C O L L I S I O N S
Collisions are the unplanned moments that make travel matter. A conversation that shifts something, a stranger who becomes a mirror, a place that hands you a piece of yourself you didn't even know was missing.
Each impact reveals a truth, leaves its mark, deposits residue meant to shape not only how we move but who we become.
COLLISION 00016
All That Lived and Breathed Underneath
As someone who likes to travel fiercely to her own rhythm, I rarely sign up for the structured tour. I like the freedom of going where I want, when I want; of stopping when I’m inspired to; or skipping altogether when I’m not moved or motivated to slow down.
I don’t want to see a new place through the lens of someone else’s templated, standard agenda. I want instead to harmonize all the nudges of my internal bearings – my mind, body, gut and soul – through my own intuition and through finding my own flow. I am unabashedly and uncompromisingly selfish in this sense. For I know when I travel locked into my own why, I connect to a place in the way I was always meant to.
That doesn’t mean I don’t follow whim and wonder or lean on locals and experts. It simply means I move, above all, by my internal compass.
But I also know my limitations.
Driving on the other side of the road has always been a travel non-negotiable for me, as much here in South Africa, as it was months earlier in New Zealand. Throw in cliffside driving, wine-tasting and the risks of parking a tempting, shiny rental car around Cape Town, as I had been informed of them, and I knew I had to turn to a local to help me navigate all the places I wanted to see. Three weeks here would take me not only to Cape Town, the Mother City, but around the Cape, through three different wine regions and down to the whale-inhabited southern coast.
Thanks to a good-old-fashioned Google search I found Allie. I hired him for all the reasons I would come to so thoroughly enjoy him for. His Tours by Locals profile exuded personality, a self-effacing humble charm and a genuine streak of unrelenting hospitality. This meant all the more, sitting as it did atop a convincing collection of rave reviews from fellow travelers.
I knew I wasn’t getting an ego-fueled, canned script when Allie spoke. I could tell he was sharing what he knew based on the unique shape of our one-of-a-kind encounter. I am sure he had his talking points, but he engaged with them versus delivered them.
He delighted in finding me dolphins and whales, baboons and ostriches, clear skies and rainbows. He persisted in getting just the right shot, finding just the right look-out point, sharing just the right detail to turn a waterfall, bay or neighborhood into a more colorful, human story.
Never was this more evident than when he surprised me on our way to Franschhoek with a visit to the gates of Drakenstein Correctional Facility, once called Victor Verster prison. The prison known above all else for releasing the most famous political prisoner in South African history. Nelson Mandela.
As we approached, I leaned forward from the front seat fighting against the resistance of my seat belt. At these gates thirty-six years ago now, Nelson Mandela completed his historic 27-year walk to freedom.
I had goosebumps everywhere. My eyes widened with the unexpectedness and tenderness of Allie’s gesture. A lump caught in the back of my throat as my head slowly shook back and forth in pure joy and gratitude. I was smiling.
I never knew seeing this place was a possibility. I never knew standing on this ground could be my reality.
Somewhere along our drives earlier that week, I had shared with Allie that I’d read Mandela’s autobiography, The Long Walk to Freedom. I even shared that I was grateful I hadn’t made the trip back in 2020 when I originally planned to visit, because I wasn’t ready for any of it. Allie and I had talked at length during our time together about life during and after Apartheid, about the ripple effects of it on the country’s policies, politics and poverty.
While I wish for the sake of so many it wasn’t a lens I ever had to gaze through, I was grateful I could try and understand it through Allie’s lens.
He was a wealth of knowledge about the Western Cape, its wildlife, its history, its must-see and must-do spots. Walking alongside him in and out of restaurants and sites of interest, it was clear, too, he was an incredibly well-respected tour guide. He’d been doing this for three decades, he told me. He was an entrepreneur, a steward of the earth and nature, and in the sweetest of ways, he was a proud, doting grandfather.
I couldn’t help but think as we drove into Franschhoek later that afternoon, that decades before some might have only reduced him to a man of color, Brown, of Indian descent. That made the lump in the back of my throat return.
What a tragedy to judge this life based only on its skin and surface. And how lucky had I been that Mandela took that walk so I could see and collide with all that lived and breathed gloriously just underneath.
COLLISION 00015
The Mitchell Effect
I knew the moment I met Mitchell he would be a young man to remember. His wholesomeness, positive energy and sense of wonder and curiosity were simply too big to contain, to not write about, to not later reflect on. To not be grateful to have met him along my journey in this extraordinary part of this extraordinary country.
I met Mitchell in the lovely wine village of Franschhoek, South Africa. Franschhoek sits tucked just so in a valley nestled within these epic African mountain ranges. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to learn this is where the concept of place as breathtaking was first conceived. It is that and then some.
As the sun rises here it casts a warm, mystical glow over the valley. And as it sets it seems to cinematically dim the daylight into darkness in such peaceful stillness that I imagine it could even lull God, Himself to sleep.
The air is crisp and fresh. The lane leading up to my hotel is simple, serene perfection. There are white, bright pink and yellow roses, bright green sunbirds perched on winter’s picked-over, resting vineyards, smoke spilling out from chimneys of the white Dutch rooflines that pepper the horizon. My morning runs here were as much spiritual exercises as they were physical.
