we arrive at a destination already knowing what we’re supposed to think about it.

We’ve watched the YouTube videos. We’ve read the Reddit threads. We know which queues to skip and which neighborhoods are “up and coming” and which restaurants are worth the wait and which are tourist traps (the distinction often being, simply, that one has been discovered and the other hasn’t yet).

We arrive pre-loaded with opinions that belong to strangers.

What this does, in practice, is create a very specific kind of disappointment. The thing that was supposed to be transcendent is merely nice. The place that was supposed to be “undiscovered” is full of people who also watched the same YouTube video. The restaurant with the three-hour line served good food, but not three-hour-line food.

We have pre-consumed the experience. We have nothing left to discover because we have already been told what to find.

The alternative — and I say this as someone who has over-researched entire countries — is to show up with less. A neighborhood instead of an itinerary. A rough direction instead of a schedule. Some capacity for things to be different from what you imagined.

This requires a tolerance for uncertainty that is, frankly, not our national strong suit.

We Think Slower Travel is a Privilege

The rebuttal I get most often, when I talk about this, is: “Sure, Dana. But some of us have jobs.”

I understand. I do. The American vacation structure is not set up for slow travel. Two weeks is a generous allotment in a system where paid time off is considered a perk rather than a baseline expectation. (Europe has entered the chat, looked at our vacation policies, and politely not said anything, because they were raised with manners.)

But here’s the thing: you don’t need six weeks in France to travel differently. You need a different orientation.

It’s not about duration. It’s about what you’re trying to get from the experience.

If you go to Rome for five days and spend those five days eating at the same trattoria twice, walking without a destination for an afternoon, having a long conversation with a stranger over wine you did not plan to drink — you will leave knowing something true about Rome. You will also, probably, leave wanting to go back.

If you go to Rome for five days and see seventeen things and take four hundred photos and eat at the restaurant that was listed in the article titled “The Only 10 Restaurants You Need in Rome” — you will leave having completed Rome.

These are different outcomes. Only one of them is actually travel.

Europe has a relationship with enjoyment Americans don’t have

Europe is not inherently more civilized. It has its own particular chaos — bureaucracy that would break an American’s spirit, customer service that operates on its own mysterious timeline, trains that are either exactly on time or four hours late with no apparent middle ground.

But Europe has, in most places I’ve spent time, a relationship with enjoyment that we don’t have. A belief that pleasure is not something you fit in around the important stuff — it is the important stuff. That a good meal, a slow walk, a long conversation, an afternoon with nowhere to be are not treats for when you’ve been productive enough. They’re how you live.

We know this, on some level. It’s why we fantasize about moving to Portugal. It’s why we come home from Italy wishing we could stay. It’s why the phrase “European lifestyle” exists as a shorthand for something we want but can’t quite name.

What we want is permission.

Permission to stop optimizing. Permission to sit somewhere and not immediately be somewhere else. Permission to eat slowly and drink the wine and not feel like we should be doing something more.

Europe gives itself that permission reflexively. Americans have to consciously, deliberately choose it — and then fight against every instinct telling us we’re doing vacation wrong.

Familiarity is underrated

You came for observations. Here’s what I’ve actually changed in how I travel, after many years of doing it the American way and then slowly, embarrassingly, learning to do it differently:

Book fewer things. Leave days with no plans. Real no-plans days, not “free time to explore” days that secretly have a list. Empty days where something can happen or nothing can, and both are fine.

Eat where the locals eat, but also eat slowly wherever you eat. The quality of the meal is partly the food, partly how long you stay.

Walk without a destination at least once per trip. You will find something. It won’t be on any list. It might be the thing you remember most.

Go back to places you’ve already been. Familiarity is underrated. Returning somewhere means you have preferences about it, which means it’s become real to you.

Leave the itinerary at the hotel for one full day. One day. See what happens. The anxiety will peak around hour two and then, if you let it, dissolve into something that feels unexpectedly like vacation.

The waiter in Rome eventually came back, by the way. He refilled my wine without asking. He did not ask if everything was okay. He did not tell me about the specials or bring the check or perform any of the subtle hospitality theater that signals, in America, that your time at this table is appreciated but finite.

He just poured the wine and left.

I sat there for another hour. I did not have anywhere to be. I had made no plans for the afternoon. I was, for possibly the first time in my adult life, simply somewhere.

It was, I think, the best I’ve ever traveled.

