Episode 158 - Sherry Ott, Ottsworld.com
Is it time to step off the path others may have set for you? Saying “Yes!” to curiosity may be as simple as stepping foot in a new place with a new perspective—or hopping onto the seat of a bike.
In this episode of Soul of Travel, Season 5: Women's Wisdom + Mindful Travel, presented by @journeywoman_original, Christine hosts a soulful conversation with Sherry Ott, Founder of Ottsworld.com.
Sherry is a pioneer in the world of new media, writing about her travel lifestyle and around the world adventures on Ottsworld.com since 2006. In her 11 years of living nomadically, she’s circled the globe multiple times, visiting all 7 continents and providing continuous blog coverage. She primarily writes about outdoor adventure travel for women with the goal of inspiring and teaching women how to get outdoors and travel.
Sherry is an avid hiker, completing many thru-hikes and pilgrimages around the world. She is also currently biking from Capital to Capital in the United States, finishing a project her father started by foot in 1984. Named an “Influencer to follow” on OprahMag.com, she continues to seek out epic adventures to intriguing places, inspiring people to overcome their fears and reap the benefits of travel.
Living as a Digital Nomad–Before It Was a “Thing”
Long before the phrase “digital nomad” became an integral part of the travel vocabulary, Sherry had left her corporate career with the intention of returning to her “normal life.” She never did–and has leaped into the world of travel blogging, social media, and embracing the unknown in every aspect of her life.
She launched several businesses around career-break travel and travel writing in new media. As businesses began to invest in new media after 2012, Sherry had already had a few years of experience before settling in Denver in 2017.
When a number of the people in her circle continued to express a desire to travel with Sherry, she began designing trips to go off-the-beaten path and align with small and local businesses through her company and travel blogging brand, Ottsworld.com.
Sherry expresses that she was so driven by the desire to stay on the road and continue traveling that she found the tenacity to do whatever it took to make it happen, including being a part of the launch of travel blogging.
“I feel honored to be a part of something–the beginning of something. It’s very different now!”
Now, in a world that even has events for travel content creators like the Women In Travel Summit, travel content creators are competing with thousands and thousands of folks who are also surfacing as travel writers and content creators.
Sherry’s advice for both travelers who are looking to find out where they should travel and travel writers is this: “Find out where people are going, and turn around and go the other way.”
“My best piece of advice always to people, whether this is a traveler who’s trying to figure out where to go and what to do, or a travel blogger trying to figure out what is my business going to be, my core piece of advice which is very core to who I am is to find out where everyone is going, and turn around and go the other way. You have to set yourself apart; you have to be unique.”
Sherry shares that those looking to create a travel blogging business now begin with the business in mind, which is far different from her approach to writing to share her story and let her friends and family know where she was traveling. She and Christine encourage folks to follow their passion and look to create the most impact with the most aligned audience.
Trusting in Travel
Early in her writing endeavors, Sherry found that she received great responses from her readers when sharing about her trips. She has also always had a fascination with exploring, seeing something for the first time, and working to reach or achieve a goal.
The first time she learned about the Camino de Santiago, she was drawn to the journey and took five weeks to walk the Camino. This slow approach to travel has shown Sherry the beauty of going slowly and of simplifying life into three goals: eating, sleeping, and walking every day. The trip came at the perfect moment for Sherry, who was on the precipice of choosing whether to follow the mainstream blog trends or to do what she ultimately decided to do: To make her own way.
She also completed the Mongol Rally, an intercontinental car rally through thirteen countries that, in 2008, didn’t even have roads. The rally went from London to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia (now, the journey goes from Europe to Russia). But Sherry had one fear in her way: The fear of driving in a foreign country on a self-sustained trip. By that time, Sherry had been on the road for five years and had learned the power of travel and the goodness of people, placing her trust in the journey itself.
Capitol to Capitol with Sherry Ott
In response to the global pandemic and the halt of travel in 2020, Sherry began looking for alternative ways to get out into the world and piece together the puzzle of her new home in Colorado. She hopped on her (less-than-awesome) commuter bike and began riding; in 2021, she went to the local bike shop and upgraded her bike–and her mindset–into a new world of biking.
