The first thing my parents taught me, more by accident than intention, was that travel gets into your blood. It’s a drug. It’s magic. I was born on the northern edge of Montana where on cold, clear nights you could glimpse the auroras stretching through the night sky, like psychedelic fingers clutching at the fabric of the universe. By the time I was four we’d already lived in a dozen places crossing multiple states and geographic regions. My earliest memories are divided between the American West and the azure beauty of the Caribbean, spending a year of my life on a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico, running along sunny, sandy beaches with my dog Chewie (short for Chewbacca of course), both of us pups still.

A few decades, over a dozen countries, and several continents into this journey, worshiping at the Church of Bourdain (who made me and many, many others believe that traveling across this beautiful planet was not only possible, but required), and I’m still chasing that feeling of sitting in a bar overlooking a never-before-seen view, the smells of the kitchen wafting over me along with the soft buzz of languages I don’t understand. It’s that shot of simultaneous contentment and exhilaration that comes from new soil beneath my feet, fascinating unexplored architecture, the ebb and flow of conversation in the local dialect. In the air and in a word: culture.

The second lesson my parents taught me, again more by accident than anything else, was that books are constructed of the same magic that travel is imbued with.

[Read more]