Our Story

It begins with the heart. In 1997,  it was Christmas Eve and I was in Key West, Florida on the couch of a palm reader. As she looked at the lines on my palm, I explained I was there asking about my heart. You see there were two men in my life, one that I had recently broken up with and the other I had recently met. As she took a closer, she said with confidence, “He is standing on a mountain. It’s the second one, the traveler.”

Five years later on a beach in Moorea, Tahiti, I married the traveler courtesy of a Tahitian priest and surrounded by our closest fifty strangers all wearing their swimsuits. Yes, we started our married life drinking out of coconuts with our feet firmly planted on a  white sand beach, but life is full of surprises and there was a big one on its way.

The traveler and I share not only a love for travel, we also share a love of music. He spent his college years in dive bars listening to great bands with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. That combination along with a family history of heart disease bought us a ticket to a not so great destination, the emergency room and four days later a double bypass on a man barely forty years old.

The day of the surgery, the traveler announced he would dedicate one bypass to me (the most important one I might add) and the other to a sweet friend who traveled across the country to be with us that day. We laughed instead of focusing on the details like the  cracking of the sternum and that his heart surgeon looked like Doogey Howser. The minute they wheeled him away and the metal hospital door closed behind me, I knew we would never look at our life the same.

That experience gave us, the greatest gift that any of us can receive, TIME. We are doing our best not to waste ours. So, we take a month away and some shorter stays. We know not everyone can take a month away to pretend they’re a local, that’s why we are sharing our favorite places to save you some precious time.

Happy Travels.