Back when she was fourteen years old, her father had decided that he was going to walk to every U.S. capitol–on foot. This out-of-the-blue impulse seemed to Sherry a frustrating goal, who wanted nothing more than to have a “normal” parent, but her father persisted during weekends and vacations to follow this quest with the help of Sherry’s mother on the logistics end, typing his trip notes into the family’s Commodore 64.
In her late twenties, Sherry began to respect her dad’s idea, even becoming intrigued to learn more and disappointed that her father had not completed his quest. She discovered that no one else had ever attempted this type of project that spanned the majority of his adult life, and even began admiring her father’s endeavor.
The realization hit Sherry that she could complete her father’s quest–but by bike. The rest is history.
Learn more about Sherry’s quest to cycle to the remaining 26 U.S. capitols from her father's list, and catch her YouTube series chronicling the journey.
“Anytime I’m on the move, I’m curious.”
Soul of Travel Episode 158 At a Glance
In this conversation, Christine and Sherry discuss:
Thinking and living outside the box
How creative thinking leads to opportunities and magical journeys
Overcoming the fear of driving in a foreign country
Following in Sherry’s father’s footsteps through a cross-country bike tour
Connecting with rural communities and learning about local history
Join Christine now for this soulful conversation with Sherry Ott.
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Related UN Sustainable Development Goals
Sustainable Development Goal #3: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.
Resources & Links Mentioned in the Episode
Discover the adventures of a corporate American runaway at Ottsworld.com!
Visit Sherry on your favorite social media network: Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook / YouTube / Twitter / Pinterest
About the Soul Of Travel Podcast
Soul of Travel honors the passion and dedication of people making a positive impact in the tourism industry. In each episode, you’ll hear the stories of women who are industry professionals, seasoned travelers, and community leaders. Our expert guests represent social impact organizations, adventure-based community organizations, travel photography and videography, and entrepreneurs who know that travel is an opportunity for personal awareness and a vehicle for global change.
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Credits. Christine Winebrenner Irick (Host, creator, editor). Esme Benjamin (Guest). Original music by Clark Adams. Editing, production, and content writing by Carly Oduardo.
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Soul of Travel Episode 158 Transcript
Women’s travel, transformational travel, sustainable travel, women leaders in travel, social entrepreneurship
Christine: Welcome to the Soul of Travel podcast. I'm Christine Weiner Irick, the founder of Lotus Sojourns, a book lover, Yogi mom of three girls and your guide On this journey. We are here to discover why women who are seasoned travelers, industry professionals, and global community leaders fall in love with the people and places of this planet. Join me to explore how travel has inspired our guests to change the world. We seek to understand the driving force, unending curiosity and wanderlust that can best be described as the soul of Travel. Soul of Travel Podcast is a proud member of the Journey, woman Family, where we work to create powerful forums for women to share their wisdom and inspire meaningful change in travel. In each soulful conversation, you'll hear compelling travel stories alongside tales of what it takes to bring our creative vision to life as we're living life with purpose, chasing dreams and building businesses to make the world a better place. But the real treasure here is the story of the journey as we reflect on who we were, who we are, and who we're becoming. We are travelers, thought leaders and heart-centered change makers, and this is the Soul of Travel.
Sherry Ott is a pioneer in the world of new media, writing about her travel lifestyle and around the world. Adventures on Ottsworld.com. Since 2006, in her 11 years of Living Nomadically, she circled the globe multiple times, visiting all seven continents, providing continuous blog coverage. She primarily writes about outdoor adventure travel for women with the goal of inspiring and teaching women how to get outdoors and travel. She is an avid hiker completing many through hikes and pilgrimages around the world. She's also currently biking from capital to capital in the United States, finishing a project her father started by foot in 1984, named as an influencer to follow. In oprah mag.com, she continues to seek out epic adventures to intriguing places, inspiring people to overcome their fears and reap the benefits of travel. In our conversation, Sherry and I discussed the ways she's found herself constantly thinking and living outside the box and how that has led her on some journeys, offering her an opportunity to connect more deeply, overcome her fear of driving in a foreign country in the most unexpected way, and to following in her father's footsteps after realizing they were more alike than she'd ever realized growing up.
