All Posts
Let’s Chat
Follow along on my Journey!
I promise to share fun and infrequent updates
My Latest
Adventures
Well Hello
I’m Kate
For more than a decade and a half, I’ve helped people create a life by design through my lifestyle and travel blog.
I’m a mom of 3, a full-time romance author, and I’ve been to more than 40 countries and nearly all the states.
I’m happy you’re here.
Learn More >>
Shop my Favorites
5.3M
syndicated blog views per month
Latest Blog Posts
-
What Families With Teenagers Discover About Travel That Nobody Warns Them About
Parents who traveled extensively with young children assume it gets easier when the kids hit their teens. Most of them are wrong in ways that are both funny and genuinely hard. The family vacation changes completely when your youngest is 14, and almost none of the parenting books mention what actually happens.
-
Why So Many People Book a Trip Right After a Breakup — The Psychology Nobody Talks About
Within 48 hours of a serious breakup, travel search traffic spikes in a pattern that psychologists have started calling ‘escape booking.’ It’s not random impulsiveness — there’s a specific psychological mechanism driving it, and understanding it changes how you think about why travel feels like the answer when everything falls apart.
-
The Cities Where Americans Feel Most Like Outsiders — and the Ones Where They Feel Strangely at Home
American travelers carry their Americanness visibly and sometimes uncomfortably. In certain cities, the gap between who you are and who the city expects creates a friction that never quite resolves. In others — sometimes surprising ones — something clicks. The difference is cultural, architectural, behavioral, and hard to predict from a guidebook.
-
What Long-Haul Flights Actually Do to Your Body — and the Science on How to Recover Faster
A twelve-hour flight is not a neutral event for your body. The pressurization, the dehydration, the immobility, the circadian disruption — each operates through a specific physiological mechanism, and the conventional advice on managing them is wrong often enough to be worth examining from the ground up.
-
The Travel Gear People Swear By That Is Genuinely Useless — and the Cheap Things Nobody Packs That Actually Save Trips
The travel gear industry is built on the anxiety of underpacking and the fantasy of the perfectly optimized bag. After enough trips, most people quietly retire the compression cubes, the neck pillow shaped like a croissant, and the 27-in-1 travel wallet — and discover that three cheap things they almost didn’t bring did all the real work.
-
What It’s Actually Like to Solo Travel at 50, 60, and Beyond — Not the Instagram Version
The travel industry has discovered older solo travelers, which means the marketing has caught up — glossy photos, empowerment messaging, ‘it’s never too late.’ The actual experience is more complicated, more specific, and in many ways more interesting than that. People who are doing it talk about what nobody tells you before you go.
