March 8, 2026
When I was a kid, the library let me check out ten books a week. That was the limit. I hit it every single week, all summer long, and then I re-read them before I returned them because ten wasn’t enough.
I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t reading. And I don’t remember a time when reading didn’t make me want to go somewhere. The books opened doors to places I hadn’t been, countries I couldn’t find on a map, lives that looked nothing like mine. I grew up in a world that was geographically small, but the reading made it enormous.
That’s the thing about books. They don’t just tell you a place exists. They make you feel what it would be like to stand there.
After high school, I enlisted. Partly because I wanted to serve. Partly because I wanted out. But mostly — if I’m honest — because the books had already shown me a bigger world, and I needed to go see if it was real.
It was.
Since then, I’ve traveled to sixteen countries and nearly every state. And the pattern has always been the same: I read about a place first, then I go. The reading shapes what I notice when I arrive. The place deepens what I understood from the page. They feed each other.
There’s actual research behind this. A study published in Psychological Science found that new environments improve cognitive flexibility — your brain literally rewires itself in response to unfamiliar settings, languages, and customs. Eighty-three percent of students who traveled abroad said a widened worldview was the greatest benefit. People who travel more perform better at work, partly because travel builds self-efficacy — the belief that you can handle what comes next.
But the part that resonates most with me is this: people who travel often come home and make changes. Real ones. They leave jobs. They start things. They stop waiting. Travel doesn’t just show you new places. It shows you new versions of what your life could look like. And once you’ve seen that, it’s hard to unsee it.
I think that’s what happened to me. Slowly, and then all at once.
Three years ago, my friend David told me about his experience becoming a travel advisor — how much he loved it, how the work felt like it was made for him. And something clicked.
I’ve spent my career in marketing, event planning, and project management. I am — ask my husband Robert or my daughter Kate — a planner. The spreadsheets are legendary. The itineraries are color-coded. The research phase of any trip I take is longer than the trip itself, and I enjoy the research phase more.
Becoming a travel advisor wasn’t a leap. It was a convergence. Everything I’ve loved doing — reading, traveling, planning, organizing groups, building experiences — pointed here. I just hadn’t seen it yet.
I still have my corporate job. I’m not writing this from a beach with a laptop and a mai tai. I’m building Early & Away in the hours between everything else, because I believe in it enough to do both.
Early & Away is a travel company for people who do their reading first.
We plan reading retreats and literary travel — trips where the reading list is part of the itinerary. Not a book club that takes a vacation. Not a tour group that happens to like reading. Something more specific: you read deeply into a place before you go, so that when you arrive, you see it differently.
Right now we have four trips in the works:
Each trip is built around the idea that the destination means more when you’ve read your way into it. The books come first. The place comes second. And the place is always better because of the books.
I’ve been quiet about Early & Away for a while. Building it behind the scenes. Testing whether the idea holds up. Figuring out whether I could actually do this.
I can.
The website is live. The first trips are booking. And I’ve learned — from every book I’ve ever read and every country I’ve ever visited — that the world gets bigger when you stop waiting for permission to go see it.
If you’re the kind of person who packs more books than clothes, who plans trips around what you’re reading, who has ever finished a novel and thought I need to go there — Early & Away is for you.
I’d love to have you.
Trip announcements, curated reading lists, and the occasional dispatch — before anyone else.