And speaking of following in her father's footsteps, she talks about her latest travels, which have her biking from capital to capital across the us, learning about our history and connecting with rural communities here in a way she hadn't thought of in her 11 years as a nomad before it was even something we talked about. So many common connections have tried to get Sherry and I to connect over the years, and I'm so glad we finally did. Join me now for my soulful conversation with Sherry Ott. Welcome to Soul of Travel podcast. Today I'm really excited to be joined by Sherry Ott, who is an adventure travel rider who has really embraced the nomadic lifestyle and is currently setting out to bike ride from capital to capital in the us. I cannot wait to share more about your story and all about your journey in this industry. So welcome to the podcast, Sherry.
Sherry: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited about this.
Christine: Me too. It's been a long time coming for us to meet. We've had so many people that keep pointing us in the same direction, and we were just talking before we hopped on this call. Even just recently, I was even meeting more people who said, the two of you need to talk. And I finally was able to say we are. I'm interviewing her on the podcast next week, so I'm glad that moment has come. Sherry, I'd love to turn it over to you to take a moment to introduce yourself to my listeners and tell us a little bit about who you are in the space of travel.
Sherry: Sure. Gosh, where to start? So my name is Sherry Ott. I started a travel blog called OTs world.com. I started that back in 2006. So I've been doing this for a very long time and seen so many changes. However, prior to that I was in corporate America for 14 years working in it, and I basically needed a break from that back when I was 36 years old. I took off on what I called a career break with the idea to hit all these bucket list ideas and places that I've always wanted to travel for a year and then figure out life and what I wanted to do next and come back. But I've never came back, so that's kind of where the nomadism comes in too. I left in 2006, but I traveled around the world for a year and a half. I went back to New York City, sold all my stuff, and then went back out on the road and I was nomadic for 11 years long, long time back then I was just thinking about this digital nomad wasn't even in our vocabulary and now that's something, it's so crazy to me how the world has changed even.
But during that whole time I was blogging and what I would call the world of new media at that time was just starting to open up and I was in the right place at the right time, and I think probably having a business and corporate background probably helped in that sense too. But I was on the cutting edge of that travel blogging and so on. I joined social media really early. I had time and I was curious, and so that's how I kind of built up my business in there. I also started some other travel businesses around career break, travel and so on, but I basically got into this industry like that and as you know, through the probably 2010s, 20 elevens, 20 twelves, businesses started to kind of all of a sudden take new media much more seriously and they started spending budget money on it and so on and so forth. So it made it a viable career and now little kids can actually say, I want to be a blogger, which is weird to me.
So that basically took me all over the world. For 11 years, I have been very fortunate, and probably in 2017 I decided to get a home again and I settled back here in Denver, always still writing and blogging, doing social media. At that time I also decided after years of hearing people say, oh my God, I want to travel with you. I decided to start to do some of my own tours that were really a testament to how I liked to travel, which is really to find unique places, get off the beaten path, stay places longer, et cetera. So I started designing some of these trips and working with small local companies in the regions that I loved, and I started doing OTs world tours and I do about four or so a year, three or four a year. They're always kind of adventure focused and to different places, I would say. And yeah, I'm trying to think what else now. I mean, that's where I'm at right now. I also, because I've been in this industry so long and been so many places, I've started to work on some travel design for people who want to go to places that I'm in. So that is where my travel career went. I never could have imagined
Christine: Seeing that evolution. And even as I was researching your background and the timing of things was I was thinking the same thoughts of that you were a digital nomad, embracing that lifestyle before it was something that we knew we would or could embrace. It just was you were traveling and living abroad for long periods of time, but there wasn't this same acceptance, I guess, of that lifestyle, whereas now that it is something that people really strive for, you were really kind of going against the norm by doing that. And then also as you were talking about getting onto social media, blogging, travel, writing, that was really when blogging was still just barely emerging and surfacing. So I love that, like you said, it was kind of the right place, right time, but also you took advantage of the things that you noticed were surfacing and turned those into opportunities for yourself.
Sherry: Yeah, I was so driven by how can I stay on the road? How can I stay traveling because I don't want to go back to what I was doing. I knew that, and that drive, I think just kind of made me dig in and do whatever I had to do to get the blog off the ground, et cetera. And it was a really fun time, the beginning of blogging, of travel, blogging and seeing that whole world develop. There was a few key people, there was a few of us, and under really a hundred people I would say that we were all kind of starting around this at the same time, and it was really fun. I feel honored to be able to be a part of something like the beginning of something. It's very different now. I feel old. I am. I look back on those days and I'm like, oh, the good old days.
