“Why don’t you try cutting out coffee?” my doctor suggested.

I was sitting across from her in an examination room, my legs dangling from the table, my hands bracing me on either side. This was the third time in six months I’d been in this very room, at this very table, listening to the white paper beneath my hands crinkle as I swung my legs. We had been trying to lower my blood pressure naturally, and this was the last chance she was giving me before we had to start discussing medications.

The magnesium hadn’t moved the needle. Nor had the hibiscus tea. I couldn’t stick to the meditation practice regularly enough, and the breathing techniques just gave me more anxiety.

The laugh got stuck in my throat, “Is there really no other option?”

She smiled, “I know it sounds extreme to people who have been drinking coffee their whole lives, but you’ll get used to it; you just have to find something to replace the ritual with.”

So I bought a bag of decaf coffee.

Slowly I went from 3/4 caffeine to 1/2 caffeine, to 3/4 decaf, and eventually, after a week of brain fog and going to bed before 9 pm, I was fully off the caffeine.

———

I have been play acting as a coffee drinker since I was 16 years old and my mom would drop me off at the mall to meet my friends and I would go to Starbucks to use the $5 that she gave me (could it really be that you could buy a drink from Starbucks with tax for $5 in the early 2000s?).

A grande mocha Frappuccino with extra whipped cream. It’s essentially a milkshake, chocolate syrup running down the inside of the cup, coffee syrup and milk blended together with ice and topped with whipped cream and yet more chocolate syrup. It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I learned there is no actual coffee in a Frappuccino.

Coffee has always been around me. My parents would make a 10-cup pot each morning, the sound of the percolator bubbling as I came into the kitchen to have breakfast before school.

When I was a senior in high school, I took a class that started before regular school hours. I was up at 6am and driving myself to class by 6:30. My mom would have the timer set for the coffee pot and by the time I came downstairs to grab a drinkable yogurt, the pot was full. I started pouring one for myself around this time. Half a thermos of coffee, the other half of Coffee Mate Creamer. Equal parts caffeine and sugar.

In college, there was a Dunkin Donuts on campus. I would head there every day before class, order a large iced coffee with milk and drink the entire thing before I even sat down in the lecture hall. Even in the middle of a Massachusetts winter, I still ordered it iced. Likely because it hid the actual taste of the coffee.

As I got older, as I drank more coffee, I started to like the taste. It was probably the year I lived in Sydney, Australia, that converted me into a full-fledged coffee snob. Coffee is a religion, and the brand of coffee you choose, your church. Mine was Campos. I wouldn’t go to any cafe that didn’t have the sage green Campos umbrellas above the tables outside.

Since then I’ve been to coffee farms in Indonesia, Costa Rica, Mexico, and when I returned to the US a few years ago after over a decade abroad, I moved to one of the country’s coffee capitals, Seattle.

Coffee was part of my identity. I was a coffee drinker, a coffee lover, a coffee addict. I believed I couldn’t function without it. I was one of those people who shared memes about not talking to me before I’d had my first cup of the day. It was a joke I was proud to make.

Liking coffee, not just for the caffeine, but for the taste, being able to drink it black, that bitter smell making my mouth water, sort of felt like an accomplishment.

So when I gave it up earlier this year, I did so with the hope that it wouldn’t work. My mom has high blood pressure, my brother has high blood pressure, my uncle, my grandfather had it.

“Sometimes it’s just genetic,” my doctor had said to me during this final discussion as she tried to prepare me for what we both thought was the inevitable conversation about blood pressure medication.

A week after I gave up caffeine, I checked my blood pressure on my at-home monitor.

After inflating and slowly deflating, the monitor read 116/74.

I had never seen those numbers before. They had never been so low.

I checked again in case I had done it wrong the first time. The exact numbers popped up again.

The next day, it read 116/72. The day after that 115/72. For the rest of the week, it hovered around there.

I was heartbroken.

I would never again drink coffee in the same way.

After two weeks, I still craved it. I still took the tiniest sip of Luke’s coffee as I brought it over to the table for him.

“It’s so unfair,” I said to him one morning when he decided to check his own blood pressure after his second cup of fully caffeinated coffee.

The monitor flashed 115/72.

——

“You should have a funeral for it,” my doctor told me on our fourth and final meeting of the year. After she took my blood pressure for herself and confirmed that, even with the usual white coat syndrome, my blood pressure was still 118/76.

I did no such thing.

But more time has passed. It’s been over four months since I last had a real cup of coffee. I don’t miss it anymore. I don’t need to smell or slurp Luke’s to feel like I’m really living.

I feel better than I have in years. My energy is sustained across the entire day. I don’t have any afternoon dips when the caffeine used to wear off. I don’t wake up with my brain telling me I need coffee just to be able to function.

I still make a cup of decaf every morning. I still enjoy the ritual and the creamy, bitter taste. But I don’t crave it. I could easily skip it and get on with my day.

And sometimes that makes me sad.

But mostly I’m proud of the accomplishment. Proud that I was able to let something go and remember that my identity continues to not be tied to a single addiction or personality trait; it doesn’t depend on what country I live in or what my job is. I get to decide, and as it turns out, I can change it whenever I want.

How to Support This Substack

Simply subscribing and giving this a like or leaving a comment about what you enjoyed about this week’s essay makes a huge difference! If you are a regular Substack user, sharing the post is also a huge help.

If you would like to support this newsletter further, you can check out my blog for more stories and helpful travel guides from around the world.

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Until next time,

Laura

I was feeding a tiny piece of my octopus to the curious cat beneath the table, scratching her under the chin as she purred.

I looked up to see who he was talking about and realized we were the only two occupied tables at the restaurant. He was talking about me.

He was sitting with his wife and daughter. They had just ordered their meals and were sipping beers, their sunburned skin glistening with aftersun gel.

I had arrived in Hydra, this little Greek island, the day before, after spending a few days at a conference on the mainland.

I was a speaker at the conference, which is always exciting, but also exhausting. It’s full days of networking, speaking to strangers, selling yourself to tourism boards, then the adrenaline crash of finally giving the talk that you’ve spent weeks preparing for.

I had booked a two-day trip to Hydra to decompress afterward, to chill out on this quiet, car-free island before heading back home.

That morning, I was up bright and early to hike to the highest point of the island, Mount Eros. You pass a peaceful grey brick monastery along the way. Then after a little rock scrambling, you get to this 360-degree viewpoint, the bright blue Aegean Sea on every side. I had the entire mountain top to myself.

I came back down to town and ravenously devoured an enormous plate of juicy lamb koftas with yogurt and pita bread over a heaped pile of French fries.

I headed back to my hotel to change into a bathing suit and went straight to the nearest beach to jump into the water. I sat reading on a lounge chair all afternoon, watching the fishing boats go past, and slipping back into the water whenever it got too hot.

As the sun was starting to go down, I went back to my hotel room to call Luke and catch him up on how my day had been.

“Enjoy your last evening,” he’d said before I hung up, “it’s well deserved.”

I took a cool shower, changed into my favorite white and blue striped dress, and headed down the road to dinner.

I had earmarked this place for my final night as a little celebration. They served up a local octopus dish that is a specialty of the island. I ordered a glass of ouzo when I sat down and waited for my octopus to be cooked.

It was perhaps a little late for the tourist crowd at this point, though restaurants around Greece are open late. It’s one of my favorite things about visiting, not just the food, but the food culture. Big shared meals that take hours. As long as the restaurant is open, the kitchen is open.

When Luke and I first came to Greece, we often found ourselves still picking over the menu after 10 pm, a few too many glasses of Mythos perhaps the culprits, and no one would even bat an eyelid.

Just as my octopus arrived, so too did the sunburned family. I was busy dipping my bread into the red wine sauce, wondering if the waitress would scold me for giving a little scrap to the cat, wondering if it was ok to give a cat a piece of wine-soaked octopus in the first place. I cut a small piece and wiped it on my napkin before reaching under the table when I heard it.

“Being alone on vacation, how sad.”

I smiled to myself. I looked over and made eye contact with the man, and he blushed, realizing that I must have heard.

I sat back with my new cat friend at my feet and took a sip of my ouzo.

How very sad indeed.

How to Support This Substack

Simply subscribing and giving this a like or leaving a comment about what you enjoyed about this week’s essay makes a huge difference! If you are a regular Substack user, sharing the post is also a huge help.

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Until next time,

Laura

Perhaps on my flight, I tried and failed yet again to complete The Covenant of Water (I swear I really love this book, but it is never-ending, and I keep running out of time on Libby and then have to wait for my turn to read it all over again!).

But I have more than made up for it in the last two months. The first thing I did when I got my Florida driver’s license was go straight to the local library and sign up for a library card, and I have put approximately 30 books on hold since.

The Seattle library system is a book lover’s paradise. They have every new release, often hundreds of copies. But in a city of nearly a million people, there are also a lot of readers. So I often waited months for the most popular reads.

In comparison, I barely wait a week to get popular books out of the library in my small Florida city (I almost called it a town because it feels more like a town than a city).

The only problem is that they are slow to purchase new books. Only one of the books on the recently announced Booker Prize longlist is available in the entire library network.

Somehow, I’ll manage.

Over the last two months, I’ve read eight books, and I liked almost all of them.

1. Heart the Lover by Lily King

What a stunning star-crossed-lovers story. I laughed, I cried, I felt the heartache. Any story of long-distance love always brings me back to my own experience of it, and even after all of these years, that ache still feels so familiar.

It’s a short, quick read, but somehow King manages to make you fall for these characters, to learn about them so deeply with so few words. What an art.

Writers and Lovers is already on the bookshelf behind my desk waiting to be read.

2. The Sons of El Rey by Alex Espinoza

The tale of fathers and sons and grandsons, this multi-generational novel follows the famous lucha libre fighter, El Rey de Coyote (Ernesto Vega) from a small town in Mexico to the big lights of Mexico City all the way to Los Angeles.

Each chapter is told from someone else’s perspective, mostly Ernesto Vega, his son Freddy Vega, and his grandson Julian. But intermittently we hear from Ernesto’s wife and El Rey de Coyote himself.

If you read this for the fun of it, then it’s mostly enjoyable. But I found the jumping back and forth timeline a little bit confusing. The ending was not really that much of a surprise, and I found the characters lacking in depth, and I can’t forgive his mixed-up geography of Mexico City - the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe is not in the zocalo; it’s not anywhere near the zocalo! Who edited this book?

3. Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors

When four sisters become three, the ones left behind have to figure out how to keep living. This is a story of family, the good and the bad of it all, sibling relationships, and surviving through crippling grief.

These characters are so perfectly flawed, so believable in their internal struggles. I thought the dialogue was fantastic - real conversations between siblings and the ridiculous things we say to each other.