I stayed at the Cape Vue Country House. It would turn out to be all the things an inn in a place as picturesque as Franschhoek should be. Charming with every attention to detail thought of, but not overbearing, uptight or pretentious. The people who worked at Cape Vue: from Roger, the hospitality manager, to Mitchell and the waitstaff, to Bongi and Zola, the night watchmen, were heartwarming delights to talk and connect with. Human to human. I never wanted to leave.
When my eyes opened every morning, I thought of one thing first and only. Their phenomenal breakfast. That was where I first came to meet Mitchell. I enjoyed our daily conversations as much as I enjoyed the plates heaping with fresh fruit, the right-out-of-the-oven muffins and croissants and the locally curated meat and cheese tray.
Every morning at the breakfast table, after Mitchell brought my americano and took my order with a great big good morning greeting and smile, we would chat about everything under the sun: life in America, life with Trump and life with Obama, the Chicago diner scene, the CIA, fate, love and heartbreak, but of course travel.
When I asked Mitchell where he’d go in this great big, bountiful world, he replied, “Athens,” without the slightest bit of hesitation. “I’m obsessed with Athena,” he explained. I loved the conviction and passion of his reply. The way his eyes lit up and his whole body loosened when he spoke about Greek mythology. I could only shut up and listen. And hope that I had done my part to encourage him, as I suspect I was meant to, to see the world in the way he so clearly hungered to one day.
I acknowledged silently that so many had done that for me along my path to the right here and right now.
My second morning at Cape Vue, Mitchell surprised me with an off-menu Bobotie Benedict, a South African specialty of minced meat, sweet and savory at once. It was so very Mitchell as I would come to understand, and so very delicious.
Usually when I travel I keep my head low scrolling Substack, returning emails, cycling through silly games. But in Franschhoek? I never once looked down at my screen at the breakfast table. How could I?
Not only was the view from the dining room like nothing I would ever see again, I had found through one of the universe’s unlikely pairings a kindred spirit to connect with. Someone with whom to share what I knew about moving with meaning. And someone I suspect, too, I was meant to learn from about fostering childlike joy and marvel for the wonders of our world.
As I hugged him goodbye, I wished deeply to myself that life and circumstance would, in fact, carry Mitchell to the places he dreamed of and to the collisions he deserved. I wished it for him, but mostly I wished it for the rest of us.
For if I learned one thing after four breakfasts in Franschhoek, it was that The Mitchell Effect under our one and only sun was magnificently and truly contagious.
COLLISION 00014
Between Land and Sea
As skeptical as I was of AI’s recommendation to read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, 12,000+ positive human reviews encouraged me to take the leap of faith.
I was instantly swept up in Kimmerer’s point of view which weaves her scientific knowledge as a botanist and ecology professor with her spiritual beliefs and practices as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Kimmerer’s words opened my mind for the first time to the often overlooked and simply magical relationship plants have to each other, the land and our human existence. In exploring this tension between two seemingly disparate worlds, she connects dots that everyday living and modern lifestyles can gloss past and recklessly over.
I had chosen the book in a concerted effort to shift out of the heavier stories of triumph and failure found in the memoirs of Maya Angelou and Nelson Mandela, the headier, over my head achievements found in Walter Isaacson’s Albert Einstein biography and the gastronomic obsession found in the poetic musings of the one and only Julia Child. I didn’t want lighter reading necessarily. I wanted instead to discover a new lens from which to filter the meaning traveling with intent and writing about intentional travel had inspired within me.
It’s fair to say I got that and then some.
The parallels that existed between Kimmerer’s soulful metaphors of reciprocity, gratitude and existence and Travel’s transformative power energized and animated what I once thought was all but impossible. They enabled an even deeper relationship with curiosity, beauty and self-discovery. They brought even more meaning to movement and collision.
I was still reading Braiding Sweetgrass when I sat down at Seebamboes, a Cape Town restaurant I had booked in the weeks leading up to my first visit to South Africa. Seebamboes’ concept was a most unusual take on traditional surf and turf. It creatively explored connections found among the local ingredients of the Cape’s land and sea. And not just any local ingredients. Its marine vegetation.
I wasn’t even halfway through my first dish when a card on the table caught my eye. Plant by plant, it detailed what would show up on my plate here in ways that were mind-blowing, flavorful riffs on both the familiar and the unconventional.
There would be nibs and tastes in some iteration or another of the big, gnarly, ominous sea bamboos that washed ashore with stalks as thick as a fireman’s hose, which time and tide had uprooted from the coast’s giant sea forests. There would be broths, stews, even ice cream made from the sea’s Duinespinasie (dune spinach) and Duineselderei (dune celery).
When I first tried to make my reservation, Seebamboes was closed for holiday. But I stayed on it and persisted in booking my coveted spot in the 16-seater restaurant. The very night I was scheduled to dine, South Africa’s June 30 immigration protests shut down the restaurant as a precaution. Fate eventually got me in two nights later, on my last evening in Cape Town. A special wine collaboration dinner. A single table left.
And that is how I came to dine, forty-eight hours later, with an enhanced perspective that could have been gleaned only from a tour around the Cape of Good Hope. I had driven past the kelp forests where My Octopus Teacher was filmed, experienced a local fish market and penguin colony and soaked up the awe of a journey to and from the most southwestern tip of this magnificent continent. The delay had groomed and readied me.
Wanting to keep the collision alive, I felt pulled to tell one of the restaurant’s founders about Braiding Sweetgrass. While she hadn’t heard of the book, she immediately recognized the significance of what I was sharing.
What I had been hungry for in mind, body, gut and soul was laid out before me now to take in with all of my senses. But it was taste that carried the meaning to a sacred place deep inside.