Christine: Yeah. Well, that was really going to be my next question or you're following my stream of consciousness, I think is how different it looks today. And when I go to events for travel content creators, well, one, there are events for travel content creators. You're right, and there are hundreds of people there and they are all trying to figure out how to get into the space. And now becoming a travel blogger doesn't look anything like where you started. And people are starting with growing their email marketing lists, drip campaigns and lead magnets and all of these things. It's very structured, and not only that, you're not competing with 10 to a hundred writers. You are competing with thousands and thousands of content creators. And because of what social media looks like these days, anybody can surface as a content creator and a travel writer. And so setting yourself apart from all of those people is a huge thing. When you speak with people who are starting out in this industry, what do you tell them is a strategy for really creating your own niche or refining your voice or standing out from that crowd?
Sherry: My best piece of advice always to people, whether this is a traveler who's trying to figure out where to go and what to do, a travel blogger who's trying to figure out what is my business going to be? My piece of advice that's very core to who I am is find out where everyone is going and turn around and go the other way. You have to set yourself apart. Like you said, you have to be unique, and that might mean a smaller group of followers or whatever you want to call it, but at least you are doing something different than everyone else and you've got a chance because there's just too many players. Now the other thing is, and you've really alluded to all this, is the people who are starting now are starting with the idea that they're going to build a travel blogging business or a content creator business.
They start with it from the business in mind, hence the emails, et cetera. The people who I started with, we didn't start with that in mind. I had a blog because I wanted my family and friends to know where I was and I didn't want to take my journal, so this was my way I could electronic journal. There was never a plan to have it as a business. And because of that, I would say that's probably, it was great in the beginning. It's probably hurt me now a little bit because still it was just passion that drove me and I still want it to be that way and still stuck in that. And somehow I guess I have made it work. But yeah, it's a hard thing to start into, but you're right, anyone, it's hard to be successful is what I would say.
Christine: Yeah, I would agree with that. And I think the other thing is because the metrics of success are likes, followers, impressions and all these things that I don't even fully understand if I'm honest. I know I've seen the lingo. And so that's about getting these masses of followers. But then you are saying, if you are trying to be someone who I think is valued by a small set of people, the place where you can create the most impact is not by having the most likes and followers and the large community. You need to have a very aligned community so that you can speak right to your audience. And then when you're looking at it from a business perspective and you're pitching yourself to brands, it looks one way. If you can say, oh yeah, I have 10,000 likes on every post versus if you have a thousand on every post, but you are speaking very clearly to that audience, and I come through this with the podcast all the time, is I'm speaking to a very, very specific audience and they understand what I'm saying. And when you look at it from a marketing standpoint, if I'm sharing a product, I'm sharing it in a way I know resonates exactly with who I'm speaking to, and I don't have to filter out all these other peripheral people who I've just gathered for the sake of numbers, I'm very clear on who I'm speaking to. So you end up in this very, I think, difficult space in this industry.
Sherry: You're right, it's hard. It's hard to be different. It's hard to go your own way. Yeah, it's very, very challenging. And so much of my career has been because I was one of the first people that was kind of into this whole world has been educating destinations, businesses, travel companies, PR companies on what really value I bring and what I can do with them kind of thing. So it's not just running a business, it's a lot of persuading. But because of that too, I'm happy to say that the first to do a lot of things, I'm always still seems like today this happens a lot. I'll work with a destination or a company and they'll always be like, oh, you're the first blogger we've ever worked with, or You're the first whatever. We've never had anyone take over and do our stories before. You're the first one. That has been my career, the first at all of that stuff. And that's exciting to me. It makes it hard because it's hard to be the first sometimes because educating so much, but it's also really special and it ticks that box for me to be unique and new.
Christine: Yeah, I love that. Well, I think this will be a common thread in our conversation, as you said, being outside of the box or going the opposite way of the crowd. But I'm wondering if we look back at your early travel experiences, even before you decided to leave corporate and travel, did you always know that you were interested in travel from a young age, the outdoors? Were you always kind of thinking outside of the box or is this something that evolved in your journey?