I loved this book despite how often I was crying while reading it. I would definitely pick up another Mellors book; her writing is wonderful, and her characters had me from page one.

4. A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar

I didn’t know much about this book before I picked it up, but it was available in the “new release” section at the library, so I thought I would check it out.

I was unprepared for how tragic this would be from start to finish. A woman in the not-so-distant future is living in India with her daughter and her father. Her husband has moved to the United States to set up a life for them, and in a week’s time, they will be joining him now that they have their visas.

As the book unfolds, we learn that climate change has ravaged the city. Crops are no longer growing, food is scarce, and temperatures make it impossible to be outside during the day. People are desperate.

I don’t want to give too much away, but this book had me hooked, so thankfully it was short because I read it in about two days and then just sat in shock at that ending.

5. Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

One of my favorite authors, Reid knows how to write strong female characters and books that are just so perfectly readable. I had to check a few times that Daisy Jones and the Six were not, in fact, a real band because the interview style of this book kept making me think they must be real!

I love how she always brings in a random character from one of her other books, a little nod to her loyal readers. But most of all, I just love her female lead characters, and Daisy Jones was such a likeably imperfect young woman.

6. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

This 600+ page tome was one of the most beautifully written books that I’ve read in a while.

Could it have been a hundred or so pages shorter? Perhaps, but I forgive Desai because we were living amongst her characters for long enough that I felt I knew them. I didn’t mind spending a little more time with them.

A young Indian woman finishing college in Vermont falls in love with a much older painter. He woos her with luxurious experiences, love-bombs her with affection, and then ultimately controls her so much that she loses herself.

In the meantime, her family back in India is trying to arrange a marriage for her with a friend’s grandson, around her age, who is living in New York with an American girlfriend that his family doesn’t know anything about.

For the next 500 pages, they try and fail to come together in different parts of the world. Sonia moves back to India when her visa in the United States ends. Her relationship with her parents and their relationship with each other becomes a central part of the book for a while, as does Sunny’s relationship with his widowed mother.

Sometimes I wasn’t rooting for them. I wanted better for Sonia, wanted Sunny to just stay away and for her to figure out her life on her own terms, but other times I was hoping it would work out for them. It was an emotional rollercoaster that I wish I could ride again for the first time.

7. My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh

I have mixed feelings about this book. There were parts of it that I loved and parts of it that made me roll my eyes. But I was still rooting for the main character and often understood a lot of her internal battles despite having a very different life in my early 20s.

Overall, the writing was fantastic, and the societal observations about how we treat people, especially young women, based on how they look were so well done.

8. The Director by Daniel Kehlmann

I went back and forth between loving and only sort of liking this book while I was reading it. I loved how it ended, and so my lasting impression is that this was well worth the read.

Based on a real person, G.W. Pabst was a very successful film director and screenwriter. This book is a work of fiction and supposes what his life may have been like during World War II when he went back to German-occupied Austria to see his ailing mother and was then stuck in the country until the war ended.

The writing is chaotic, like the minds of the people that they are narrating. This meant that I sometimes had to reread a few paragraphs to understand what was going on fully, but the further into the book I got, the more I became used to the writing style and actually came to enjoy it.

It’s some of the best historical fiction that I’ve read in a long time.

What have you been reading this summer?

How to Support This Substack

Simply subscribing and giving this a like or leaving a comment about what you enjoyed about this week’s essay makes a huge difference! If you are a regular Substack user, sharing the post is also a huge help.

If you would like to support this newsletter further, you can check out my blog for more stories and helpful travel guides from around the world.

If you’re traveling to Mexico soon, consider picking up one of my digital travel guides to help you make the most of your trip!

If you really enjoy these stories, consider becoming a paid subscriber or gifting a subscription to a travel-lover in your life.

Give a gift subscription

Until next time,

Laura

I’m late to the party on this, since National Geographic posted this list of Best of the World 2026 back at the end of 2025, but a photo popped up on my Instagram feed the other day from @mexico.explores with the headline, “National Geographic Names Oaxaca Best Destination in 2026.” The article specifically mentions the once-sleepy surf town of Puerto Escondido.

It caught my attention immediately, my first reaction a moan of, “Oh, no.”

Early last year, I spent two weeks exploring Oaxaca. I headed into the mountains to drink coffee at the source, to see the natural beauty that remains largely untouched. It was a press trip meant to show the lesser-known community tourism initiatives in the more rural areas of Oaxaca.

I finished the trip with a few days in the state’s capital, Oaxaca de Juarez. A city that is well and truly on the international tourist map. Thousands of people ascend upon the city to experience its unique Day of the Dead celebrations.

Many more visit throughout the year to eat. They wander the halls of Smoke Alley, an area of the local market known for its grilled meats. They go in search of the many moles, the hot chocolate, the pan de yema. All of it made here for thousands of years by the 16 distinct indigenous groups who have come to the city’s markets to sell their products for generations.

But this trip felt different from any other to Mexico. It felt weighed down by a sense that I wasn’t wanted there, that no tourists were wanted there. I wrote about it on Substack shortly after I returned and had time to process it.

After my experience there last year, I couldn’t help but feel like this headline was truly irresponsible journalism, pushing the hordes to a place that does not have the infrastructure, never mind the desire to host those hordes.

I’ve been feeling this way, and writing about it for nearly two years now. I published my thoughts on tourism in the age of over-consumption over on my blog in early 2025.

I was hoping that I could use my voice for good, but I soon realized that it was easily drowned out by so many other voices, much bigger ones, like National Geographic.

It can be hard to fight the good fight when enormous organizations are out there sending people to places that aren’t ready for that volume, that aren’t interested in tourism, that don’t want their culture to be your vacation photo.

Tim Ferriss acknowledged his power to ruin a business many years ago in his popular 5-Bullet Friday Newsletter. He knows that if he recommends a company, they are going to get so inundated with business that their website could crash, and they could end up needing to hire too many new staff too quickly, which will likely decrease the quality of their service over time. He knows that he has to be so careful about what he recommends, because it could make or break a company.

If Tim Ferriss knows the power of his recommendations, so too must National Geographic (and other large-scale media like the New York Times, Travel + Leisure, and Lonely Planet, who all make similar lists each year).

And yet, the lists persist.

I’m not saying that we should not go to these places. I have been to the Oaxaca coast several times, and I hope one day to return again to explore more. Huatulco is one of my favorite beach destinations to get away from it all. But maybe we need to pay more attention to what our visits are doing to these places and understand when it is best to wait. And maybe accept that we can’t have everything that we want.

Part of the reason so many people, myself included, love this region of Mexico is that it still feels unspoiled by mass tourism. The way it lacks huge hotel investment, or has all of those tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurants serving up a single dish, closing early when they sell out. There’s something special about going to a place you have to work hard to get to, something that keeps most people away who don’t have the time or patience for such extreme travel.

When tourism picks up in places like this, suddenly direct flights begin to crop up, land that wasn’t previously for sale gets bought up along the coastline, bigger and more expensive hotels replace mom and pop motels, forests are cleared, and we end up with another Sayulita, with nowhere to park and sewage leaking into the ocean where people are swimming.

I wasn’t alone in my reaction to this news. When I clicked on the Instagram post with this headline, the comments were overwhelmingly negative.

So many people feel the same way. “The Kiss of Death” comment was what made me sit down and start writing this. So many people already know the power of these sorts of lists and what it means for the small communities along the coast of Oaxaca.

Of course, this Nat Geo article alone will not cause the problems, but they are a catalyst. People within the industry pay attention to these lists, and they react accordingly. More content gets created, more content creators visit these places, more brands and tourism boards send people to these destinations, and suddenly it looks like everyone is talking about this place, so more people feel influenced to visit.

When more people visit, more travel writers and magazines feature these destinations because they know they’ll get more clicks, and the cycle continues. We’ve seen it in recent years with Mexico City, Tulum, Barcelona, Iceland, Japan, Santorini, and so many other places around the world.

For large-scale change to happen, governments need to get involved. We’ve seen rumbles of this in Spain and Scotland, with the management of Airbnbs becoming stricter in an attempt to reverse the damage that has already been done to property prices.

But I believe that as consumers, as travelers, as human beings, we also need to be better.

I know I can do better.

It’s something that I continue to work on as I slow down my travels, as I try to visit lesser-known destinations, and as I try to educate myself about a place and its people instead of showing up only to consume and then leave.

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What I’m Reading

• The Sons of El Rey by Alex Espinoza. I just finished this book, which I mentioned in last week’s newsletter. I enjoyed it, for the most part. It did feel like an obvious ending, but still a nice one overall. It was all a little bit too wrapped up in a bow, perhaps, but I liked the characters and was rooting for them throughout.

• Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors. I was addicted to this book from page one. I have not been able to put it down, and I imagine I am going to finish it tonight or tomorrow. The characters are so real - three sisters trying to find their feet after the death of their fourth sister. The dialogue is exquisite, the three very different personality types of the women, and the way that Mellors perfectly captures sibling relationships. I’m hooked; I will report back next week on how I feel at the end.

How to Support This Substack

Simply subscribing and giving this a like or leaving a comment about what you enjoyed about this week’s essay makes a huge difference! If you are a regular Substack user, sharing the post is also a huge help.

If you would like to support this newsletter further, you can check out my blog for more stories and helpful travel guides from around the world.

If you’re traveling to Mexico soon, consider picking up one of my digital travel guides to help you make the most of your trip!

If you really enjoy these stories, consider becoming a paid subscriber or gifting a subscription to a travel-lover in your life.

Give a gift subscription

Until next time,

Laura

I was out for dinner the other night with some fellow travel blogging friends, Tim and Donna. We were talking about how much travel has changed in the last 10 years. How it wasn’t that long ago that we were traveling without smartphones, stopping into local tourism offices to get a physical map if we didn’t already have one in the paperback Lonely Planet in our backpacks.

They talked about traveling with film cameras and how strict they used to be about how many photos they could take of something, “no more than two,” they said with a laugh. “Can you imagine?”

“Now I take at least five photos of everything, if not more,” I said in agreement.

This style of travel, this way of living in general, seems to be having a comeback. The 90s are fashionable again, and not just for the questionable clothing choices (capri cargo pants are back? Really??).

Gen Z and Alpha are buying old digital cameras, and even more are buying disposables and taking them on their trips. Their sepia images appearing unedited on Instagram. Sure, still more curated than the photo albums with over 100 photos that we used to post on Facebook, but equal in quality. They love the novelty of not knowing what you’re going to get until you get it developed, love that you only get 27 precious chances to capture what you want.

