The glaring, delicious deficit sitting right in front of me was a challenge to explore more and a gift to enjoy it.

The only playbook that matters when we’re traveling untethered is ours.

While each piece of art tells its own story, together they tell my story. 

As magic hour washes over the shops, restaurants and stalls, the river that cuts this ancient town in half starts to swell with the most arresting and electrifying display of color and tradition.

And most of it all, San Sebastián opened up everything – eyes, ears, heart, mind and gut – to the realization that my calling and my purpose will always faithfully orbit around the infinite manifestations of taste in this world. 

Life had me in motion for no other reason than to stop me in my tracks

A country bursting with freshness, color and most of all flavor

If our hearts, minds and eyes remain open, travel can be so restorative from places where raw and sweeping beauty is so abundant.

In search of the bites and sips that reawaken not only tastebuds but quiet possibility from deep within

Even if life directs me somewhere else, I half believe my tastebuds belong right here.    

A place we love can call us back any number of imaginative and mysterious ways. 

My favorite places to go back to are those that somehow intuitively meet us just where we are. 

How hard we think it is sometimes to connect with one another when our hearts are already built for that very thing!

It was impossible for me not to see these places I had once been with fresh perspective.  I believe that’s one way travel’s magical powers go to work deep within us. So much gratitude can be found in seeing, once and yet again.

It was suddenly clear to me as I let my heart play navigator through the bustling streets of Rome that professional failure and regret were no match for the taste and vibrancy of this city.  

I had uncovered the confidence and snatched up the permission to see the world at my own pace, on my own budget and through my own taste.