Located between Tulum and Mérida along the Yucatán Peninsula, Valladolid is the kind of place that earns its spot on your itinerary — not just as a base for day trips, but as a destination worth slowing down for. This compact colonial town surprises most visitors with...
I'll be upfront with you: Tulum was a strange one. We arrived in late April — just past Easter, technically shoulder season — and the place felt oddly quiet. Half the hotels along the beach road were either under construction or looked like they'd been abandoned...
Playa del Carmen was my first look at Mexico, and it won me over immediately. My boyfriend and I flew into Cancun, but we had limited vacation days and a tight itinerary, so we skipped the city entirely and took the first ADO bus south. Two hours and 270 Mexican pesos...
People ask me this all the time. Friends, followers, strangers in hostel common rooms: where should I go first? And every time, I want to give them a real answer — not a list of the world's most Instagrammed places, not a roundup of "hidden gems" that are anything but...
When I was a little girl, I used to make dresses for my dolls. Not buy them — make them, from whatever fabric scraps I could find. I had strong opinions about what looked right and what didn't, even then. That instinct never left me, though it shifted somewhere along...
The short trip to Tallinn was made possible by a pandemic loophole. In 2020, while I was volunteering in Vilnius, Lithuania, the three Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — formed a travel bubble. You could cross between them freely while the rest of Europe...
I have never driven a car. Not once. I've never sat in the driver's seat, never touched a steering wheel, never parallel parked or stalled in traffic. And yet I've stood in front of a Ferrari at Motorworld in Cologne with my heart doing something strange, and I've...
I almost didn't stop in Râșnov. We were in a taxi leaving Bran Castle — a bit underwhelmed, a bit touristy-fed-up — when the taxi driver said "there's another fortress on the way back to Brașov." It wasn't on my itinerary. I'd never really thought about it. But we...
I first set foot in France in September 2019 — not through Paris, not through a package tour, but through a volunteering program in the tiny village of Laguépie. A group of us — young people from different countries — were living together in a big house and helping...