The connections between land and sea truly are as infinite it seemed as they are delicious.
COLLISION 00013
The Perfect Collaboration
As any traveler can attest, our most memorable and meaningful moments away from home are often the ones that never make an agenda. They materialize circuitously. We instinctively follow through on that one off-script, extemporaneous nudge and before we know it we’ve arrived at a place or in front of a person who it suddenly seems was always meant to find us.
As was the case with my visit to Amina Winery in Vagliagli, a postcard-perfect hamlet in the heart of Tuscany. My mom and I came to taste here at the insistence of our sweet and charming but persistent Tuscan tour guide, Ema. Just the evening before, Ema had more than proven himself by taking us last-minute to taste at Fontebelvedere, an elegant, laid-back vineyard that had it all, including wide-shot-worthy sweeping views of his hometown, Siena.
Amina felt special the moment we arrived. It is a small organic, female owned and operated vineyard producing under the label Complicità. Complicità translates into complicity, chosen quite deliberately. Here, in this small pocket of Tuscany, winemakers worked together pooling resources, insights and passion to ensure their neighbors were as successful as they were. The name Complicità celebrates the spirit and success of that long-running collaboration.
Amina’s family-run property includes a bed and breakfast, olive groves and of course, a vineyard. Its founder and owner, Cinzia Manca, is a local, self-made Vignaiola: a female artisan Italian winemaker and producer.
Cinzia gave us a tour of the grounds and warmly led an easy-going tasting, expertly weaving in just the right amount of detail and anecdote. By the time we had finished our tasting, she had elevated herself in my eyes from fearless female entrepreneur to outright badass.
I admired her independent, rebellious streak. I would later learn that fewer than 25% of vineyards in Italy are owned or managed by a woman. As a new founder myself, I was also fascinated by the way she seemed to do it all. The left brain and the right brain. She was a vintner and a visionary, fussing about our comfort and talking cement tank fermentation; a local businesswoman and a graceful host to guests from around the world.
She was proof of a concept I had been circling, but couldn’t yet name.
I had just launched The Untethered Traveler’s website weeks before. That baby step alone for me made me feel excruciatingly exposed and vulnerable. Yet, here I was standing in front of a woman who had been doing for years what I one day hoped to do. Build. Create. Thrive.
I believe when we take the right steps forward toward our purpose and calling, the universe bends, designs and arranges a path forward alongside us. I had found Ema. Ema, despite my control-freak tendencies, had managed to tame and influence me just enough to sit me at this exact tasting table in front of this exacting inspiration.
A perfect collaboration indeed.
Complicità.
COLLISION 00012
The Frequency That Found Her
The more I’ve adopted traveling with intent and perhaps more importantly, the more I’ve let go of an identity that no longer served me, the more I’ve felt a heightened and fulfilling shift in my interactions with others when I travel. It is as if I’m tuned in, finally after forty-seven years on this planet, into a whole new frequency.
Over the last eighteen months of untethered travel, I haven’t felt the shift as prominently as I had until I visited Mexico City for a week in May. I must have presented there with a shinier approachability which makes sense as I had already acknowledged I was traveling as leaned in as I may have ever been. I was hungry for whatever movement brought – be it creativity, culture shock or the collisions I’d come to live for.
I would go on to have encounters with a couple from Phoenix at the Handshake Speakeasy, two sisters from Austin at Pujol, and a young man from Chicago at Quintonil’s chef’s counter.
In each instance, shared wonder and awe for a dish sparked a back and forth which deepened as the drinks and meals progressed. In each instance, my original calculation about who my fellow travelers were proved to be embarrassingly narrow. In each instance, by staying open to coincidence, I had found a tiny irreplaceable burst of reassurance and joy.
By collecting and reflecting on these encounters through a single lens, their randomness had accumulated just so. I could suddenly grasp the power of culminating collisions as readily as I have come to celebrate the easy-to-spot, single seismic ones.
But of course, I reminded myself. Travel is a journey – not a series of disconnected episodes. It only makes sense that not all collisions will stand meaningfully on their own.
Then, somewhat reluctantly, I thought back to all the times I had sat in seats around the world completely walled off and resistant. Completely missing the point of travel – shielding myself in effect from its transformative touch and power. By refusing to let hundreds of opportunities to learn, stretch and feel pass through me, I had given up so much. Where, who, would I be now if I had embraced the gifts of travel as they were laid down before me?
Instead I chose to focus on what culminating collisions in Mexico City were surfacing to teach me. The couple at the bar? They weren’t snobby socialite hipsters. The sisters at Pujol? They were in town for two-Michelin-star dining and a System of a Down heavy metal concert! The young fellow Chicagoan? A soulful consultant who was learning to sew.
And me? Who was I to this gloriously random group of foodies?
A stepping stone, I had hoped, to the next random foodie. A reminder like they had been for me, to turn over our first impressions and not cling to them.
The girl who used to sit stiff and unaffected? She was a wiser woman now, making up for lost time, finally grateful for the frequency that found her.
COLLISION 00011
They Just Aren’t You’re People
I had just had an amazing forty-eight hours in Christchurch and I was leaving New Zealand’s third largest city inspired and well-fed behind the work of small counter chefs, quaint kitchens and a TranzAlpine foodie train ride across the South Island. The sun was shining and I was leaving satisfied I had maximized my time in this charming city and country.