Sherry: Yes and no. So I didn't do a lot of travel. I didn't shouldn't say that. My parents and I grew up in the Midwest and we would do a lot of car trips and my parents really liked the outdoors. I did not like the outdoors. They would drag me camping and I hated bugs and I was scared of everything and I was a big scaredy cat as a kid, so I did not like that too much, much rather would've went shopping at the mall and yet at the same time, so I didn't really have a lot of experience in travel. And here's a fun fact, I didn't have my passport until I was 30 years old. So I've accomplished a lot since then.
However, when you say, did you always like to go outside of the box? I think yes, I knew when I was a kid that I liked to be outside of the box a bit. My best way that I can describe that I guess that I look back on is when it was time graduated high school and we were picking our colleges or whatever. All of my friends, I grew up in Peoria, Illinois, all of my friends were going to University of Illinois, Chicago, and that would've been the easy thing to do, but I knew that for some unknown reason, I wanted to be different. I didn't want to go where everyone else was going. So I went to University of Nebraska and didn't know people there just went. And so I knew that I've always had a desire to not follow everyone, I guess. And then through my twenties and thirties, that just continued to manifest in bigger and bigger ways until that ultimate point where I'm like, I'm quitting my great corporate job in New York City and I'm going to go and adventure and do something different that no one else that I know of has done.
Now people have done it all over, but I didn't have that influence in my life, I guess at that point I didn't really know much about travel
Christine: As you were telling that you reminded me of this moment traveling with my girls and we were in a T-shirt shop where we were in Greece and you could make any kind of shirt you wanted, and they had a lot of things that were tourist focused, and they had this one shirt that said it had a checker or a tic-tac toe board, and it said, think outside the box, and it had the tic-tac toe board, and then the circle was outside of the box and my middle child was like, that's the shirt I want. And I was like, of all of these things, you don't want one that says anything about Santorini or Greek something, something. And she's like, no, I want that shirt. That is so funny. She also got to design it and her design choices in and of themselves were out it, and she's like, don't you get it, mom? Don't you get how you have to be outside of the box? She just had this epiphany, I think about who she is and who she wants to be. So I love that's super, seeing that spirit energy I guess of that.
Sherry: Who knows where it'll take her as she gets older. I mean,
Christine: I think she definitely will blaze her own trails as well. Well, I know as you evolved and become a traveler, which I love hearing that you didn't have your passport until you were 30 because I think a lot of people might think that means they're just not meant to travel. And this is another theme for you, I think, is really saying that you can tackle new challenges, you can reinvent yourself over and over again at any age and stage. So we're going to talk more about that, but as you started to fall in love with travel, you also, like you said, fell in love with the places people weren't going and also the ways of travel. People weren't really focusing on such as long distance travel, slow travel, really traveling in unexpected ways. And I know you've done some long distance hiking. You've driven from London to Mongolia. I would love to hear from you, what did start to draw you to these types of experiences and how has spending time moving slowly through places changed how you see the world and how you want to tell stories about the world?
Sherry: Oh my God, there's a lot there. Okay, hopefully I can remember it all. If not, make sure you bring up that second part again. So yeah, once I kind of ticked off, I did that year, that first year, what I call the career break, and I hit a lot of the main things to see the main bucket list things I would say. But even pretty quickly into that trip, I realized that I started learning things about myself of what I liked in travel, and I really loved traveling and developing countries. I loved traveling to places that were cultures that were very different than what I grew up in because I was super fascinated with that type of stuff. So that drove me to places like Southeast. I spent a lot of time in southeast Asia, India, Morocco at that time, et cetera.
Then as I started to have blogging is a true career. I think the first thing I realized is that if I write the same thing as everyone else, what's the point? And I found that if I did different things and wrote about different things that I actually from a blogging standpoint had more people interested in it because there were fewer, you do a Google search, this was before I ever even understood SEO or anything. That has been a learning process too. I realized that writing about different adventures was good for my blog because more people would find it. And then that kind of led me to, I always really liked big journeys, big projects. I love the idea of going from A to B in a long arduous journey. I have this fascination with explorers and Lewis and Clark, whatever, but they idea of exploring something, seeing something for the first time and really working to get there.
And that was just really deep inside of me. So one of the first I started hearing about because I didn't know anything about it, like the Camino de Santiago, a long distance walk for 500 miles across Spain. Once I heard about it, I'm like, oh, that sounds interesting. Maybe I could do that. And the beauty of being nomadic is I could spend time like that in those places. So it took me five weeks I think, of walking across Spain, and I'll get back to that because that has a big kind of aha moment in why I ended up doing my recent project. But even then I realized that it was such a good time to, when you walk through a country, it's so slow and you learn so much and it seeps into you at that pace. And the idea of walking was it just made, all I had to do every day was eat, sleep and walk, and that's it.
