My lifelong curiosity about the lives of others led me to study cultural anthropology, a discipline that granted me a unique lens through which to see the world, grounded in the respect of people and traditions different from my own. It also granted me a whole lot of student loans and no straightforward career path. After receiving my master’s degree, I decided to travel and it quickly became not only my passion but also my career. After guiding tours on two continents, I worked for tour operators, designing and managing complex travel experiences across the globe. 

As someone immersed in the travel industry for close to 15 years, I’m often asked “what is your favorite travel destination?” I hate this question. It’s too finite, too fixed. My answer depends on my mood, the temperature, the book I’m reading, the music I’m listening to, the time of day. “What does travel mean to you?” is better, but still too limited. Travel can be truly life changing, providing a harrowing experience that shifts our perspective on life and pushes us to find our limits. It can also be a vacation spent laying on the beach for pure fun and relaxation, and I don’t think there is a hierarchy on which of these experiences is more valid. Travel can also be tiring and disappointing. For me, the most important thing about travel is the multiplicity itself - it is so many things, to so many people; it is so many things just to me, all the time shifting and providing something new. 

This sense of multiplicity links travel and inspiration: they feed on each other and grow. I find inspiration in many places, but always come back to art and literature. I read a line in a book, which reminds me of a painting hanging in the Prado, and suddenly I’m in Spain in my memories, smearing freshly sliced tomatoes onto crunchy grilled bread. I have found that opening ourselves up to inspiration creates better travel experiences, which then become their own inspirations within our lives. Social media can be great, and it can be terrible, and it is currently unavoidable. It is also a funnel: when we look at the same types of images that tell us what travel is and what it feels like, we narrow our vision so it can only ever be that, or the failure to live up to that which we see. I want to use social media to escape this funnel and engage with a multiplicity of inspiration, to expand our ideas of what travel is, what travel feels like, what it gives us, how we get inspiration for it, how it should be planned. 

Travel is about how we want to feel, and we need to understand and engage with that in order to get the most from it. My mission with Muses is to help you do just that.