I slid into my airport Uber and it wasn’t long before the young driver and I were engaged in a friendly back and forth, exchanging pleasantries at first and then the conversation gradually turned to real and heavier things. I had opened the door, I suppose, by sharing that I was traveling exclusively for work these days thanks to a forced career reset and layoff.
My driver got very quiet and I wondered as I do, if I had sounded too much like a privileged, out-of-touch, middle-aged white American. He eventually broke the silence, confessing that just three days before, he had been forced to move back in with his parents in Christchurch after losing his job quite unexpectedly in Wellington.
He was friendly, if not outright friends with the man who ran the company and recruited him. Just the night before, this manager had invited him to a party and promised him there was nothing to stress over. My driver went to bed that night feeling heard and satisfied but woke up the next morning to learn by email he’d been fired.
To hear him tell his story when it was still so raw was heartbreaking.
His role had been to come in and shake things up. But the more he tried to modernize the way his company did things the more he found himself on the wrong side of office politics. He hadn’t been there that long and he’d already been shunned and deemed powerless and expendable by his peers.
“No matter what I tried to do, they ganged up on me.” He saw me recoil and wince.
His voice grew louder, shakier and more impassioned as he spoke about failed attempts at diplomacy, creative problem solving and building relationships. He wasn’t angry. He was just rightfully emotional. He seemed equal parts hurt, bitter, disillusioned and confused. Emotions I understood in painstaking detail.
The more he talked the more I panicked. I closed my eyes and begged the universe for the right words to come, the ones this young man needed to hear today or could at least hold on to for later. I really tried. Words came out – half-formed anecdotes, a few misshapen platitudes. Finally my voice trailed off in defeat. “They just aren’t your people,” I said in a soft whisper.
He had heard me. Our eyes locked in the rearview mirror.
Those were words a friend had said to me when I was hurting the most. They had given me permission to see I was in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing and so yes, of course, I was surrounded then by people who weren’t my people anymore.
Finding my voice again, I spoke up to reassure him. “You’ll find your people. And when you do, you’ll find yourself.”
As I walked into the airport, I couldn’t help but regret not telling him.
We had already found each other.
COLLISION 00010
FROM A SEAT I WAS TOO GOOD TO OCCUPY
While I initially launched the Collisions series as textural evidence for travel’s transformative power at work in my own life and in the next ripple out beyond mine, I know it is much bigger than just a personal series of proof points.
What started as a project to simply notice, catalogue and celebrate travel’s touch – all of its coincidences, nudges and encounters – has evolved into a mounting ambition to scale and mobilize a bigger movement to recognize and spread the joy of travel. My experience is, after all, just one tessera in the larger mosaic.
Collisions are the unplanned moments that make travel matter. A conversation that shifts something, a stranger who becomes a mirror, a place that hands us a piece of ourselves we didn't even know was missing. Each impact reveals a truth, leaves its mark, deposits residue meant to shape not only how we move but who we become.
Before I ever tackled the topic of collisions themselves, I wanted to lay out a runway of them. I suspected that each one, and then each one alongside the other, could far better demonstrate my intent than mere words and a philosophical framework alone.
It wasn’t until I started putting them to paper that the full potency of collisions became abundantly clear. They are signals, catalysts, forced time-outs, a-has, McGuffins, redirects, jumpstarts, off-ramps and on-ramps. They are inflection points, pivots and validation.
They arrive without warning to affect us. They have surprisingly sneaky reverberations that wash over us at some indeterminate point in time after impact, after the collision in its original form has struck. In every collision I’ve shared, there has been an exchange of joy in the moment, but there has also been a rush of joy at the point of resurface, reflection and reapplication.
Collisions are extraordinarily regenerative which suggests to me they really could be divine, the universe’s intervention and, most of all, truly all ours to hold and recast.
An unbelievable thing happened when I started writing this piece. A random encounter I had on a trip I took to Stockholm two summers ago mysteriously slid into view. That would make a good Collision, I thought. I stopped, made note of it in my content calendar and continued writing.
But then I realized it’s not meant for June 23, it’s meant for today. I take myself back to July 2024.
I was miserably hungover after an overindulgent dinner at Ekstedt. My United 1K status didn’t load in the SAS system so I was assigned a window seat in the back row of the plane for the two-and-a-half-hour connecting flight to Zurich. I was all shades of furious and feeling sorry for myself like only an entitled travel brat could.
Then an Asian man and his young son sat down in the back row with me. They spoke no English. The boy was maybe five or six years old. As our wheels lifted up, the father pointed out the window to the boy, speaking excitedly, I can only guess, about the buildings, the shrinking city below and then the clouds.
The more the father spoke, the more the boy sat up straighter and straighter in his seat. He giggled. He clapped his hands together. Their heads swiveled from the window to each other and back again. They embraced. Now, they were both clapping and giggling.
And on the inside, so was I.
From a seat I thought I was too good to occupy, I watched as this moment of joy and discovery played out just next to me. I have taken off hundreds of times before but never with a heart that felt as light as mine did that morning.
Now, as I try to still a quivering lower lip, I can finally see that collision for the perfectly timed gift it was.
Then, and most certainly right now.
COLLISION 00009
THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE OF ALL
Quintonil was one of the first reservations I locked in before booking my flight to Mexico City. Every indicator pointed to it being a meal I would not soon forget. It sits at number three on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list and has two Michelin Stars. It was a calculated, must-do splurge in a global food capital known for tremendous flavor across all price points.
