2016–2024 Adventure Roundup

Nine years of writing through travels and tribulations

I first started writing my adventures in a series of emails when I was fourteen, on a month-long trip to Mexico’s southernmost state.

It wasn’t quite a solo trip — I was in the company of the twenty-year-old daughter of a friend of my dad’s. But I met her for the first time during the LAX transfer on the way there, and she spent most of her time interning at the local hospital.

Consequently, I had a lot of time on my own: learning recipes from the grandmother at our home stay, taking baile foclórico classes at the town community center, befriending children by juggling on street corners — and writing.

In writing these letters home (to an ever-growing email list of family and friends), I discovered the addictive rhythm of the craft: taking mental notes of moments, word choices, smells. I wrote out recipes and cultural notes, and found I treasured the experiences the more for sharing them.

Across the intervening years, I wrote as I always have: intermittently, but prolifically when the mood strikes. I wrote letters when I was twenty, backpacking and hitchhiking the length of Chile with my dad, and processed them into short stories for an independent study. I wrote articles and interviews for my college paper. When we launched our startup back in 2013, I wrote our company blog: user stories and notes from inside the process.

When I hit the road in the spring of 2016, I started writing for myself again. That was the year I lived out of a backpack. Between conference speaking engagements spanning Mexico City to London, Beirut to Singapore, I was reading books on our changing climate and hiking long distances through southern Iceland, the Norwegian Arctic, China’s Yunnan province. Writing after a long walk was a way to process my thoughts.

It was on the China leg of the trip when I really started blogging regularly, posting to an unknown audience — always for my own pleasure, the focused flow. I write at inadvisable times, in snatches, during the should-be-sleeping hours. I can’t help it; I think of the way I want to say it, and I have to write it down. I write almost exclusively on my phone, one-handed, on bus rides and in the waiting…