I caught the travel bug early.

I was the kid who always wanted to be somewhere else. I spent hours reading about UNESCO World Heritage sites and made obsessive lists of the world’s greatest destinations. I read dated copies of National Geographic at the hair salon while my mom received a perm. I watched travel shows, thrifted tattered guidebooks, and daydreamed about the places I’d go.

So when I flew to London with a children’s choir, my 12-year-old heart could barely contain its excitement. Before we even dropped off our bags at the hotel, we drove—on the opposite side of the street!—to a concert at St. Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square.

The parish felt old and grand. Onstage, kids dropped like flies from jet lag and stuffy summer air, but I stood wide-eyed, barely singing, taking it all in. Churches back in Kansas looked nothing like this.

And there was so much more to see. I gawked at the Tower of London’s ravens, slowly circled the Eye, tried rice pudding. A security guard at St. Paul’s Cathedral barked at me for sitting, and a boy named Paul spat sugar at me over a cuppa.

I was spellbound. It all felt positively Hogwartian.

Unsurprisingly, that little dreamer has never left me. She’s led me to more than 20 countries across four continents, from the mountains of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest and the plains of the Serengeti to the great cafes of Europe and reefs of the Caribbean. And there is still so much more to see.

Now, I’m chasing the dream of being a travel writer.

I earned my journalism degree at Columbia College Chicago, and following internships at Time Out Chicago, Chicago Magazine, and Crain’s Chicago Business, I landed my first full-time newspaper gig as an editorial assistant at the Chicago Tribune. After a year, I transitioned to an editor’s role, producing stories for chicagotribune.com. It was exhilarating and exhausting in equal measure.

I later served as a lead editor of Chicago Lawyer magazine and copy editor for its affiliated newspaper, the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, before taking a corporate detour. I served as a communications manager at global firms like McKinsey & Company and Baker McKenzie, where I focused on executive communications for CEOs and senior leaders, content development and publishing, strategic messaging, and change communications.

But I craved better quality of life, new adventures, and, importantly, the freedom to chase the stories I want to tell. All of which led me to quit a full-time Communications Director position and pursue freelance writing opportunities alongside contract communications consulting roles.

To take my midlife crisis (midlife glow-up?) a step further, I relocated to Barcelona in 2025 with just a few suitcases and my cat. The city is an endless source of inspiration and one of my favorite destinations to write about.

If you’ve read this far, thank you.

Through my work, I want to explore what it means to travel slowly. Thoughtfully.

As magical as travel can be, I worry about the impact of overtourism on the people and places we visit. Congestion, pollution, strained infrastructure systems, increased costs of living, displacement, habitat destruction. Barcelona is a great example: rents continue to rise while day trippers flood the city center, spending little outside the main tourist haunts.

We as individual travelers can't control the systems that fuel these problems, but we can take intentional steps to limit our personal impact. I want to tell stories that help people (myself included) move through the world with greater care. I hope my work invites questions. I hope it sparks curiosity. And I hope it inspires adventure.

Thank you for being here. Wishing you safe travels!