I arrived early and was invited to sit down in their small but cozy lobby for a pre-lunch cocktail. I went for the Negroni Atocpan which substituted mezcal redistilled with Atocpan mole for traditional gin. It was the perfect mood-setter matching both the taste and style that was artfully tucked in behind the textures, details and smells wafting in elegant but animated unison all around me.
Just before I was to be seated, I handed my jacket and my Untethered Traveler branded shopper over to the staff for safe keeping behind the front desk. I glided over to my seat at the chef’s counter with a giddy but act-like-you’ve-been-there-before anticipation.
Once settled the Maître D’ made a friendly observation about my cocktail, surmising based on my order, we would hit it off just right since it combined two of his favorite things in the world: the Negroni and Mole. I earnestly agreed, sharing those two are a few of my favorites as well.
We took care of the usual pre-meal questions. Still or sparkling? Any allergies? Which wine-pairing? “The Mexican one,” I answered of course. And then one more final albeit less typical one: was I comfortable eating insects? I hesitated only at how casually the question had been laid out before me. Not thrown off so much by the question itself as the graceful delivery of it. “Sure,” I heard myself saying. Rationalizing later that if I’m going to let any kitchen serve me bugs, Jorge Vallejo’s Quintonil would be one of them.
The counter to my left and right started to fill up with other patrons as the kitchen in front of me ramped up in gusto to meet the new diners. It was a front row seat to the theatre of purpose that no matter how many times I occupy it, never seem to be enough. Behind every brush of trout, placement of a flower, dusting of the plate was unparalleled fastidiousness and palpable passion. It was a high-stakes reminder that to do what we love takes focus of will and talent.
I started a friendly conversation with a fellow Chicagoan who had been seated next to me. Then, just before our first course and pairing, the Maître D’ returned.
“I noticed,” he started, “that you collect pins.” The Untethered Traveler shopper I handed over before sitting down had a pin from every country I had visited as the Untethered Traveler – thirteen in all – tacked to it.
“But,” he lingered for effect, “you’re missing the most important one of all.”
He reached up and unfastened the Quintonil pin from the lapel of his jacket. I was too stunned to do anything but watch as he carefully handed it over to me. It all felt like it was happening in slow motion. As I fingered the pin, thanking him profusely, I felt a rush of chills go up and down my spine.
It was such a simple, heartfelt gesture – the perfect collision. It was also a remarkable gift. I had the pin, yes, but to have had that exchange then and there? To have felt seen and understood? Well that was honestly one of the more exhilarating rushes I’ve ever felt since stepping into this role.
What followed was plate upon plate of culinary genius, a series of love letters to Mexico’s traditions and tastes. There were long, lingering pauses between bites that still make my shoulders drop, sips of truly phenomenal Mexican wine I’m so grateful to have discovered and delightful travel and food banter with Ziyi, my seatmate.
But the moment the Maître D’ handed me that pin?
That wasn’t just a thrilling act in the theatre of purpose.
That was why I travel.
COLLISION 00008
HEART OF GOLD
It was a brisk, sunny autumn afternoon in Kyoto. I had fallen in love with the city the moment I arrived and every breath and step I took there made me feel like I was floating, suspended in an effortless flow.
My spirits were high that Sunday even though my time in Kyoto was coming to an end. I was grateful to be out and about taking in Kyoto’s Old Town charm with hungry, wide-open eyes.
As I strolled down Pontocho Alley, a walk I had taken my first night in town but much, much later in the evening, I saw it come to life through a new set of characters and colors. Now there were children screeching in delight from a nearby playground and young locals soaking up the last of their weekends along the river’s edge. The whole scene unfolded through vibrant red and yellow leaves framed against a brilliant blue sky.
It was a technicolor snapshot in time, a moving postcard I pressed deep into my memory as I walked further down the passageway. As I made my way to nowhere in particular, I passed a man playing Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” on his acoustic guitar. I love that song. And as I walked on I realized I was humming it along with him.
It made me smile.
I didn’t know his story. But I had to imagine he was out there on a Sunday afternoon because that was his calling. I admired the bravado and simplicity of that.
And… he was really good.
I stopped, retraced my steps and dropped a handful of coins into his guitar case.
I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. I just wanted to buy him a cup of coffee. Most of all, I wanted to make sure he felt heard that day. Sometimes I think that’s more rewarding than anything – an acknowledgement that our art exists. And that we exist alongside it.
He called after me to thank me and asked me where I was from. When I said, “Chicago,” he broke into the Blues. Now he was the one smiling.
And that made me smile again too.
COLLISION 00007
THE ANSWER TO HIS QUESTION
I typically keep to myself when I travel. While I don’t go out of my way to avoid eye contact, I also don’t go out of my way to make it either. Until thinking about it now, I honestly don’t know what mix of ingredients has to come together just so for a conversation with a total stranger on the road to materialize.
Engaging creators, waitstaff, artisans and shopkeepers is different. Those conversations come more naturally to me, born from a curiosity and hunger to hear more about others’ origin stories, calling to craft and purpose.
The people behind the taste are such a rich and fascinating part of the full experience that I can’t help but get inquisitive and talkative around them. They always make the difference between logging a moment in time with food, art or drink and impressing a lasting memory. Dozens of qualifying candidates come rushing at me now – a bartender in Luxembourg, a waiter in Seoul, a barista in Rome.
The encounters I have with other locals or travelers like me, the other patrons I’m sitting elbow-to-elbow with at a dining counter, dimly lit bar or community breakfast table take shape differently, maybe even a bit more mysteriously.