And it cleared my mind. It was a really great, great experience. I remember one of the things that came out of it for me was at that point too, I was kind of struggling with, do I keep on doing this blogging? How do I make this more into a business that can support me, et cetera? And so I had a month to sit to walk and think about it. And I remember coming out of that as one of the big things that I learned was this idea of make your own way. And I decided at that point that I could go. All the other bloggers had gone and do the very traditional things, and I just decided, no, I'm going to make my own way. And so when I finished that, I really kind of refocused how I was doing the blog. A little bit after that, I ended up doing another big journey as you mentioned something called the Mongol Rally.
It's actually a charity event, but it's a crazy charity event. I learned about it. I read about someone who had done it, and when I read it, I thought, no way. No, this is impossible. Who could do this? This is crazy. It's impossible. It at that point, I had been to Mongol at once before, and Mongolia to me was the most fascinating country. It was one of those that was very, very different than our culture. And this was back in 2008, so it was even more undeveloped. It's certainly gotten much more developed now, they didn't even have roads, and I was so fascinated with how these drivers could navigate in the middle of nowhere without roads. I didn't even understand it. So I was always kind of fascinated with that. So when I saw that there was this charity event that you could drive from London Mongolia or from London to Mongolia to Ula Batar Mongolia in kind of like a race for charity, I was very intrigued because that meant that you would have to drive across Mongolia. And I thought, I can't imagine anything more challenging than driving across Mongolia on my own.
So that's kind of how the whole idea started. The other thing is, up until that point, I had been really nervous to drive in foreign countries because it's very intimidating, even though I guess I did live in Vietnam and I had a motorbike, but I was very intimidated to drive in other countries, and I thought, wow, if I drive from London to Mongolia, that will most definitely get me over that fear. So that's another reason why I did it. I wanted to face that fear. I also, as crazy as it sounded, because this wasn't a supported trip, you didn't have people with you like an organization that was with you the whole way. Basically the organization through a beginning party and an ending party, and then whatever happened in the middle was you had to figure it out. No one was going to come rescue you.
But by that time, I had been on the road for five years and I believed in the power of travel, and I believed in the goodness of people because that's one of the things I think that travel teaches you. And I was willing to go out on this crazy adventure because I knew that if I needed help, I could find it. I mean, I didn't speak any of these languages. There was so many new things and scary things, but I was just going to put it out there to the travel gods and go, you're going to take care of me. And they did, actually, it was 9,000 miles. We drove through 13 countries. The other piece had to be in a totally inappropriate car, so it had to be in a tiny little car. So we had this little Nissan and I went with three other people.
We were a team and we made it. We were at that point, about 50% of the teams that started actually made it to the end because of car trouble or whatever. And wow, did I learn a lot. It was incredible. And then we raised money for the charity, and then we actually, if the car made it to Mongolia, it's changed a little bit now how they do it. But at that time, if it made it to Mongolia in one piece, the car would stay in Mongolia and you donated it there. I still often wonder, I wonder if our little Nissan is still running in Mongolia. It probably is.
Christine: Wow, what an incredible experience. And I think some of the things you mentioned prior to that, but also about that journey is the working to get there and what that means when you arrive, wherever that end point is. I feel the same way that travel, when you just arrive somewhere without any struggle I guess, or any challenge or any effort, it's as if the travel can't give you the gifts that it would like to give you.
Sherry: That's a great way to put it. Yeah, it's so true.
Christine: So imagining that journey, not only is it difficult, but it's continued challenge after challenge, I'm sure. Just like you said, the very first thing was learning how to drive in a foreign country, which I'm sure there's many easier ways you could have overcome that fear, but I love that you headlong into, you're like, I know how I'll beat this. I will drive halfway around the world.
Sherry: That's very true.
Christine: But that idea of then when you reach that end point, what you have accomplished truly changes you, and you kind of have allowed this great gift to be bestowed upon you by the experience. And again, I think this will come up as we're speaking about your next project, but I think that's a really important thing because travel has become very easy. And I think much like you, I was always drawn to that discovery process of travel or that hard-earned victory or the romance of early discovers and archeologists. And I think part of it was that spirit of discovery and that journey. And when you just can all of a sudden go on a plane and hop on a train and arrive at this magical destination, something has been lost in the journey. So I would love to hear from you what that brings up for you.