They call it going analog. Listening to CDs and records again, rather than letting the Spotify algorithm determine what they are going to listen to. Some are even going as far as getting flip phones, which they comically call dumb phones. They are shunning the smartphone and its control over our attention spans entirely, although they’re still managing to find ways to post about it on social media, so figure that one out.

People my age are beginning to take up hobbies we now call Grandma Hobbies; things like knitting, crocheting, and watercolor painting. Heck, I wrote an entire Substack about sewing.

As the world becomes ever more digital, ever more comfortable, ever more out of our control, we are all seeking places where we can use our hands, where we can use our brains, make our own decisions, make something of our own.

I’m sure everyone has a different reason for seeking out these hobbies. I started sewing because I thought it would be fun to make my own clothes, but the more I do it, the more I love the feeling of being completely engrossed in something.

Writing does that for me in a different way; my brain is still on, still editing as I go, still pulling for words at the back of my brain, still forcing me to look up and around and go in and out of focus. But when I’m sewing, I am nowhere else. I am so focused on the singular task at hand that hours pass without my knowledge. There is something so magical about that.

I have started to become much more discerning about the travel information I consume lately. With the rise of AI and how much is being scraped from blogs like mine, no credit given, no ad money received, no affiliate income made when someone books that tour that I recommended, but that was found on ChatGPT instead of on my blog, I want to make sure I am supporting small businesses and real writers.

I started reading guidebooks again last year. First, I did it for my November trip to Glasgow. I went to the library and took out Rick Steves’ Guide to Britain. It was packed with funny anecdotes, helpful tips, and a great walking tour that I did during my trip.

Then I got the Scotland Lonely Planet. I’ll be honest, Lonely Planet books are more style than substance these days, with beautiful photos and better maps, but really lacking in the information that they used to carry. But I did use those maps and some of the cafe and bar recommendations, which were excellent.

I did this again for our road trip through Northern California down to San Francisco, and once again, I was surprised at the depth that many books went into. I took one of them with me on the trip, and we used all of the maps of the different Redwood Forest Parks to find hikes (but also, always stop into park ranger offices, they have the best maps and hike recommendations! So many analog options!).

I still love reading blogs and other online articles for restaurant recommendations, because they tend to be the most up-to-date options, and I love supporting fellow bloggers and travel writers, but overall, I have fallen back in love with analog travel.

Maybe I should go get a disposable camera for my next trip, too.

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What I’m Reading

• The Sons of El Rey by Alex Espinoza. So far, I am loving this multi-generational tale of Lucha Libre wrestlers. The book hops between timelines, and in each chapter, the narrator shifts to one of the sons or the eldest grandmother. You go between Mexico City and Los Angeles across the generations while learning about the complicated relationships these three men all had with each other and those who are close to them. I haven’t been able to put it down!

• Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez. I am reading this for my job, and so far I am fascinated! I have only read two chapters, but the gender data gap is wider than I could have ever imagined. “The fact is that worth is a matter of opinion, and opinion is informed by culture. And if that culture is as male-biased as ours is, it can’t help but be biased against women. By default.”

How to Support This Substack

If you would like to support this newsletter and my continued work to bring you thoughtful stories from around the world, you can check out my blog for more stories and helpful travel guides from around the world.

If you’re traveling to Mexico soon, consider picking up one of my digital travel guides to help you make the most of your trip!

Simply subscribing and giving this a like or leaving a comment about what you enjoyed about this week’s essay makes a huge difference, too.

If you really enjoy these stories, consider becoming a paid subscriber or gifting a subscription to a travel-lover in your life.

Give a gift subscription

Until next time,

Laura

I set up my chair and dug my feet into the sand. It was still hot enough that I needed sunscreen, a hat, and sunglasses. I stayed until the sun set and drove home to make dinner.

It’s a life that I had for brief moments during the pandemic down in Mexico, but it wasn’t my reality for very long. Work and life took me elsewhere, and for nearly five years now, I have dreamed of being back by the beach.

What most people who follow along on this journey don’t know is that the main reason we have moved so much over the last 10 years is because of Luke’s job.

As a soccer coach, he has taken us from Mexico to Lithuania and then to Seattle. The job often chooses our location rather than the other way around, and it has been an exciting way to see the world.

But after two and a half years in Seattle, we realized that we needed to consider things more deeply. We couldn’t just look at the job anymore; we needed to look for a place that allowed us to have a life that made us happy outside of our “office walls,” if you will.

That has led us to Florida, a little spot on the Gulf Coast that has a few craft beer bars, pickleball courts that I can play on year-round, stunning beaches, and a much more affordable cost of living.

I have so much more to catch you all up on - just before moving down here, we spent a magical two weeks in France and Spain, then there was the mad week before we left Seattle, where we had to pack up our entire apartment and also still plan for a two-week trip to Europe all while still working full time and trying to plan our move to Florida upon our return.

I hope you’ll stick around for many more stories of travel, misadventure, and this crazy and wonderful life I continue to try to build for myself.

Until next time,

Laura

It felt like I struggled to find flow with my reading these last two months. I had a few gems, but often I found myself not wanting to pick up the book that I had put down the previous day. I went a whole week avoiding my bookshelf because I didn’t feel like reading any of the books that were on it.

It doesn’t help that I also spent a week enjoying the sunshine in the Bahamas in March and a long weekend in Wyoming in April, visiting family. Although I did some reading on all of those flights, for the most part, I was too busy enjoying the company of the people I was with.

That being said, in March and April, I finished eight books, which surprised me when I did the count because it didn’t feel like I did quite that much reading.

These are the books I read in no particular order.

1. Katabasis by R.F. Kuang. Earlier this year, I read Yellowface by the same author, and I absolutely loved it, so I was excited to get this one from the library, her most recent novel, which came out last year. Set on the campus of Cambridge University in the late 80s, it was an interesting start to what is a meaty 500+ page book. Alice Law is studying magik and accidentally kills her professor, so she decides to journey to hell to find him and bring him back. There’s a bit of mystery, intrigue, and romance. It really slowed down in the middle, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to pick it back up, but I’m glad I did. It probably could have been 100 pages shorter, but overall, I enjoyed it.

2. Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis. A not-so-serious book about a kind of serious topic. When Nadia Amin publishes a well-researched work on the deradicalization of young women in Iraq, the United Nations takes notice and invites her out to Baghdad to help deradicalize and repatriate the foreign women who moved to Iraq. It’s a harsh critique of NGOs and the “help” that they try to offer nations around the world, but it’s also funny and human and filled with likeable characters. It was fast-paced but also incredibly thought-provoking.

3. Writing Creativity and the Soul by Sue Monk Kidd. I haven’t read a “how to write” book in a while, but when I saw one of my favorite fiction writers had recently published a memoir/how-to style guide, I figured I would give it a read. I really enjoyed her reflections on her own writing life and how she got to where she is today. I loved learning more about the process behind some of my favorite books that she has written, and it was really interesting to learn more about her early life before she became a writer. Overall, a quick read that helped me learn more about Kidd but not all that much more about writing.

4. The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune. Something in between a 1984-style government and a Harry Potter-style plotline, the world inside the House in the Cerulean Sea has “normal” people and “magic” people. Most of these magical children are taken from their homes when they are young and raised in orphanages around the country to protect them and, more likely, to assimilate them into “normal” society. But this orphanage at the edge of the country on a tiny island hidden from the rest of the world is a home for the most extreme cases, including a little boy named Lucy, short for Lucifer, the son of the Devil. It’s such a charming book, but it also digs deeper into the way we “other” so many people in our society simply because we do not understand the way that they live. Klune did an amazing job of using children as a way to remind us all to have compassion and kindness because we’re all just people who want to be loved.

5. The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett. Following the life of PJ Halliday, millionaire lottery winner and alcoholic. PJ lost his daughter on the eve of her high school graduation and, as many would, fell apart. He ruined his marriage, he has nearly ruined his relationship with his other daughter, and he has nearly squandered every last penny that he won. So when child protective services calls to tell him that the children of his estranged brother, recently murdered, will be placed in his care, he decides this is his second chance to get it right. He stops drinking, cleans up his act, buys some bunk beds, and tries to be a better man. There are many calamities along the way, but mostly heartwarming. I laughed, I cried at the end, and I read this quickly because I wanted to know what was going to happen next.

6. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. Without a doubt, one of my top reads of the year so far. So beautifully written, so rich with detail. It was a masterclass in suspense as each chapter took you between the past and present, leaving you hanging, leaving you to say, I just need to read one more chapter to find out and then hours have passed. A fictional telling of Shakespeare’s home life and the tragic death of his son, Hamnet, after whom, perhaps, Hamlet is named.

7. Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz. Originally written in Spanish, this translation has been turned into a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence. There were parts of this book that were so gripping and emotionally raw, and other parts of it where it felt overly repetitive. Sometimes it was just downright confusing, and I didn’t know whether she was having a manic episode, or she was dreaming, or if it was really happening. Maybe that’s part of the point.

8. The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. I waited three months for this book to come through from the library. When I first reserved it, I was number 1,437 in line to read it (luckily, the library bought 400+ copies of it!). It always worries me when a book is that popular, but this was truly worth the wait. Written exclusively in letters between the main character, Sybil, and her friends, we follow Sybil’s later life and learn so much about her, her tragic past, her relationship with her daughter, and so much more. I could not put this book down. I read it in two days and tried to go slower because I didn’t want it to end.

The Books I Didn’t Finish

• Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. This book has had so much publicity. It only just came out, and it is already being turned into a movie. Natalie lives on a ranch with her family and makes a living sharing her perfect “trad-wife” life with the internet. Until one day she wakes up, and she is in her home, but everything is different. I got about halfway through the book, hoping that I would start to like it or at least find it more interesting, but the whole first half just felt vapid, obvious, and boring. I hated Natalie, which I think is the point, but it’s just no fun to read a book when you don’t like any of the characters (how I felt while reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow). So I decided to stop, and then I picked up The Correspondent and immediately felt better.

• Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. This book won the Pulitzer Prize! Surely I would enjoy it? Maybe I was just in the wrong frame of mind when I picked it up. I had just finished Hamnet and was looking for something to get involved in from page one, and this book was not it. It started off SO SLOW. I found that I just didn’t want to pick it up, and eventually it was due back to the library, so I returned it unfinished. Do I need to give this another go?

• The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. I did actually really like this book, and I intend to take it back out and finish it, but it is SO LONG. I got this book on my Kindle and read it on several of my flights these last two months, and yet, I am not even halfway done with it. I have spent hours reading this book, and I am barely a third of the way through. It is a tome! But it remains an interesting tale of many people who I imagine are all going to start coming together in different ways, but at the moment, it feels like I have read three different books, all of which I really enjoyed. Hopefully, this will be on the list of books I finished in May (ok, maybe June).

