There is a version of travel that is curated—mapped, anticipated, checked off. And then there is the kind that changes you. The intrepid kind, not loud or performative, steady in its willingness to step into the unknown and to return, because the intrepid traveler can do both.

I have spent much of my life moving through airports, train stations, and unfamiliar streets, and in conversations with people I was never supposed to meet.

Not because I was seeking escape, but because something in me has always been drawn to expansion… the quiet unraveling that happens when you willingly immerse yourself in another culture, another history, another way of seeing the world.

Long before I ever boarded an international flight, I saw that same curiosity in a quieter form in my grandmother, Rosie. She rarely traveled beyond Michigan, except to visit family in Colorado and once to California after my first son was born. Yet despite rarely leaving home, she carried an openness to the world that felt expansive in its own way. She would sit for hours, watching Rick Steves wander through European villages, hidden alleyways, cathedrals, and cafés, as though she had stepped inside them herself.

I think I inherited that longing.

But the intrepid traveler does not stay where she is known for long, she pivots and follows curiosity, not comfort.

And so, I can change course. Paris to Brittany to Saint-Malo…drawn not only by the rugged cliff lines, landscapes, and sea, but by history. By my enduring fascination with World War II and by the quiet pull of All the Light We Cannot See and the echoes it leaves behind.

Saint Malo is a rebuilt walled city. A place where beauty sits atop devastation, and somehow both remain true. And then came Dinard..quieter, softer and enduring in a different way. Two sides of the same coastline…one shaped by what was lost, the other by what remained.

It’s interesting, the farther I travel, the more I realize that every destination carries its own emotional atmosphere.

Some places hold grief quietly.
Others wear elegance like armor.
Some invite introspection.
Others awaken memory.

And sometimes, a city calls to you for reasons you do not fully understand until you arrive. Helsinki called to me that way in all its Nordic calm.  For salmon soup, warming cold harbor air. For the interior emotional landscapes of Tove Jansson, a Finnish woman author who understood solitude, imagination, emotional weather, and the complexity of being human.

Again and again, I found that the places themselves were only part of what I was collecting. The real imprint came from the people. Strangers who became temporary companions and conversations over wine that turned unexpectedly honest. The people who stepped briefly into my life and somehow remained there long after I returned home.

In Dinard, a man named Freddy helped me find the ferry entrance with patience and generosity that quietly dismantled the tired stereotype that the French are unwelcoming. It was a small moment, almost forgettable by ordinary standards, yet travel kept teaching me that humanity often reveals itself in precisely those fleeting exchanges.

Again and again, strangers surprised me with endless stories, not because the stories were extraordinary, but because the strangers were willing to be kind.

And then Riga happened.

My reason for visiting Latvia was never simply about the destination. It was a continuation of Clara’s story. Once held only in my heart and in words, it is now anchored to the ground beneath my feet. All the Baltic countries are lovely, as are their people. But Riga itself is beautiful—not in ornament, but in essence, in the way resilience is beautiful.

Ernesto and Zane walked and drove me to the memorials and the Kaiserwald forest, not as drivers and guides, but as stewards of memory, historians, and humanists. Together, we walked the grounds that still seemed to groan under the weight of what had occurred there, where Clara and her mother endured the second of the three concentration camps; they somehow survived.

At one point, overcome by the enormity of it, I cried beside Ernesto, who had been a stranger only hours before. And standing there, overwhelmed with emotion, I realized something I could not unsee: I could walk away from those grounds. Clara could not.

We can speak of history, and even more so of humanity… of struggle, of strength, of quiet resistance… but there is a powerful shift that occurs when you put yourself in. I understood something there: resilience does not announce itself. It simply continues.

Again and again, I found that the most transformative moments in travel were rarely the ones listed in guidebooks. They emerged instead through detours, wrong turns, missed trains, shared meals, historical stories carried through living memory, confessions over wine, and conversations with people I was never meant to meet.

Over the years of my wanderlust, I stopped thinking of travel as tourism and began to see it as relational witnessing. Human connection became the true portal to place.  

The farther I traveled, the more I noticed that strangers reflected pieces of my humanity back to me. Different countries. Different languages. Different histories. Yet beneath the surface, so many of us carried remarkably similar griefs, longings, wounds, hopes, and questions about who we were becoming.

Travel expands my understanding of humanity, while quietly dismantling parts of me.

Somewhere between memorial forests, ferry crossings, solitary dinners, candlelit conversations, and unfamiliar streets after dark, parts of myself I had outgrown began to quietly fall away.

There is a particular stillness that comes from moving through the world alone. Stripped of routine and familiar expectations, I began to hear myself more clearly.

The internal excavation happened slowly, not through grand revelations but through accumulated encounters. Through listening, witnessing, and being witnessed in return.

I began traveling to see the world. Somewhere along the way, I realized the world was helping me see myself. Perhaps the real transformation was never geographic at all. My globetrotting taught me that expansion requires courage… the willingness to leave behind certainty, performance, emotional containment, and versions of ourselves that no longer fit.

This is what it means to be an intrepid traveler.

Not simply to go, but to move between worlds with openness. To carry both grief and beauty, remain curious in the face of difference, and let places—and people—leave their imprint.

In the end, the intrepid traveler is defined not by distance but by range. The ability to return without becoming complacent, to wander without becoming lost, and to feel deeply without needing to explain why.

The silent bargain in travel is the ability to leave believing we are discovering the world—only to realize the world has slowly been uncovering us all along.