Sherry: Oh, wow. I mean, it's funny because in just both of those projects, the Camino de Santiago, the Mongol rally, I so distinctly remember the last days of them, the last day, the day I saw Santiago for the first time in the distance and the day when we got to the outskirts of Ola Mutar. And I still, that feeling that I had inside one, it was like, oh my God, I need it. But you're right, it was hard earned. It changed me. We talk about transformational travel. I know you talk about transformational travel all the time, and that's really the truth. It does transform you. I think not only, and the other big thing for me, which I think is huge, is it builds confidence. I think as we get older, we lose a lot of that sometimes and we think, oh, I could never do that, or whatever. And once you actually get to the other side of it and you've worked hard to get there, it's amazing. The confidence just grows. That feeling is it's an adrenaline you've never had before kind of thing.
And hopefully for me, I'm also inspiring people along the way to do something similar to challenge themselves. But yeah, I think when you challenge yourself is really when you grow. And that's how I've always kind of looked at travel is how can I challenge myself to be different? How can I challenge myself to try this new thing that intimidates me? Sometimes it's easier for me to wrap it up in travel because I love travel so much that it makes me more apt to do it. Kind of like the driving, I suppose. It makes me less scared. I think for me, and I've always said this, I am not a, what do I want to say, a brave person necessarily. Everyone always is like, oh, I can't believe you did that. But for me that when you put yourself on that point of that kind of precipice of fear, like, oh, this is scary because I don't know what's going to happen.
It's new to me. I don't know if I'm going to make it whatever. And excitement, the travel aspect, really that's the perfect place for me to learn and grow. And along the way, you get all the culture that you're surrounded by too, that you get to take in and you rely on people. I think that's one of the hard, I'm solo, so I am not married. I don't have kids. I do everything on my own. And one of the hardest things for me to do is to rely on people because I'm so used to being on my own and the Mongol Valley, I absolutely, I knew that I was going to rely on people, whether it be my teammates, random strangers at gas stations, which happened multiple, multiple times. Yeah, I think it's great. You put, you're vulnerable. And like I said, when you wrap it up in the travel sphere, I think it makes it more easy to handle and do.
Christine: I love that. And I always try to share that with my kids. The idea of when something's scary and overwhelming or frustrating, they're afraid. Or I sometimes say scare sighted is the sweet spot when you're scared and excited. Yeah,
Sherry: That's perfect. It's like hangry. But I love that scare sighted. I've got to totally remember that
Christine: It's true. I was like, what's happening is you're just growing and it's going to hurt. And I also, when they have growing pains, which they do often as children, it is painful sometimes. And it's okay. I love that because it's not forever, but it's really important. And so just to be like, it's okay to feel all these feelings and then just know that this is growth that's happening and it often is tangled up in all of those other emotions.
Christine (Ad): Hi, it's Christine. Can you believe we are about to move into a new year? One of the things most excited about is my women's book club. I launched my virtual book club in 2021, and it was such a powerful and valuable experience that I've kept it going. I love the relationships I've cultivated with women who have returned each year. This is a journey meant to inspire travel, create cultural awareness, and offer personal growth experiences all from the comfort of your home or wherever you may be lucky enough to be in 2023. Each moment we spend reading is a moment that endures in our bones. Reading wakes us up, reading transports us to another world, another experience or another perspective. Reading leaves us changed forever. Imagine who you'll be at the end of this book. Sojourn past participants have said that they enjoy diving deep into a book and hearing other stories and perspectives. Last year, women said it was one of the most powerful experiences they had. You can join us beginning in January, soul of Travel. Listeners will get a bonus call with me to welcome you to this experience and set our intentions and begin building our new community. Visit lotus sojourns.com/to join this unique travel experience today. Now let's hop back over to our soulful conversation.