When I travel I must operate under a sneaky, savvy sixth sense. While I deliberate with myself about what and usually how much to order, it runs, without my knowing, on auto-pilot in the background sizing up the souls and situation around me. If the program runs without encountering a red flag, I soften and let my guard down.
That’s when a narrow gateway to potential connection opens up just a crack. It’s wild really what happens when one of us, me or them, dares to step on through.
In the week and a half that I’d been traveling in Vietnam I hadn’t chatted much if at all with strangers until I got to the counter at Anan Saigon. A story in taste all of its own, Anan Saigon is a sensational one-Michelin-star treat for the senses in Ho Chi Minh City. If one could taste color, they would taste it here.
At some point, when the spell Taste had cast over me broke a bit, I noticed I was sitting next to a young man in his late twenties. Just like with so many of the other collisions I’ve had, I don’t know exactly what sparked our conversation.
He was young, facing a career inflection point of his own, and enjoying an extended layover in Ho Chi Minh City between his family in Singapore and his home in Los Angeles. At one point, as we traded life and travel stories back and forth, he asked me a question I wasn’t expecting.
“Why do you pick the countries you visit?” he asked.
Not even sixty days laid off, still interviewing for a slew of roles I had no business pursuing, I was and am still shocked at how quickly and resolutely I answered.
“Food,” I said. “I go where I want to taste.”
And there it suddenly was.
This conversation with a young stranger, my first of consequence and meaning in days, from a country half way around the world, wasn’t just a collision – it was the collision.
What followed in the months to come was a series of nudges, more collisions with purpose I couldn’t ignore and an eerie and heightened level of self-awareness – an unavoidable avalanche of self-discovery.
Two months later, hiding out from the rain over a pot of peppermint tea in the Hotel Maria Cristina in San Sebastián, Spain – with the answer to his question front and center in my mind – I finally saw the first piece of it.
The Untethered Traveler.
COLLISION 00006
FINDING JOY FLATFOOTED & FLUSTERED
I was in a weird spot when I traveled to Spain a few months after being laid off. I was struggling with the guilt of being away and spending money, confronting the loss of my “corporate” identity and releasing stress and expectation that no longer served me. I should have felt lighter and free. But I felt weighted down, even more tired and stuck.
Toledo, however, was too special a place to let career transition anxiety overshadow its exploration and discovery. I permitted myself to get lost among its maze of corridors before arriving early to the day’s much anticipated main event, lunch at Taberna Botero.
The first to arrive that day, I was shown to a table upstairs in a bold and brightly colored dining room. An abundance of textures and art set a fun, celebratory mood. My spirits started to lift. Locals slowly started to fill the space and the energy in the room built in a contagious and palpable momentum.
Just as my first glass of red and the Black Cod Fritters arrived, a young family was seated to my left. They were three total: mother, father and a young boy maybe three years old. I’ll admit I bristled, selfishly questioning how their arrival would affect the carefree flow I’d finally found myself swimming in.
But those reservations were dismissed almost immediately. This young boy was adorable – long eyelashes, big tenderhearted eyes and an irresistible smile. If he wasn’t part of the salve I’d been looking for, then I don’t know what was.
He was a bit of a flirt! It wasn’t long before we were exchanging glances between the tables. I smiled, offered, “hola” and waved. He sheepishly did the same. I took a chance, pulling out some rusty Spanish. “Me llamo Amanda. ¿Cómo te llamas?” He shrank low and embarrassed in his chair. After some encouragement from his parents, he said with just as much shyness and charm, “Me llamo Fabio.”
I didn’t want to risk getting him in trouble so I tried to reposition us back into our own little worlds. But it wasn’t long before Fabio came to stand just next to me, looking up at me with those big, quizzical eyes. He fired off a string of questions and stories, one after the other. Sadly, none were a match for my four years of high school Spanish. All I could do was smile and say, bueno, bueno. He had me flatfooted and flustered in the absolute best way.
And there it was.
Sometimes all we need to make each other laugh and smile is a single word. I watched Fabio and his family leave, feeling lighter than I had in weeks.
Then he did something I’ll never forget. He turned around, looked me right in the eyes and waved “bueno!” just before disappearing down the stairs and out of view.
Bueno, I thought. Fabio had it right.
Everything will be just bueno.
COLLISION 00005
A SHADE OF ALL THREE
My Slovenian road trip from Lake Bled to Vipava wine country could best be described as the most harrowing, white-knuckled drive of my entire life. I will forever think twice before choosing the scenic route again. For hours, I navigated the most mind-blowingly narrow roads and bridges, held my breath passing through truly blind curves and squeezed past put-out speeding semis.
I rubbed blisters into my palms. I cursed and I cried.
By the time I finally made it to the flatter, tamer and wider roads of the valley I had almost run out of gas, missed an opportunity to eat and taken countless, hard-to-correct wrong turns. My gross miscalculation in driving time was about to cost me something worse – my first wine tasting in Slovenia at Lepa Vida.
Of all the tastings I had booked, Lepa Vida was the one I was most looking forward to. I felt drawn there.
The first time cell service permitted me to call the winery with an update, my 1pm appointment was approaching in ten minutes and I was easily still 20 minutes away. I was pumping gas and beyond grateful to be doing just that. The thought of keeping any guests waiting was out of the question so I told the woman on the other side of the line I’d eat the tasting fee – thinking to myself I’m not going to be the ugly American who keeps anyone waiting.