What have you been reading that you loved these last few months? Do I need to give Olive Kitteridge another chance?

Life has been so full lately.

I don’t like the word busy because it sounds like my days are full of things that I did not put there, and that is not the case.

My days are full of long conversations with intelligent women with whom I have the privilege of working. They are full of books, reading them, browsing them at the library, thinking thoughts about writing one of my own, but never actually putting words on the page.

It’s been full of spring flower-hunting and hiking in the mountains, long walks by Lake Union and long leisurely dinners with friends.

They are also very full with a new hobby, which has partly been why I have stopped writing quite so much. It seems I can’t have two all-encompassing creative hobbies at once.

I got a sewing machine for my 38th birthday. Something that I have wanted for a while as a 4’11” grown woman who can never find clothes that fit just right.

Being a beginner at something is so immersive.

I have the sort of personality that when I find something I’m not good at, but that I enjoy, I go all in. I’m sewing after work in the evenings, spending entire weekend afternoons cutting and measuring and hemming and putting good sides together and watching tutorials as I accidentally sew the good side to the bad side. I’m at the stage of learning where hours evaporate. I look up from the machine to see that the sun is setting and the apartment is growing dark. It’s a flow state I haven’t reached in many years.

There’s a whole new language to learn. Raw edges and French seams and basting stitches and cutting on the bias.

And there are so many accessories! I thought sewing would save me money! But each weekend I’m back online buying a new color thread, scissors, pins, and chalk. I have more on my wish list that I’ve had to force myself to wait for because, of course, I don’t really need a cutting mat or elastic thread or a serger quite yet.

There is a whole online world that I didn’t even know existed. Sewing influencers, pattern makers, thrift flip videos where women turn oversized men’s shirts from Goodwill into intricate dresses and skirts.

Meanwhile, I’m still excited when I sew a straight line on a pair of pants I hemmed. I’ve also managed to take in a dress that was too big, cut the sleeves off of a dress that I haven’t worn in years, and make it look like it was always meant to be a sleeveless dress. I have turned too-long t-shirts into cute cropped ones, and in one of the hardest projects so far, I have taken in a pair of jeans that were too big, and they look great as long as you don’t look too closely at the center seam.

When I have attempted to make clothes from scratch, it’s a different story. There are the shorts I made out of thrifted fabric that are somehow both too big and too small. Then there’s the skirt with the elastic band that looks like a prairie skirt from the 90s that no shirt looks quite right with. My most recent attempt was a skirt with a zipper! and pockets! The zipper is somehow crooked, and while I intended for it to be high-waisted, it is so low-rise that even my 15-year-old self wouldn’t wear it (that’s not true; there was probably nothing too low-rise for my 15-year-old self).

All this to say, writing has taken a backseat, but I miss it. I have been falling asleep to Substack ideas, waking in the middle of the night, jotting notes down on my phone, the blue light illuminating my dark room.

I think I am out of the very beginner phase of sewing, and with a few upcoming adventures, writing is easier to take with me than my sewing machine. See you on the road.

What I’m Reading

After a huge start to the year with reading in January and February, March and April have been weird reading months. I have read a few books that I really liked, I have started a lot of books that I have not yet finished, and I have absolutely detested a few that I kept trying to read despite hating the characters (Yesteryear, I’m looking at you).

Here are a few that I finished that I really enjoyed.

• The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett. This is a feel-good book about a family that has spent years grieving the loss of their teenage daughter. We mostly follow the father, PJ, as he tries again and again to get his life back in order. The dynamic between him and his ex-wife, who lives down the street with her new husband, is heartwarming. When PJ finds out that his estranged brother and wife have been killed and that he is next of kin to look after their two children, he jumps at the idea, feeling like he is getting a second chance at doing that dad thing right. It brings together his whole family, and the ensuing road trip made me laugh out loud.

• Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. Without a doubt, the best book that I have read in the last two months. So gripping! So beautifully written! The story of Shakespeare’s family mostly follows his wife and their children. I haven’t yet seen the movie, so I’m not sure how closely aligned they are, but the book was spectacular.

• The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Kline. This is my first time reading anything by TJ Kline, and it’s not usually something that I would pick up, but I really enjoyed it. A sci-fi style book, it’s about an orphanage on a small island far away from civilization. This orphanage isn’t a normal orphanage, but rather a home for the most extreme magical creatures, including a young boy named Lucy, short of Lucifer, the son of the devil. It’s sweet, it’s funny, it’s a good summer read.

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Until next time,

Laura

February is a strange month in the Pacific Northwest. The days are getting significantly longer. On the last day of the month, I didn’t close my blinds to the darkness until close to 6:30. A solid two hours later than just two months prior. The sun is shining more often, and the buds are popping up on the trees. It’s still winter, but there are whispers of spring in the air.

Winter months are always when I do the most reading. Not much daylight left after work to go for a walk, I end up on my couch beneath the light of a lamp (I just got a new reading lamp, and I am making VERY good use of it), reading for a few hours before dinner.

I thought I would start sharing my monthly reads with you all since my 2025 wrap-up of the best books I read last year was such a popular one. I find that travel lovers are often book lovers as well, books being our first forays into adventures around the world, sometimes our only gateway to places we hope to one day visit.

I read five books in February and enjoyed all of them, for the most part. Some were better than others. Here they are in reverse order of “worst” to “best”.

5. Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Adichie is a spectacular writer, so when I spotted this book at the library recently, I added it to my ever-growing pile, knowing it would be a good one. The story is told by four different women across four different sections, each one telling the story of their lives from their perspectives in the lead-up to the pandemic. Three of the women are from Nigeria, and one is from Guinea, and they are all connected in different ways. It’s filled with love and heartbreak, life in the United States as an immigrant, and life in Nigeria as a single, successful woman. Adichie, as always, delivered on character development, storytelling, and stunning prose, but the book is ranked fifth for me because it just got a little bit long. Although I enjoyed it while I was reading it, I was never in a hurry to pick it back up again.

4. Mammoth by Eva Baltasar. Translated from Catalan, this short book takes place in Barcelona as well as in the Spanish countryside. A young woman is coming of age, learning the disappointments of adulthood. For such a short book, you really get to know the main character very well, and I think any young woman who struggled with life after college can likely relate to her inner monologue, if perhaps not with the actions that she took in figuring herself out. It’s stunning writing, and I underlined so many quotes in this book, but overall, it was a little bit depressing in theme, and I’m glad it wasn’t any longer than 100 pages.

3. Small Rain by Garth Greenwell. This was a stunning work of fiction and has made me want to read everything else that Greenwell has written. His writing is poetry, his storytelling is captivating, and I absolutely loved each and every character, down to the nurses. The book is based on a true story in Greenwell’s life when one of his arteries burst, and he went to the hospital, where he spent more than a week being tested for every possible reason that this may have happened to a healthy man in his late 40s. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time I was reading it, the suspense of whether or not anything more would happen, meaning that I could not put it down. The only reason this isn’t number one or two is that I’m squeemish and sometimes the descriptions of what was happening to him in the hospital were just a tad too descriptive.

2. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. A modern retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (which I must admit I’ve never read), this book is a big one at about 550 pages. It follows the life of a young man named Damon, but everyone calls him Demon Copperhead. It’s about the failure of the foster care system, the poverty of Appalachia, the life of a young man who just wants to be loved. It’s beautifully written, and at 550 pages, you really get to know the characters. It’s one of those books that when you finish, you’re still thinking about them, wondering what happened next, where are they now?

1. Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley. I started reading this book in January, but I didn’t finish it until February, so I’m putting it on this list because it was stunning, it was magical, it was funny and sad and beautiful, and all of the other adjectives that make a book so fun to read. I think I said in a newsletter earlier this year that this is the first time I have ever finished a fictional novel and thought, “I wish I had written this!” It is so intelligent, so deeply interesting. It’s the story of two young people who meet in college at Berkley and fall in love, but can’t seem to get together for one reason or another. But they both love music. Percy has an ear for it, but can’t play it, and Joe is a talented musician who needs Percy’s help to take his songs from good to great. There is so much talk of great pop music across the decades, and I found myself making a playlist that I now listen to when I cook dinner. LOVED this book. They’re now turning it into a movie, which I am intrigued to see.

What’s on your reading list for March?

How You Can Help This Substack

Liking, commenting, and sharing go a long way in getting more eyes on these stories that I write.

If you feel so inclined, you can support the Substack financially by becoming a paid subscriber, or you can gift a subscription to a travel-lover in your life.

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Thank you for being here.

Until next time,

Laura

Find a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life, the old trope goes. It’s one that carried me forward through 7-day workweeks, constantly refreshing emails, spending evenings learning about SEO, mornings writing blog posts, afternoons pitching to brands or tourism boards, and refreshing my emails to find not a single response, not even a no.

Find a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life, fueled me boundlessly for nearly a decade. A decade of days filled with tasks that did indeed feel like work. But I was always so terrified to tell anyone, terrified to admit that this job that I thought was my dream job, traveling the world and writing about it, was in fact, very much a job that felt like I was working every single day of my life.

What’s worse, the very things I loved, the storytelling, the adventure-seeking, the joy of being somewhere I’ve never been before, started to also feel like work.

The long train rides with picturesque countryside became offices, with no time to sit back and take in the views, because I had videos to edit from the last destination, and I needed to do research and find locations to film for the next stop. I felt panicked if I didn’t get an aisle seat, because how would I get a great photo or short video clip to share on social media?

I would come back from two-week work trips exhausted. Eating badly, not being able to keep up with any sort of exercise routine, drinking most nights because it was part of the press trip, or to network, or because at the end of a long day it felt like the only way to wind down and get some sleep in another new bed.

Even as I write these words, I see the privilege in them. I see how it always would have sounded to someone who thinks that this job is, in fact, a dream job. For years, I would get comments from people telling me that I was “living the dream.” And in many ways, I was. I visited destinations around the world that I never would have gone to on my own, places I’ve never heard of or wouldn’t otherwise have been able to afford. I am so grateful for the life that I have built myself over the years, but I also think it’s important to know when it’s time to step back and realize that maybe it isn’t my dream anymore, maybe it’s time to give my spot to someone who is still dreaming this dream.

When I started my blog, Eternal Expat, in 2016, it was because I wanted to be a writer. I had dreamed of writing long-form travel stories like Paul Theroux or my favorite blogger at the time, This Battered Suitcase.

Ever since I moved abroad and started going on longer and longer backpacking trips in 2010, travel has been something that has consumed me in the best possible way. It taught me so much, opened my eyes to so many different ways to live. It changed some long-held beliefs about religion, politics, and my understanding of history and how it gets told.

