Welcome!
Sudden Journeys is a place to think slowly about travel, memory, and belonging.
I’ve spent most of my adult life moving between places; from cities and countrysides, countries and cultures. First as a traveler, then as a guide, and eventually as someone entrusted with shaping experiences for others.
Along the way, I noticed something true: travel doesn’t change us because we go somewhere new. It changes us because we pay attention differently.
This space is for essays about place and presence. About the ways landscapes enter our bodies, how movement reshapes identity, and why certain places feel like mirrors rather than destinations. Some pieces are practical… how to design days, choose where to stay, or travel without exhausting yourself. Others are reflective. All of them are rooted in the belief that attention is a skill, and belonging is something we practice.
I don’t believe in travel as a checklist. It is not something to be consumed, but something to be felt, something that lingers. The best journeys soften us, crack us open in ways we never expect.
I write for thoughtful readers… for those who sense that travel can be more than consumption, and that a well-designed journey can offer rest, clarity, and a deeper relationship with the world.
This Substack is also where my longer work takes shape: the ideas behind Sudden Journeys, my small-group travel company, and Echoes of Elsewhere, a podcast exploring human movement, history, and the stories places carry.
Why this, why now
Before Sudden Journeys was a travel company, it was a blog.
In 2006, I started writing a blog to record my reflections while working as a travel guide and tour leader throughout Europe. I wrote about what travel was provoking in me often in the liminal spaces no one really talked about. The early essays were gritty and honest. I wasn’t afraid to name the brokenness I was encountering, even as I delighted daily in the wonder and beauty unfolding around me.
Somewhere along the way, that kind of writing narrowed. Actually, I instantly found myself a mom, trading my passport in for the car pool line number. (But that’s a different story!)
The writing narrowed not because the reflections or questions disappeared but because the containers maybe more like the bandwidth did.
Later when I launched Sudden Journey as my travel company, I found I edited myself into SEO searches, brand language, character limits, and marketing copy. I told myself there wasn’t space (or attention) for the deeper work. That writing had to be useful, polished, sellable.
But the words never stopped waiting. I continued to journal and write notes in my phone.
I’ve been wanting a place to write beyond travel essays and recommendations.. a place to explore journaling as a practice, the long and often harrowing journey of motherhood, and the quieter moments of home life when I’m not on the road. A place to share glimpses of my life in the English countryside, my photography, and my lifelong love of gathering people.. many of you know I love a good tablescape, creating atmosphere, and practicing hospitality which is at the core of all I do.
I wanted a place to go deeper into the thinking behind the podcast, Echoes of Elsewhere. A place to gently lift the veil on parts of my life I’ve kept quieter… not out of secrecy, but out of care.
Writing has been part of my life for nearly 30 years. So has reading. You can’t have one without the other. And for the first time in a long while, I have the space to slow down and to give legs to half-thoughts, unfinished notes, and words that have lived too long in my drafts folder.
For now, this feels like a return to where I first began.
A home for the words.
A kind of healing.
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Community
This space is for those who crave depth in their travels, whether that means crossing an ocean or simply paying closer attention to the world just outside your door. It’s for the seekers, the wanderers, the ones who still believe in awe and wonder .. and that there is beauty to be discovered, goodness in this world to delight in and that the human spirit transcends borders and time zones.
I will be sharing musings from the road, book recommendations, photography tips, recipes from my farm cottage, and the occasional story from a local whose path has intersected with hers.
I hope you’ll join me. The journey is yours.