She was polite but having none of it. “Come,” she said, “we will wait. Take a breath and join us.”
I pulled into the parking lot about as frazzled and pissed off at life as one could be. Raging inside, I did my best to pull myself together before I walked into the tasting room.
No one was angry. No one was stressed. They were warm and welcoming.
I took the place that had been prepared for me. Their eye-catching lineup of wines and labels was on display just to the left of the huge floor-to-ceiling-window that framed an infinite stretch of vineyards.
Then the storytelling began. I felt my blood pressure drop as I let myself be swept away by story and surroundings.
I came to learn that the labels that caught my eye were in fact abstract drawings, each concealing a female silhouette. Each label a different color, a different female figure, a different story. I sat straight up in my chair. I didn’t know any of this.
Lepa is a familiar woman’s name in Slovenia and Vida of course means life. Collectively these labels and this winery represented the thousands of Slovenian women who left their families behind to work as wet nurses in Egypt when the Suez Canal was being built. In the decades that followed, these women who sent money back home when times were already tough, had become proud and strong symbols of independence and commitment.
My arms and neck broke out in goosebumps.
The story landed hard, especially since it sat among other inspiring encounters of strong Slovenian women – Irena Polanec, the portrait artist whose work I purchased in a Ljubljana gallery, Anna Roš, whose three-Michelin-star Hiša Franko I’d be dining at a week later, and Sanda, a reformed corporate marketer turned jewelry artisan I met at Center Rog.
All of this, the winery and the women’s stories that it honored, were artistic expressions of purpose and calling. I hadn’t just been drawn to Lepa Vida to taste wine. I had been drawn there to hear these women’s stories – to put color to the storytelling and taste that moved me.
As hard as it had been to get there to hear any of it, I was simply meant to. Some collisions are invitations and nudges, others drop serendipitously in front of us and still others we have to earn and fight like hell to even encounter.
This collision at first seemed to be the latter, but when I really thought long and hard about it, I realized it was a shade of all three.
COLLISION 00004
SHE DID THE SAME
On a sunny Saturday afternoon in November, the historic, narrow streets of Kyoto’s Higashiyama district were flooded with tourists. But the abundance of craft, culture and spiritual significance there made battling the crowds worth every minute.
Nestled in amongst the congestion, a plain storefront caught my attention. It looked like it was closed from the street. I took a chance and pushed the door open.
I immediately sensed the specialness of where I was. Nothing about the curated assortment, merchandising or shopkeeper screamed mass-produced or tourist trap. The lights were low. The store was still, tidy and full of one-of-a-kind artisan pieces – matcha bowls, tea sets and sake carafes.
I took my time browsing the store. Each time I circled back around to the corner of the boutique where the shopkeeper sat, I slowed and watched with interest as she folded tiny paper cranes.
She did not speak English but did her best to point and gesture around details and pieces of import. There is something so humbling and intensely human when life calls upon us to communicate without words. Facial expressions and body language become amplified currency with the eyes becoming our most important window to tone and meaning.
After I found the gifts I was looking for, I approached the table she’d been doing origami from. She carefully wrapped each item and I settled my bill. I smiled, bowed my head respectfully and whispered a delicate “arigatou” (thank you).
She did the same.
But before I could turn to leave she tucked two of the tiny paper cranes she’d been folding into my shopping bag. I felt a sudden surge of gratitude, awe and veneration overwhelm me. Surprised and a bit embarrassed by my own reaction, I quickly wiped away the tears that spilled out onto my eyeglasses.
I left the store on unsteady legs, both numbed and moved by the gesture of this elegant stranger.
From an overcrowded neighborhood in this sacred city, I had wandered into a respite of tranquility and grace. By walking through the door of a storefront that looked like it was closed from the street, I had set a simple and intimate exchange in motion. In the moment, it moved me to tears and for the rest of my life it would be a beautiful reminder of how uncomplicated the connections travel inspires can truly be.
Before I complicate and overthink it, I stop myself from wondering in busy skepticism if the shopkeeper gives out paper cranes to every customer.
That wasn’t what really mattered.
What mattered was how touching a collision could be between two strangers who couldn’t technically say anything more to each other than hello and thank you. And yet had managed in just a few seconds to have said so very, very much more.
COLLISION 00003
THE PERFECT FIT
Not all encounters of consequence will go on to reveal their meaning in the moment. Some will take root and linger inside for days, months, even years after first touch. They’ll resurface only when life bears down on us just so. Pressing for action or stillness, contemplation or clarity, release or ignition.
When we do finally extract their fruitful, hidden messages, as purposefully deposited as they were purposefully held on to, it’s like unwrapping an unexpected gift. These collisions are but another reminder that Travel is a journey, not a series of disconnected episodes. That if our hearts are open to it, something from a past season of our lives, can inspire us quite intentionally in the next.
In the Summer of 2024, I took a trip to the Nordics as the signs started to stack up that my career at Wilson Sporting Goods was coming to an end. My first stop was Helsinki. It was the Summer Solstice. The city was humming and buzzing through the change of another season – some places quiet others lively in celebration.
Restless for some retail therapy, I took a day trip to Porvoo, Finland a quaint little riverside town 30 miles east of Helsinki. The drive there was quite spectacular. The sun was shining, the shops were open and I felt just the tiniest surge of optimism flow through me.
