HI, I'M LISA

I am an adventurous traveler and avid photographer from the United States.

As a child I was a voracious reader. I loved to learn about far away places, with each book taking me on a journey to distant lands. I wanted to grow up and be an archeologist-detective-explorer! Instead, I followed the "normal" path of college, then corporate America.

I worked for years in various high-pressure jobs, but always found time to take an annual vacation with friends or family. These trips typically involved rushing around for two weeks each year (okay, sometimes twice per year!!!), when I would attempt to leave my worries behind by grabbing my passport and heading for the most remote place I could find. I was looking to get lost but what I could never seem to lose was my need to always be “working”: I would check my emails every time I had wifi access; I thought about work 24/7; I worried that something back at the office was going wrong.  

Over the years my desire for a different kind of life grew. I wanted deeper, more meaningful travel adventures. I wanted to slow down and really get to know the places I visited. I wanted extra time to linger, engage, and experience. In a nutshell, I wanted MORE, so in mid-2014 I decided to retire from my job to pursue my passion for travel and photography. Since then I’ve been spending more than half of the year on the road, visiting new places and re-visiting areas of the world that I love…and now I take these trips at a slower pace, with a clearer mind and much gratitude. To learn more about how I financially managed to retire early, click this link.

When I'm on the road, my mantra is “travel deeper”. I tend to spend a good amount of time in a place before moving on. You won’t find me spending one day in a country and then boasting that I’ve added another checkmark to my bucket list. I prefer to linger, wait, watch, wander, enjoy. 

I’m a visual storyteller. My writing and my images are intertwined; they support and enhance each other. When I travel you will always find a camera in my hand, whether it be my Olympus camera, GoPro or iPhone. I try to document what I see and experience so that I can remember and share those experiences. While doing that I also make sure to be extremely culturally sensitive, so there may be times when it’s just not appropriate to take a photo. In those cases, I put down my camera and just enjoy the moment.