The website was only ever meant to be a portfolio, a place where I could show bigger publications my writing style, the depth and breadth of my knowledge about different destinations. And it worked. My blog is the very reason that I got my regular writing gig with Lonely Planet.

But somewhere along the way, I learned that I could make money from blogging. I could avoid the rejection letters and the red pen of editors on my beloved words, all while making more money than writing for those bigger publications. It seemed win-win.

I let the wave of SEO writing and press trips, corporate-sponsored videos, and the addiction of short-form content take over because it paid well and I could work less and travel more, and somewhere along the way, I lost my love for writing, for creating simply for the joy of it.

A few years ago, I started hearing this whisper inside my head. Sometimes, while I was on a trip, sometimes when I got back and faced the piles of notes, the folders full of video clips, and unedited photos. The worst times, the times that really made me wake up and start paying attention, were when the whispers came even before I set off for a trip. In the days leading up to it, in those moments when I looked into my closet, took my backpack down from its shelf, and started to pack for yet another trip for my dream job.

“I’m tired,” it whispered, “I am so tired.”

That whisper grew louder through 2024 as storytelling and writing became an even less viable way to make a living, and short-form video felt like the only way to survive.

But I was so deep into this now. This was what I had dedicated the last 10 years of my life to. What would I even do for work if I weren’t doing this?

I spent the first half of 2025 crippled with indecision. Maybe I should go back to school, get an MFA, become a writing professor? I reached out to a professor whom I had in college to seek some advice.

We spoke on Zoom, and she listened to me talk about my writing life, about my missteps, about my feelings of uncertainty. And she told me that an MFA would not solve my problems. It would certainly give me the chance to open more doors, it would connect me with a cohort of writers that would likely become lifelong friends, and it would no doubt help me to become a better writer. But it would not magically give me a new career path; I would have to carve that for myself, regardless of whether I chose to go back to school or not.

Towards the end of that summer, I got a call from a good friend who was starting a nonprofit, an organization in the public health space.

She spoke for five minutes about all of the research and community work that she and her cofounder wanted to do, and I waited until she got to the end of her pitch to understand how she thought I would fit into this.

“We need someone with a business mind,” she said. They needed someone who understood branding and marketing and could turn their scientific writing into layman’s terms for newsletter readers and social media.

I took on the role part-time, unsure if it would be something I could wrap my head around. Public health is a long way from tourism and travel writing, but I was intrigued by the idea of doing something completely different. I still had a few contracts for brands that I needed to complete and a few more videos that I wanted to make, so I did both jobs at the same time.

In October, something happened that helped me decide that going full-time with this new job was the right decision for right now.

I went on a trip to Glasgow, Scotland. I was so excited to get back to one of my favorite countries, to wander the streets of a city that I’ve never been to before, and go on vacation.

I didn’t film anything, not for YouTube, not for Instagram. I didn’t see 20 sites in a single day, so that I could fill up a video and share every single possible thing to do in the city with people. I saw one or two sites a day, and had long leisurely lunches with a friend. I went to cafes and wrote for the fun of it. I went for runs in hilly local parks, stopped into thrift stores, and drank cask ale.

I thought it would be hard, that I would have the itch to pick up my camera or to post something on social media. But it wasn’t hard. I had no itch.

I was utterly relaxed and experiencing my trip in the moment rather than wondering how it would look in the edit.

I started the job full-time when I got home.

Over Christmas, Luke and I went on an epic road trip along the southern part of the Oregon Coast, into California, all the way down to Big Sur. We stopped at the Redwoods, Sonoma, San Francisco, and Monterey.

I stood in awe of the enormous Coastal Redwood trees, got the rush of driving over the Golden Gate Bridge, and felt the wind blowing off the Pacific on a hiking trail in Big Sur. I took pictures, but I wasn’t stressed about capturing it in any particular way. I journaled most days in the mornings or after getting back to our hotel, writing about our action-packed days before we headed out for dinner.

And so I’ve come back around. I have that dream back in my hands. The dream of traveling the world, seeing Mother Nature up close, exploring destinations deeply, and writing about them. But I think this time, I’ll try not to turn it into my job.

What I’m Reading

• Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. It’s always a big commitment to start a book that has over 500 pages, but all of the reviews that I read promised this would be worth it, and it was. I spent most of this past rainy Saturday finishing it. It was heartbreaking, hilarious, so well written. The characters were fantastic, and the depth she went to to understand life in Appalachia really came through.

How You Can Help This Substack

Liking, commenting, and sharing go a long way in getting more eyes on these stories that I write.

If you feel so inclined, you can support the Substack financially by becoming a paid subscriber, or you can gift a subscription to a travel-lover in your life.

Subscribe now

Thank you for being here.

Until next time,

Laura

In 2015, Luke and I took the slow boat from the border of Thailand along the Mekong River to Luang Prabang. From what I’ve read, the journey has changed little in over a decade.

We had been backpacking through Asia for over four months at this point, so we felt like old pros, ready for any method of transportation that would cost us the least while giving us the biggest and best adventure for our money.

After two weeks in Thailand, we were excited to cross into Laos and spend a month off-grid.

The day started before dawn with a 5 am bus from Chiang Rai to the border.

At this point in the trip, we had crossed land borders from Vietnam to Cambodia (where our passports were taken away), from Cambodia to Thailand, and now, this, our third land crossing in as many months, felt like a breeze. We smugly bypassed the groups who had chosen to pay a tour guide to take them through the process and stepped up to the immigration desk to get stamped out of Thailand.

Then we walked through the building, outside, and back into a different building to be stamped into Laos. From there, we were directed to a muddy bank and shown our boat. We were the first ones to board, the truest luxury, to have our choice of seats for the journey.

I had done a lot of research leading up to this trip, reading blogs from people who had recently done the same journey.

“Don’t sit near the back,” one blog post had warned, “because that’s where the engines are, and it stinks of petrol.”

“Don’t sit on the seats that look like couches,” another instructed, “they look comfortable, but they are old and have no support, so you’ll be in agony by the end of the 10-hour journey.”

We chose two seats near the front that looked like they had been removed from a transit van and drilled into the wooden base of the boat. These would be our seats for the next two days, so I hoped we had chosen well.

When every last tourist had filed on board, the engines revved, and we began our journey along the Mekong River. It was August, the middle of the rainy season, and the water was muddy and deep. Trees floated past us, swept up in the current, moving faster than our boat.

That first day was exhilarating. The surrounding mountains and jungles were so lush, the villages along the shorelines so colorful, the humid air so warming. We stopped for the evening in a town that feels like it only exists because of this boat.

Pak Beng is almost exactly halfway between the border town of Houayxay, where we got on the boat, and Luang Prabang, where we could eventually disembark. Boats pull up at the base of a steep, muddy road, and with each new arrival, locals flood the banks with laminated photos of their guestrooms.

We followed the first man we met, who had promised a room facing the river, breakfast, a packed lunch for the following day, and the thing that clinched the deal, the shortest walk back to the boat in the morning.

It was starting to get dark, and we had only had a small sandwich all day while on the boat, so we headed to a nearby restaurant where we ordered our first Beer Laos, the national beer, which would be one of the only beers we’d find for the next 30 days.

Like in Thailand, the bottles are large, 640 mL (about 21 oz). They were not quite fridge cold. We clinked our bottles together and took our first swig.

“Oof” I said, looking at Luke.

“Metallic,” he said.

We laughed and took another swig. Then the power went out.

Not just in the restaurant, but in the entire town. It was pitch black. I could not see Luke, could not see my Beer Laos, could not see the street that was directly to the left of our table.

“Oops!” our waitress said as she came out with a lantern. She set it down between us and then found another one to put on a nearby table.

“Sometimes it happens,” she said with a smile.

We ate our meal by the light of our lantern, chicken curry, rich with coconut milk and a mild spice, with a side of the stickiest rice I had ever had.

This was before we owned smartphones, so we didn’t have a flashlight of our own.

“Where are you staying?” our waitress asked us when she saw we were about to leave without any light to guide us. We told her about the place closest to the pier, the one with the hammocks on the balcony.

“Oh yes, I know the one,” she smiled. “Take the lantern, I will pick it up from them tomorrow.”

The next morning, as promised, we had a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bread, and fresh fruit. Before we left, our host handed us each a paper bag with a chicken sandwich, a bag of chips, a pack of cookies, and a bottle of orange soda inside it. Like two happy kids off to school, we waved goodbye to our hosts and arrived at the boat, yet again, the first to board.

The second day didn’t feel any less exciting. We had slept well, we were in a new country, and we had a whole month of exploring it ahead of us. We had books in our backpacks that we had swapped for at a hostel in Chiang Mai, a GoPro with a full battery, and a paper bag full of snacks. I browsed the Laos section in our well-thumbed Southeast Asia Lonely Planet, trying to decide how to spend the next few days in Luang Prabang.

Eventually, our two-day adventure along the Mekong came to an end. We pulled up to the port, grabbed our overstuffed backpacks, and climbed off the boat to look at more laminated photos of guesthouses, to follow a stranger to his house, and to try again to get used to the oddly metallic taste of Beer Laos.

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What I’m Reading

• Mammoth by Eva Baltasar. Baltasar’s books always leave me wanting more. All of them are short. More like novelas at just over 100 pages or so, and Mammoth was no different. I read the book in about two days and almost wanted to start it over again from the beginning. To be able to get such depth of character in such a short book is something that always awes me about her writing. Maybe because the characters are so relatable, their inner thoughts are laid so bare on the page. And then when it ends, you feel a sort of sadness for not being able to get to know them even more. The book is about a young woman who moves from Barcelona to the countryside shortly after graduating from college. But even more so, it’s a philosophical look at humanity, about growing up, about how we exist together and apart from one another.

• Small Rain by Garth Greenwell. I’m only about 1/3 of the way through this, but I can’t put it down. This is the first book I’ve ever read by Greenwell, and it makes me want to look up his other works. His writing is poetic, his paragraphs long and full of distractions. Small Rain follows the journey of a man who is admitted to the hospital with a mysterious, debilitating pain in his abdomen. He becomes something of a phenomenon that everyone in the hospital wants to examine, and in doing so, he becomes less human and more specimen. He turns to art as a way to escape from the present moment; he turns to his past, to his memories, and his inner thoughts about mortality. I can’t wait to read more.

How to Support this Substack

If you would like to support this newsletter and my continued work to bring you thoughtful stories from around the world, you can check out my blog for more stories and helpful travel guides from around the world.

If you’re traveling to Mexico soon, consider picking up one of my digital travel guides to help you make the most of your trip!

If you really enjoy these stories, consider becoming a paid subscriber or gifting a subscription to a travel-lover in your life.

Give a gift subscription

Until next time,

Laura

Do you have a story that you love to tell? For me, it’s the story of how Luke and I first got started living abroad.