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Dana Kaplan writes Off to Somewhere — a Substack about travel, food, wine, and the occasional unsolicited observation about how we’re all living. If this resonated, subscribe below. New posts go out weekly.

Or…a lawyer’s completely unscientific, deeply personal theory about food in America

I am not a doctor, a nutritionist, a scientist, or anyone from whom you should take medical advice. I am a 52-year-old lawyer who has been managing type 2 diabetes for about half her life and is currently on one of those newish GLP-1 medications that everyone is talking about. It got me off insulin, which is genuinely miraculous, and I am grateful for it every single day.

The medicine also makes me sick. My stomach is in a constant state of low-grade protest approximately 25 hours a day. And I keep thinking “this is just the medication…this the price of admission to a life without insulin.” And I truly believe it is and I’m willing to pay it. Despite this, I firmly believe the food in America is as much a cause of my type 2 diabetes as genetics. I no longer eat sweets and have limited my white flour intake to almost nothing. My BMI is finally within normal range, thanks to the GLP-1. Yet my digestive and endocrine systems still hate me.

After COVID, I starting traveling to Europe more and I now travel there about three times a year. Every single time I am there, within 24 hours, something strange happens. My blood sugar stabilizes. My stomach quiets down. I feel, against all odds, like a person who has functioning digestive and endocrine systems.

I come home and it starts again.

At first I dismissed it as the placebo effect of vacation. Less stress, more walking, wine with dinner instead of anxiety, served with a side of mashed potatoes.

But it kept happening. Every trip. My blood sugar was better. My stomach liked me again. So I started paying attention.

In Europe, I eat full meals — real ones, not sad little portion-controlled ones — and my numbers are fine. My stomach behaves. I sleep better. I feel like a normal human who can eat real food.

I come home to Florida and eat a salad and feel terrible. My blood sugar is unmanageable and my stomach is doing somersaults.

Through my non-scientific research, I decided that the phenomenon I experience must be the way food is produced in this country. The additives, the seed oils, the pesticide residue levels that are legal here and banned elsewhere, the ultra-processing, the stuff that’s approved by the FDA and not approved anywhere in the European Union. I’m not saying the EU is perfect. I’m saying something is clearly different, and my body — my very unscientific, middle-aged, chronically ill body — notices.

The bread in Europe doesn’t bloat me. The pasta doesn’t spike me.

So I began researching why. Here is what I learned. In Europe the wheat varieties have lower gluten levels that are easier to digest.  Additives, specifically glyphosate, but also others, used in the U.S. during the wheat’s life cycle, harvest, storage, or baking are banned in Europe. In other words, my body isn’t fighting the food in Europe the way it is in the U.S.

I have not done a clinical study. I have a sample size of one. I am aware that my analysis is not how science works.

Turns out, I’m not the only one who has noticed. Food scientists have been quietly pointing out for years that the U.S. allows additives in its food supply that are outright banned in the EU — things linked to gut inflammation, blood sugar disruption, and worse. The regulatory philosophy, apparently, is “innocent until proven guilty.” Europe is closer to “let’s not find out the hard way.”

In my non scientific research I have also learned that Europeans generally have lower obesity rates and fewer metabolic diseases than Americans, and they’re not doing anything dramatic to achieve it. Unlike us Americans, health is not achieved by elimination diets or $80 supplements shaped like gummy bears. The formal is simple - Europeans eat actual food, at actual mealtimes and at an actual table. Blood sugar management isn’t a strategy. It’s just Tuesday. Between proper food habits, meal timing, and better ingredients with less additives and more natural ingredients, Europeans know how to manage blood glucose without classes, textbooks and elimination.

Despite my silly little research, it’s not my research that convinced me. What convinced me is the fact that I feel better on a different continent. Repeatedly, consistently and without even trying.

I don’t have a solution. I can’t move to Europe. I can look at ingredients on labels to try to avoid some of the more problematic additives, but that doesn’t save me when I go to a restaurant. That also doesn’t save me when there are hidden additives pre-manufacture, such as bST/rBGH, which is injected into dairy cows to increase production. It is considered safe for humans by the FDA. A lot of research says it is not.

Every time I board a flight back to the U.S. from Europe, there’s a small, not so irrational part of me that wonders if the thing making me sick isn’t my pancreas, my medication, or my genetics.  It’s our food. And that’s more unsettling than any diagnosis I’ve ever received.

Let me know in the comments if you have had a similar experience.