I popped in and out of little boutiques and artisan shops, the most memorable of which was A La Louko, a hybrid Design Studio-Shop awash in pastels and linen. As I browsed, I engaged in light, casual conversation with the shopkeeper. I tried on a few things that caught my eye including a bone colored dress with a matching jacket. It was a one-of-a-kind classic-set that the shopkeeper had only recently designed. It felt like the Summer Solstice.
The moment I stepped into it I knew I had to have it. But I’m not sure who was more delighted when I walked out of the dressing room. It was such a perfect fit. For me, a special find, and for the shopkeeper/designer, her work finding the body who seemed always meant to fill it.
Eight months would pass before I ever thought about A La Louko again. It wasn’t until I wrote about Finland for Tessera 15 that I saw this moment for what it was – a collision. A slow and mysterious transmission of purpose.
At the time, the dress was nothing more than a happy find. With time I came to see it for the spark of possibility it was – a calling to my own creativity that had been set in motion by a simple, passing exchange between strangers. The Finnish shopkeeper’s conviction to live into her own entrepreneurial spirit and creativity had inspired an awareness and awakening in me.
She had helped me see in this journey of life, it was time to start dressing for the job I truly wanted, not the job I already had.
COLLISION 00002
MORE THAN A RECOMMENDATION
I was excited to dine at Koji in Wellington as their Pan-Asian menu promised to put all kinds of bold, colorful taste in front of me. And while Koji more than made good on that promise – its Miso Dengaku Eggplant still taunts me from across the Pacific – it was a chance and random encounter there, that made my meal one I will not soon forget.
In between inspired courses and wine pairings, I chatted with Koji’s restaurant manager, a young enthusiastic foodie who would come to deposit two perspectives and one unknowing nudge in front of me.
First, unsolicited validation of my theory that part of the tax of visiting a place as beautiful as New Zealand is wading through all the staunch and charged opinion. And second, sensing I too was a fellow, curious foodie, potent justification for why two restaurants must be added to my last day’s agenda in Wellington and my one night out’s game plan in Christchurch.
In the middle of all the “do this and see that” New Zealand discourse, I can’t say why this specific stranger’s recommendations broke through. But they did. I reset my Sunday plans. I took dinner my final night in Wellington at Graze Wine Bar’s chef counter and I slotted drinks and a couple small plates in at Londo’s counter before my existing dinner reservation at Gatherings.
His recos were simply exceptional. But there was something else elevating my experience at these cozy little gems. I was mesmerized and overcome by the magic of being in such close proximity to everyday people living and loving their purpose.
My collision with the young manager, wasn’t just an exchange of taste between two kindred spirits. It was evidence that if we put our faith in the transformative power of travel to move us – to really move us to where we’re meant to be – life will find a way to get us there. And, Taste as it always has will lead the way.
COLLISION 00001
A COLLISION WITH A COLLISION
I naturally feature collisions when I write about a destination and my brushes there with taste and purpose. The more consistently I write about my travels, the more I anticipate and recognize these fateful nudges, coincidences and encounters. Because I consider each such a meaningful steppingstone in my journey, I’m starting a weekly series to highlight the unplanned moments that make our travel matter that much more.
I think about collisions as among other things, a conversation that shifts something, a stranger who becomes a mirror, a place that hands you a piece of yourself you didn't even know was missing. Each impact reveals a truth, leaves its mark, deposits residue meant to shape not only how we move but who we become.
From the moment I arrived in Wairarapa wine valley’s Martinborough, New Zealand, I loved it. It was quaint and charming with all the treats and trappings of a sleepy but cozy small town.
But taxis? Not so much. If life has taught me one thing, it’s strike up a good rapport with the local taxi dispatch. For reasons that still aren’t abundantly clear, I failed on all counts to do that in Martinborough. And without saying it, the service’s one and only dispatcher made it known I was effectively never getting a taxi in her town.
The immediate and most damning impact of that discovery meant I was walking three weeks’ worth of luggage from the bus stop to the Parehua Resort about one mile away from the city center. I arrived and managed more than well enough on foot for the next few days.
But my early morning train back to Wellington, before the sun would even be up, was giving me fits. I tried Uber. I called every cab in the region. Nothing. At a loss for what to do, I reached out to the Parehua Resort, and a very friendly front desk clerk took pity on me. Even though her shift wasn’t due to start for another four hours that day, she agreed to get up early and drive me to the train.
We chatted the whole way to Featherston Station about my favorite topic on earth – travel. She was young and just starting out. She had never left New Zealand and asked one enthusiastic question after the other. Where had I been? What were my favorites? But the question she asked that stuck out the most was, “What’s the one piece of advice you’d give a first-time traveler?”
Since I’d only just finished Tessera 53 the night before, a reflection on the challenges of traveling New Zealand and staying true to our own calling and compass, I felt like I had been primed by the universe for the answer. “Listen to where and what calls you. Your vacation is your time. There’s always a list or an authority ready to tell you what you should do. You do you.”
As the words came out of my mouth, they hung curiously in the air. I had just spent, after all, the last several weeks wrestling to find them for myself. Now, here I was sharing them with newfound confidence and conviction in an effort to pay this stranger’s kindness forward.
A collision within a collision.
It’s amazing how the people we meet when we travel play a supporting role in our lives simply by listening, seeing and encouraging us.
Kaylan may have thought all she was doing that morning was driving me the eleven miles between towns and, best of all, saving me from walking country roads in the dark, but she was keeping me on course.
And I hope, in some small way, I had set her off on hers.