I know it well. I’ve told it dozens of times, maybe more.

There’s a nostalgia that I cling to from those early years. When I tell stories from that time in my life, it takes me right back, back to the fluttery stomach, to the giddy feeling of what adventures we might get up to. Life was just beginning, so much lay ahead. I knew I was leaping into the darkness, and I had absolutely zero fear.

Last week, I had the privilege of telling my story on a podcast called Foreignish. Co-hosts Lexi and Erin have spent more than a decade living in Spain and are now chatting with people all over the world who have gone in search of “home” somewhere else.

If you haven’t heard it before, I hope you enjoy hearing about how it all began way back in 2008.

What I’m Reading

• The Convenience Store by the Sea by Sonoko Machida. What a feel-good book! That is all I keep saying about this book. Each chapter left me with the warm and fuzzies. The book is about a convenience store and its far too lovable manager. In each chapter, we follow someone else’s story and learn how the convenience store and the people who frequent it are connected. It’s quirky, funny, a little silly in parts, but overall a very fun read.

• Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo. A coming-of-age story set in San Francisco in the 50s. Lily, the main character, wrestles with her identity as a young, gay woman in a Chinese-American family. I haven’t read a book in a while where I was rooting for the main characters so much. Fantastic, strong female characters throughout. I also learned a ton about San Francisco’s Chinatown, Chinese-American relations in the 50s, and post-WWII life in America. Although it’s YA, I thought it was well-written, interesting, and it’s banned in a few states, which always makes something more fun to read.

How to Support this Substack

If you would like to support this newsletter and my continued work to bring you thoughtful stories from around the world, you can check out my blog for more stories and helpful travel guides from around the world.

If you’re traveling to Mexico soon, consider picking up one of my digital travel guides to help you make the most of your trip!

If you really enjoy these stories, consider becoming a paid subscriber or gifting a subscription to a travel-lover in your life.

Give a gift subscription

Until next time,

Laura

For a year of my life, I lived on the 20th floor of a 20-floor apartment complex in the small town of Jinsa-Ri, in South Korea. Luke and I used to call it the penthouse.

In July and August, when the air inside the apartment was stiflingly hot, we learned to do as our neighbors did and prop the front door open to create a cross breeze between the balcony doors and the hallway windows. In the winter months, we put towels across the bottom of the front door to keep the now icy breeze out. We would lie on the floor where the heaters burned beneath the linoleum. We didn’t have a dryer, so when it was really cold, instead of hanging the clothes on the drying rack, we would lay them flat on the floor.

From our balcony, we looked out at rice fields. The changing colors, from plowed brown to lush green, to ripe yellow grains, helped me follow the passing of the seasons. That is, until the smog arrived. The “yellow dust from China,” as all of my Korean friends and colleagues called it. Most people wore masks, and you could barely see a few feet in front of you. It looked like fog, but it had a slight pollen hue to it. Each morning in spring, I would open the curtains hoping to see out the window, but the dense smog usually blocked the view. Some days, I couldn’t even see the balcony railing.

When we first moved in, I wondered why all of my neighbors had coolers hooked to the outside of their doors. Soft, lunchbox-style bags hanging from each and every doorknob all the way down the hallway, most of them a pale blue or red. Until one day, I was leaving my apartment, and I saw a delivery person placing packs of Yakult into each of the dangling lunchboxes.

There were 15 buildings, all as tall as ours, within the complex where we lived. Everything at ground level was parking, but it never seemed to be enough. Double parking was perfectly acceptable. Most people left their car in neutral or placed their phone number on the dashboard. Some even had electronic displays, their phone numbers scrolling in perpetuity in red or blue across the windscreen. When I left for my morning runs, on the days when the smog had cleared, I would see men in suits helping each other push cars across the tarmac, a real-life game of Rush Hour.

The neighborhood was small, but contained. It had an elementary and middle school, two grocery stores, more than a dozen sit-down restaurants, and a six or seven take-out spots, a karaoke room, and two grungy bars open until the last person left. We had our favorites: fried chicken from Boor, draft beer from Garage Bar, and Dak Galbi from the nameless restaurant with permanently steamed-up windows and a sign that just read, “Galbi” in Korean.

Every Friday night after finishing work at 9 pm, Luke and I got off the bus and walked straight to Boor. After a while, we didn’t even need to order. The husband and wife who owned the place would see us coming. As we sat down at our usual table, two draft beers in frosted glasses would appear before us.

“Pa?” The husband would ask as he set the beers down on our table.

“Ne,” we would both reply, nodding and smiling at how nice it felt to have a place that knows our order, pa chicken, or fried chicken topped with strips of spring onion and tossed in a spicy mustard sauce. Sometimes we strayed from our order and got the gochujang chicken instead, so he always liked to confirm.

I often joke that our year in Korea was the best worst year of my life. Many of those bests happened in the confines of Jinsa-Ri. During the last week at our teaching jobs, it was an unseasonably warm, smogless April day. We didn’t need to be at work until 1 pm, so we poured coffee into a thermos, put our jackets on, and went for a walk around the neighborhood. If we turned left out of our building and followed the sidewalk to the end of the parking lot, after a few minutes, the towers that blocked the light gave way to dirt roads through the rice fields. On our way back home, we stopped to sit on a bench in the sunshine.

An older woman went past, stopped to stand in front of us, and smiled.

“Meoshi-sseoyo,” stylish, she said, looking at Luke and motioning to her face to say she meant his big, bushy, red beard. We all laughed, Luke thanked her in Korean, and she turned to leave. Just as she began to walk away, she stopped and turned back to us, taking something out of her grocery bag and handing it to us. A container filled with fresh chapssaltteok, Korean-style mochi. A few at the bottom were still warm. We thanked her profusely, we all bowed our heads to each other, and she turned again to head back to her building.

What I’m Reading

• Easy Beauty by Chloe Cooper Jones. I feel like it’s not too premature to say that this is probably the best memoir I’m going to read all year. I just finished this book, and I want to start it all over again from the beginning. Jones has gone through life with a disability that means she lives in near-constant pain, both physically and emotionally. This book was such an eye-opening look at how we treat people with disabilities, how easily they become objects to be fixed rather than people with feelings. It’s also about how beauty changes how we perceive so much of the world around us, including people. It’s a memoir and a philosophy book wrapped up in one, and I found myself underlining and making notes constantly while I was reading.

New on the Blog

After taking some time away from blogging to really think about how to create the best resource that I possibly can without repeating myself or replicating the same writing on my Substack, I’m back to writing travel and packing guides over on Eternal Expat.

• How to Spend Two Days in San Francisco

• What to Wear in San Francisco in Winter

How to Support this Substack

If you would like to support this newsletter and my continued work to bring you thoughtful stories from around the world, you can check out my blog for more stories and helpful travel guides from around the world.

If you’re traveling to Mexico soon, consider picking up one of my digital travel guides to help you make the most of your trip!

If you really enjoy these stories, consider becoming a paid subscriber or gifting a subscription to a travel-lover in your life.

Give a gift subscription

Until next time,

Laura

In the Rick Steves’ Great Britain guidebook that I took out from the library to plan for this trip, he says of Scotland’s largest city, “They say you’ll have more fun at a funeral in Glasgow than you will at a wedding in Edinburgh.”

On my recent trip to the city back in November, I was expecting good vibes and good whisky. What I was not expecting was a culinary scene that rivals my favorite cities in Europe. I ate the best focaccia I have ever had in my life from a tiny cafe in the Queen’s Park neighborhood (and I had a lot of focaccia in Genoa, the home of focaccia).

I had what Rick Stein called the best chocolate in the world, and although I know less about chocolate than Rick Stein, it’s certainly the best chocolate that I have ever tasted. Their hot chocolate was topped with a homemade marshmallow.

I ate chewy Neopolitan-style pizza, buttery, flaky croissants, and drank countless perfectly brewed flat whites (seldom being charged extra for oat milk).

It wasn’t just the food that surprised me; it was the way I felt in this city that caught my attention most of all: safe, excited, curious, in awe.

I started most of my mornings in Glasgow with a run around Queen’s Park, which I have renamed Queen’s Hill. When I checked my Strava stats after one of the runs, I noticed that the steepest hill in the park is called the Thigh Trasher. While my quads still haven’t forgiven me, the views of the city were worth the cardio battle.

Glasgow is a city designed for the people who live in it. After close to two years back in the US, this fact hit me like a ton of bricks. It wasn’t designed for corporations or tourists or cars; it was designed for the people, even their slogan says so, “People Make Glasgow.”

The public transportation is spectacular; a well-connected train network, a clean subway system, and buses that take you everywhere else. Crossing the street was the biggest safety hazard of my entire week in the city. Although sidewalks are everywhere, crosswalks are not. Perhaps I am partly to blame since it took me all week to start looking the right way for oncoming traffic and make eye contact with the driver of the approaching car instead of the passenger.

I like cities with soul; cities like Melbourne and Osaka come to mind, second cities in countries that often favor the glitzier, more famous siblings. Glasgow felt like that. A city that has nothing to prove.

A few of my favorite food spots to add to your Glasgow bucket list:

• Bare Bones Chocolate - buy some chocolate to take home with you and have the hot chocolate.

• Margo - they use Bare Bones chocolate in their decadent chocolate cake, but most of the dishes on the menu here are delicious.

• The Pot Still - a great whisky bar and general feel-good pub atmosphere.

• Short Long Black - home to the above-mentioned focaccia that changed my life. Their coffee is also exceptional.

• The Devil’s Roast - great coffee, good vibes in a beautiful old building, flaky croissants. It turns into a cool cocktail bar at night.

• Ka Pao - ridiculously delicious Southeast Asian food. Get the corn ribs and lamb curry.

• Kember & Jones - another fantastic pastry and coffee spot with a nice brunch menu.

As for great things to do, there are many articles out there that will share the top hitters.

I personally enjoyed wandering around the University of Glasgow campus, taking pictures around the Cloisters, visiting the many Kelvingrove Museums, and checking out the Gallery of Modern Art. There are also incredible murals all over the city. I used this map to find them.

What I’m Reading

• A Little Luck by Claudia Piñeiro: This was my final book of 2025, and I definitely ended it with a bang! I could not put this book down. I have read Piñeiro’s more famous book, Elena Knows, which was a finalist for the Booker Prize in 2022. It was excellent, but I think this one is even better. You can see what is being hidden from you at the beginning of the book, and yet you cannot stop yourself from finding out how, why, and what really happened to Maria Elena and why she had to run away from Argentina 20 years ago. A beautiful story that had me blubbering my way through the last few pages.

• Yellowface by R.F. Kuang - this book has been on my list for quite some time, and it finally arrived in my library queue, so I’m excited for it to be my first read of the year. I’m only two chapters in, and I am already starting to understand why it was such a popular read!

