About

Travel is like a drug – it can offer an incredible high, it can drag you down, and it is also extremely addictive.

I’ve played with the idea of travel writing since college, but never felt like I had any real stories to tell. I was thinking back to my first venture into Continental Europe and the excitement I encountered there.

Thirty years ago this summer, I embarked on my first real visit to Europe as a naïve college student of 19. It was 1985, and Ronald Reagan was President, Bruce Springsteen was Boss, and the dollar was strong. I’d just completed my sophomore year and I was ready to take on the world. On a sunny day in June, I flew from New Orleans International Airport to New York JFK, and then caught an Iberia flight to Madrid for a two month ‘Exploration’ tour of 20 European countries as part of a student exchange program with 39 other students.

Over the course of approximately 10 weeks, I traveled with the group from Madrid to Barcelona in Spain, on to Nice, Carcassonne, Aix en Provence in France, Switzerland, three cities in Germany, England, Scotland, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Italy and Greece – all on a bus. By the end of the summer, I’d made enduring friendships and seen more monuments and sampled more culture than I ever dreamed possible.

Ten years later, I moved to The Netherlands to live in Amsterdam, where I still reside today.

I credit my parents, particularly my father, with my love of travel. Although his parents hailed from Mississippi and the Midwestern U.S. he spent a good deal of his childhood in South America – Columbia and Venezuela. He spoke fluent Spanish, although I don’t recall him using it around the house growing up. My mother was a language major in college and studied Spanish and French at Newcomb University in New Orleans.

They continued to travel extensively after they were married, even when they had expanded their brood to include five kids. Both their families appreciated the joys of travel, and my aunts on both sides had been all over the globe and even lived abroad.

When my mother passed away, travel became my escape. Every summer, we’d load up the family station wagon, or rent an RV, or hop on a plane and my father would take us on a voyage of discovery to some new pocket of the world or back to visit one of our favorites.

I took a job opportunity in Holland just shy of my 30^th birthday, thinking I’d be spending a year traveling Europe and would eventually return back to my own country. But wanderlust got the best of me, and here I remain 20 years on…