How You Can Support This Substack

If you would like to support this newsletter and my continued work to bring you thoughtful stories from around the world, you can check out my blog for more stories and helpful travel guides from around the world.

If you’re traveling to Mexico soon, consider picking up one of my digital travel guides to help you make the most of your trip!

If you really enjoy these stories, consider becoming a paid subscriber or gifting a subscription to a travel-lover in your life.

Give a gift subscription

Happy New Year, my friends. I hope you have had a calm and restful start to 2026. I look forward to another year full of stories with you.

Until next time,

Laura

I read a lot of books.

Many of them are good, a few of them are excellent, and one or two a year are unforgettable. They leave me with what I call a book hangover.

A book hangover is when you finish a book, and you can’t stop thinking about it. The characters have become real people. You wonder what they’re up to now, after the story has finished. When you have a book hangover, it takes a long time to get into another book; each first page leaves you wishing you were reading that unforgettable book again for the first time.

When I think about the unforgettable books I have read this year, two come to mind: Martyr by Kaveh Akbar and All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert.

Both left me speechless, empty and yet whole, curious and wanting more from these characters (or in the instance of the nonfiction book, the actual people). They made me question my beliefs on different topics and affirmed other beliefs I hold close.

And for me, that is at the root of why I read, why I pick up books by authors from different countries, authors who look different from me, who have different lived experiences from my own. Authors who can open my eyes to things that I would not otherwise see. Reading is one of my greatest teachers, and for that reason, books are one of my most beloved companions.

But books are also escapism or distraction. Sometimes I pick up a book and fall into another world, fall into someone else’s life, as a way to avoid my own.

These are the 10 best books I have read this year that I think you should read too. A few are unforgettable, but many of them are simply wonderful distractions.

1. Martyr by Kaveh Akbar

The moment I closed the back cover of this book, I knew it would remain one of my most loved books of all time. When someone asks me what my favorite movie or song is, I always pause, unsure of the answer. I never pause when the same question is asked of books. Until this year, the answer was Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy. But now, I say, '“oo, that’s a tough one. I love Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy and also Martyr by Kaveh Akbar.”

I couldn’t possibly choose between the two, but Martyr firmly stands alongside McConaghy.

Cyrus, an Iranian-American man living in the Midwest becomes obsessed with the idea of writing a book about martyrdom. In his research, he finds a female artist dying of cancer and doing her final exhibit in New York City. Each day, people can line up at the museum, and each ask her one question, any question that they want. Cyrus scrapes the money together to fly to New York to speak to her. The depth of the characters, the question of what happens after death, alongside what the point of life is, ring prominently throughout.

There is not a single superfluous word in this book. It is poetry in novel form.

Get a copy here.

2. All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert

I have long been a fan of Elizabeth Gilbert. Her fiction is exceptional, her Substack is joyous, and her interviews are quirky. I have read Big Magic every January for the last three years to start the year with creativity at the forefront.

This book was wholly different from her fiction, and I imagine it’s not a book for everyone. But it was most certainly a book for me. It is raw and emotional. Gilbert exposes her most vulnerable moments in her relationship with Rayya Elias, as well as her recovery from her own addiction. I couldn’t put it down. I think I read the whole thing in two days.

Get a copy here.

3. Art Above Everything by Stephanie Elizondo Griest

I have never read anything by Griest before, but after this book, I have added all of them to my library queue. A fellow nonfiction writer, Griest spent 10 years interviewing female artists around the world for this book with the question, “Is art worth it?”

Is art worth the sacrifice of maybe never having a partner? Never having children? Never having a stable income? All of the women agree that the answer is yes. Each chapter delves into different people’s stories, while we also follow the narrative of Griest’s life as an artist sprinkled throughout. I’m not embarrassed to admit that I re-read the chapter about Sandra Cisneros three times.

Get a copy here.

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4. Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

A short but powerful read that all expats, long-term travelers, and digital nomads should read. This book was so intelligently written, in part laugh-out-loud funny, in part glaringly critical of the gentrification that is taking place in cities around the world as globalism takes hold.

The main characters, Anna and Tom, are from an unnamed southern European country. They move to Berlin in their mid-20s, armed with laptops and a few virtual clients. They spend much of those first years enjoying a lower cost of living, endless nightlife, long summer days at Templehof, and long winter nights at local cafes and bars.

People they know come and go, until every few years their friendship group looks completely different. The people get younger, or rather, the newcomers remain the same while they continue to age. The funky bars and local cafes are slowly replaced by high-end clothing boutiques and beige and white coffee shops with English menus.

The book talks about the prevalence of social media in our society and how that affects our tastes, and how universal things have become around the world because of it. It tackles the feeling of returning home, completely changed.

Get a copy here.

5. The Book Club for Troublesome Women by Marie Bostwick

Four women in suburban DC get together to form a book club in 1963, and it changes their whole lives. The first book they chose is The Feminine Mystique.

This is an ode to female friendship, to discovering your true self, to feminism and marriage, and to freedom. It’s funny and light while also being full of rich characters with deep relationships.

Get a copy here.

6. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

This is the second book that I’ve read by Tokarczuk (the first being Flights). This was such a fantastically gripping novel about a series of murders that take place in a small Polish town in the middle of winter.

All of the people who have been killed are linked to a hunter’s club, so a local woman starts to wonder if the murders are revenge from the animals. I couldn’t put this down until I learned the truth.

Get a copy here.

7. Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy’s memoir of her young life and what led her to the writer’s life. She discusses her relationship with her mother both as a young child, through adolescence, and into adulthood.

It also highlighted what it was like growing up and living in India in the 70s and 80s, which was so eye-opening. It felt like a memoir and like a travelogue.

Get a copy here.

8. Butter by Asako Yuzuki

Another murder mystery, but centered around one of my favorite topics, food. Manako Kajii sits in jail, convicted of the murder of three ex-boyfriends, while journalist Rika tries to get to the bottom of the story.

It’s a tale of Japanese culture, of the expectations of women and thinness, it’s about pleasure and joy, and most of all, about the decadence of good food.

Get a copy here.

9. Fraud by Zadie Smith

Everything Zadie Smith touches turns to gold in my humble opinion. The Fraud was hard to get into because the style of writing is very old-English, but once I got used to the writing style, I fell in love.

The main character, Mrs. Touchet, lives with her cousin, the writer William Ainsworth (a real historical character from the 19th century). Throughout the novel, we are following the also true story of the Tickborne trial, a case of a man who may or may not have pretended to be Roger Tichborne, the heir to a family fortune, and who was believed to have died in a shipwreck.

Zadie Smith brings you into the lives of the four adults who live in the Ainsworth residence, including Ainsworth’s new wife, the housekeeper who he got pregnant a few months before the book begins. It’s hilarious and intelligent. There is so much irony and dry British humor in it that I absolutely adored.

Get a copy here.

10. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Rooney is one of my favorite writers. Her books are so character-focused. I know that when I pick up one of her books, I’m going to enjoy it, and I’m going to want to be a better writer once it’s done.

Intermezzo might very well be her best work. The novel follows the lives of two brothers, Ivan and Peter, following the death of their father. Like all Rooney novels, you get to know the characters, their romantic relationships (even the failed ones), and their inner demons. Each character is so human, so relatable. Even when talking about things I know nothing about, like chess, I’m still enthralled.

Get a copy here.

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Honorable Mentions

These are the honorable mentions, the books that were very good, but didn’t quite make it into the top 10 that I read this year.

• The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong

• Joyride by Susan Orlean

• Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe

• Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid

• Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

• Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder

• It’s What I Do by Lynsey Addario

• The Naked Don’t Fear the Water by Matthieu Aikins

How You Can Support This Substack

If you would like to support this newsletter and my continued work to bring you thoughtful stories from around the world, you can check out my blog for more stories and helpful travel guides from around the world.

If you’re traveling to Mexico soon, consider picking up one of my digital travel guides to help you make the most of your trip!

If you really enjoy these stories, consider becoming a paid subscriber or gifting a subscription to a travel-lover in your life.

Give a gift subscription

Until next time,

Laura

I went for a run this morning in one of my favorite places in Seattle, Discovery Park. I was running the Loop Trail, a trail I have walked more than a dozen times in the last two years. I know every turn, every crushing hill.

At an intersection, I saw a couple stop and hover over the man’s phone, checking to see if they were on the right path.

It’s hard to get lost in this park, I thought to myself. There are signposts at every junction, pointing you along the loop trail or to the North Parking Lot or the Visitor Center.

Then I remembered back to my first trip to the park. We didn’t have a car yet, so we took the bus to the edge and walked in. I used Google Maps to navigate us from our Airbnb in Queen Anne to the center of the park. Then I used AllTrails to make sure that we were on the loop trail the whole time. We did veer off it once, but the map told me immediately, so we didn’t stray far from our intended path.

It got me thinking. When was the last time I was truly lost?

I thought of the winding streets of Hanoi, Vietnam. I was there in 2015. I didn’t have a smartphone. For the entire five months I traveled this region, I relied on the small maps in my Southeast Asia on a Shoestring Lonely Planet.

I wandered down the streets packed with motorbikes, people sitting on the stoops of their homes, the endless sound of honking horns making it hard to think. The oppressive heat and my 35L backpack bursting at the seams both weighed me down as I walked. And all the while, trying to find a street sign, trying to figure out where I was on this tiny map in the book.

Could it really be that I haven’t been lost in over a decade?

I came to an intersection and looked at the signpost. It didn’t say loop trail. Did I miss my turn?

I looked straight ahead, then to the right where the trail led. Both looked unfamiliar. The loop trail is usually easy to follow because you barely have to turn.

I went right, knowing it was probably the wrong way, knowing that I was about to head down uncharted territory.

I kept my phone in my pocket as I looked up at the mossy trees above me. I felt the mist in the air. I followed the trail for a mile before I came to an intersection. I could keep going straight, or I could turn right. Still, the sign made no mention of the Loop Trail. I kept going straight.

Strava announced that I had run another mile. Was I now both lost and running further than I had intended? I felt exhilarated. I knew that I would eventually find my way back to the parking lot. I would either end up at the beach or at a parking lot, and from either, I knew my way back. Plus, I had my phone in my pocket if I really needed it.

Eventually, the trail opened up to an expansive green space, one I was very familiar with. I could see straight across Puget Sound to the snow-capped Olympic Mountains. On the sign, there was an arrow that was pointing in both directions. Next to the arrow, it said Loop Trail.

What I’m Reading

• Joyride by Susan Orlean. A fantastic memoir by a prolific writer. Orlean started her career at a small publisher in Portland and eventually made her way up the ranks as a staff writer at the New Yorker, publishing at Vogue and Rolling Stone along the way. She has written several books on completely different nonfiction topics, but this is the first in which she writes so extensively about herself. I loved hearing about what it was like working for the New Yorker in the 80s and 90s, about the life of a freelancer when magazines were in their heyday. It was inspiring to read about the twists and turns of her career and to understand the time it took for her to write her nonfiction books.

How You Can Support This Substack

If you would like to support this newsletter and my continued work to bring you thoughtful stories from around the world, you can check out my blog for more stories and helpful travel guides from around the world.

If you’re traveling to Mexico soon, consider picking up one of my digital travel guides to help you make the most of your trip!

If you really enjoy these stories, consider becoming a paid subscriber or gifting a subscription to a travel-lover in your life.

Give a gift subscription

Until next time,

Laura

“This has to be one of our best lunch views of the year,” Luke said as we sat with our legs dangling over the rock that we were sitting on, nothing below to catch our fall. I took our lunch out of my backpack, then immediately put my arms back through the straps, securing it on my back for fear that if I let it slip, our car keys would be gone forever, left to the mountain lions that had been spotted at this peak only a few days prior. Thankfully, I didn’t see that sign in the parking lot until the end of the hike.

“Ooo, I don’t know,” I said, “what about the view of Devil’s Golf Course while we had lunch in Death Valley back in May?”

“Yeah, and there was that view of the Pacific Ocean when we had lunch out of the camper van on the Oregon coast in July,” Luke replied, taking back his initial declaration.

“It’s definitely the best mountain view we’ve had all year,” he rebuttled.

I took another bite of my potato salad and looked out at the rocky crags of the Cascade Mountain Range visible in every direction. You could just about make out Glacier Peak in the distance. To my right was Puget Sound and the lush green of the San Juan Islands dotted around it. The sky was the bluest I’ve seen it in weeks, the smoke from nearby wildfires finally at bay.

Life has changed a lot in the last few months. I’ve been feeling a lot of feelings and thinking a lot of thoughts, and sometimes it can get pretty loud in this head of mine. The mountains have been my meditation from all of the noise, and sitting up here in total silence, bar the sound of arugula crunching between my teeth, I felt the truth in Luke’s words. This was one of the most beautiful places I have eaten a meal this year, but maybe not entirely because of what I could see with my eyes.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath. The breeze at the top makes the sweat on my t-shirt feel cold. A chill is rising up the back of my neck. It’s time to get moving again.

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What I’m Reading

• Art Above Everything by Stephanie Elizondo Griest. This wasn’t a particularly long book, but I savored each chapter like a decadent dessert. Griest spent 10 years doing the research for this book, traveling from New York to New Zealand to Iceland, over to India, across the US, and south to Mexico. In each chapter, she interviews female artists asking them a myriad of different questions about their life and their art, but most of all, asking them, “Is art worth it?” By “it,” she means the sacrifices. Was it worth not having children? Not having a stable income? Was it worth the criticism and failure along the way? Everyone agrees that, of course, it was worth it.

How You Can Support This Substack

If you would like to support this newsletter and my continued work to bring you thoughtful stories from around the world, you can check out my blog for more stories and helpful travel guides from around the world.

If you’re traveling to Mexico soon, consider picking up one of my digital travel guides to help you make the most of your trip!

If you really enjoy these stories, consider becoming a paid subscriber or gifting a subscription to a travel-lover in your life.

Give a gift subscription

Until next time,

Laura

Earlier this year, I asked my mom if she could send me some of my old journals that I had in one of the many boxes stored in my parents’ garage.

“How will I find it amid the hundreds of boxes you have here?” She antagonizes me every time I ask her to find something for me. And rightly so.

They have multiplied over the years, reproducing without my permission. What started as a temporary storage situation while I was on my gap year in 2010 turned into a somewhat permanent solution that has meant my parent’s aren’t going to be parking a car in their garage anytime soon (although some might argue this has very little to do with the Home Depot containers labeled “Laura’s stuff” that dominate the back wall).

Each time I ask my mom to send me something from the garage, I get an entire box full of things that I didn’t realize were still being stored there. This time was no different.

Now, in addition to adding 10 notebooks to my bookshelf, I have also added a small brass Buddha statue from Thailand, a blown glass fern frond from New Zealand, and all of the ceramic painted skulls that I bought while living in Mexico.

I kept meticulous journals during my years of living abroad, especially those early months of arriving somewhere new or whenever I quit my job and traveled full-time. I have at least one journal for every year starting in 2010, plus the journal I kept during my semester of studying abroad, when Luke and I met. That journal is how we chose our “anniversary.” I wrote about our first date in it, a day trip to a town called Rorschach on October 3, 2008.

I knew I would want to read back through these journals as I got older, use them as a reminder of who I once was. And while it’s only been 15 years, boy, am I enjoying reading about my younger self. She was so brave, so naive, so excitable, so awed by the world. We have the last two in common still, I think.

I’ve been reading about my trip to Bali this week. It was an unintentional trip, but one that would have enormous ripple effects on my life.

In 2012, I applied for a new visa while living in Australia. I was on the Working Holiday visa for my first year, and in order to stay for a second year, I planned on taking a course at a local college and moving onto a student visa. I applied for a program, was accepted, and then sent my application to the government to move on to this other visa, all from the comfort of my Sydney apartment.

One afternoon on my way to work, Luke called to tell me that my visa had been denied. I called in sick and ran home to find out if I was a felon, if I would forever have to claim that I was denied entry to a country, and if I was now illegally in Australia.

It turns out, at least at the time, Americans could not change their visa status while inside the country. I would have to leave Australia and apply again.

Sounded simple enough. So I looked at the nearest and cheapest place I could go from Sydney, which led me to booking a trip to Bali.

My first reaction to what I wrote in this journal is how much awe I experienced on this trip. Bali was the first place I had ever been that was truly unlike home. New Zealand and Australia were certainly different in their own ways: meat pies and budgie smugglers, Christmas in the middle of summer, and always being called by some nickname that was usually longer than my actual name. But, for the most part, the language was the same, and so much of the culture was easily understood because it was similar to my own.

It wasn’t until I got to Bali that I experienced true culture shock for the very first time in my life.

There is part of this naïveté that I’m glad I have outgrown - the way that I talked about the Balinese people in these journal entries is fraught with cliché; hardworking, kind, generous, happy with so little. I cringe at young me and her inability to see through the kindness of capitalism, the generalizations of an entire nation based on the few service workers that I met, thinking that there was somehow peace in their poverty.

But I also smile at so much of the firsts. The first time I went to a night market was in Bali. The first time I drank the water out of a freshly cut coconut was in Bali (I did not like it). The first time I took a cooking class, saw a sea turtle in the wild, or made friends with a bartender who later became our tour guide was on this trip to Bali. The first time I ate street food, the first time I ate strange food, the first time I watched a sunset sitting in a beanbag chair on the beach with a beer, and the first time I almost pooped my pants were all in Bali.

I booked a hotel transfer from the airport before I arrived because I was so nervous about how I would get to the hotel. I ate at the same restaurant the first two nights I was there because it was a 2-minute walk from the hotel, and there were no sidewalks on the street, and all of the cars and bikes were honking at me. I booked all of our tours and taxis for those first few days through the hotel because it was easier.

Now, give me a little grace. It was 2012. I didn’t have a smartphone or blogs or ChatGPT to tell me how to do things. All I had was a Bali Lonely Planet that I had taken out of the Sydney library (thankfully, my visa was granted, so I could return it, but I felt like such a rebel taking it out of the country without knowing for sure!).

I was only 24 years old, and although I pretended to be big and brave about travel, I was an absolute wimp from the moment I arrived in Bali until about day four, when I realized there was nothing to be afraid of and no one was going to run me over in the street (at least not intentionally).

By the end of the trip, I was frequenting all the night markets, eating at local warungs, and walking the tightrope of concrete between the rice fields and the road like a pro. I was hailing Bluebird taxis, negotiating prices for yet another sarong that I absolutely had to have at the local shops, and covering my sunburnt back with Bintang t-shirts like every other backpacker on the island.

After three weeks of adventure, I headed back to Australia, visa in hand, but hungry to get back to this continent. It would take a year and a half, but eventually I would pack up a few suitcases (leaving the rest in my parents’ garage, of course) and move to Asia. I credit this trip to Bali with giving me that spark, with giving me that confidence, with showing me what was on the other side of my comfort zone.

I didn’t always appreciate this place, certainly not as the hours of darkness grew longer and fall very quickly turned to winter, but there’s something about the way the light looks at this time of year that always takes me back to those calm mornings. The calm, gray, peacefully quiet mornings in Lithuania.

On cold winter mornings, I sat at my kitchen table with my journal and a cup of coffee, bundled in a sweatshirt and sweatpants as the wind whipped under the weak seal of the window. I watched it go from dark to light, the kindergarten drop off in full flow across the street, the sidewalks dusted with salt to keep you from slipping on the ice that had formed overnight.

I wouldn’t exactly call it a sunrise. It was more that it just became light enough to see everything, but only just light enough. The entire world outside my window was this shade of blue-gray.

It’s still a color I’ve only ever seen in Lithuania. Like the bright green of the grass in the UK or the red-orange color of the sunsets in Baja, the blue-gray skies in Lithuania at winter time are a permanent memory. I have journals full of the all of the ways that I tried to describe this color: arctic, icy. The color your lips turn when you get cold. The blue beneath your fingernails closest to the nail bed. My fellow photography lovers will know when you’re trying to play around with the white balance in your photo and you accidentally go too cool. That blue.

I had never lived anywhere that far north before, where the sun doesn’t really rise all the way up into the sky for months at a time. It stays at this sort of afternoon height, always blinding you while you’re driving, no matter what time of day it is.

These winters weren’t idyllic, of course. It was dark and cold and isolating and lonely, some of the loneliest times I’ve ever had. But on many mornings, for months at a time, that blue-gray sky kept me company.

What I’m Reading

• Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams. Sarah was one of the early Facebook employees back in 2010 and this book is about how she went from idealist to a maniac in just a few years. It’s a behind the scenes of how things have gone so wrong maybe not just in what we now call Meta, but in the entire tech sector these last 15 years. As an outsider to this industry, I have found this a fascinating and terrifying read.

• Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. I’m reading this book for my book club and it is fantastic. I probably wouldn’t have picked this up based on the back cover, but the writing is exquisite, the storytelling is very character-focused (my favorite kind of books), and it is very philosophical about life, getting older, and how society sees and treats people towards the latter end of life. It takes place in rural Poland, whose description reminded me a lot of Lithuania and probably sparked the initial thoughts for today’s essay.

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Until next time,

Laura