Christine: I know for you, you're kind of in another period of growth and learning and tackling the unknown with your current project, which was birthed during the pandemic to bike to every capital in the US picking up on something that your father started but hadn't completed. I would love for you to share more about that project. And then after you share a bit about it, I want to talk about some of the unexpected benefits that we've chatted about before out of this
Sherry: Journey. Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this. So I'm someone that always kind of needs a big quest or journey in the future or something to work on kind of thing. And for a long time I didn't have one, and then the pandemic came and that just through everything to a halt in some ways. It was really great. Well, in many ways it was great for me because it slowed me down. I needed a break from traveling. I needed to get to know my home city now and so on. And so one of the things that I did because I couldn't travel I normally did was I started getting on a bike. I had a crappy little cheap bike that I bought off of the marketplace and started riding around on these trails that were right outside my door, and I didn't know where they went or how they connected or anything about it.
And I would ride. And at that time, I also didn't have a car. I hadn't had a car for 18 years. So for me, getting out on the bike, it was also my way to start to kind of piece together the puzzle of Denver for me a little bit. So that was exciting because I was learning. I'm like, oh, this road connects to this road, and like, oh, this is interesting. So I started biking more and more and more. The second year of the pandemic, I decided to get rid of my crappy little bike. I was going 40 miles on this just commuter bike. And so I went to the bike store and said, this is what I think I want. And then of course, it was 2021 and they're like, we don't have any inventory. So I said, okay, fine. What could I leave with today?
What do you have that I can leave with today? So I ended up spending way more money than I wanted to, but I did leave on a bike and I still have that one today. So once I kind of upgraded bikes, that started a whole new world of like, oh, hey, this is even better. So I became quite interested in biking and I never thought I would be, but it was my pastime in the pandemic at that time. I was talking to a friend and we were talking about journeys and so on, and I had told her, well, I had been thinking, this has always been in the back of my head, I'm going to take you back now to my childhood. When I was 14 years old, my father decided that he was going to walk from capital to capital in the United States. And now this was 1984 before Forrest Gump, before cell phones, before we did have a computer, we had a Commodore 64, but nothing like what today looks like.
So he just decided this, and it wasn't like he was a walker or it was just out of the blue. And for me, being 14 years old and an angsty teenager, I just thought, this is another one of his dumb ideas. What is he doing and why does he always have to be different? Why can't he just be a normal dad and be like all my friends' dads? That's all I wanted because as a teenager, that is what you want and you can't appreciate the uniqueness of your parents, especially at that point. So my whole teenage years, my dad was busy on this quest trying to walk from capital to capital. Now he worked, so he did this on weekends. He did it during vacations. My mother would be his logistics person and would drive him everywhere and pick him up and do all the communication and secure the hotels in the small towns.
And she was a saint as she always has been to him. And I would get drug along lots of times because I was 14, 15, 16, and I hated it because I didn't want anything to do with it at all. And then I finally went to college and he was still doing it, and still it was just kind of like, I don't care that much about this. It's weird, whatever. My dad is weird. In probably my late twenties and thirties, I started to really respect the idea more, I think as I got older. And then by the time he basically walked to 23 capitals about 4,000 miles over the course of a number of years, he was 47 when he started, I think his last one. He was like 74 or so that he did. And then he just stopped. He got older. I think my mom was really tired of driving him around and doing all this all the time. He kept meticulous notes about the whole thing. I don't know what he was ever going to do with it, but he typed it into our Commodore 64 and future computers, and it was just kind of for him. So he never finished it. And that always stuck with me as being a little bit disappointing because he raised us as we have to finish everything we start. And that always surprised me that he didn't finish it once he retired.
Then as I started traveling, I would say, and became a citizen of the world, I realized in my quest to always find new things and unique things, I realized that it was really unusual that in all these years, no one that I knew of and I had researched it, had attempted what my dad did or what my dad was doing on his project, on his capital project. And I thought, wow, that's really amazing that he could come up with such a project that could stand the test of time that no one has done it yet. People bike across the country and all that stuff, or walk across the country. But no one had done it that way. And so I started really admire it, the thing that I hated. So anyway, fast forward pandemic, I start biking. I had thought in the past about someone should really finish this project.
It's a shame that it wasn't finished. But when I looked into walking it, finishing it, the way my dad did it, it was a long way. It's like 9,000 miles left because of the distances between some of the capitals that he has left. And once I started biking, it just kind of hit me one day that I'm like, but I could bike it. I could do it my way. I could make it my own. And I talked to some friends about it and they were kind of excited and I'm like, I'm going to do this. And that's how it started really. And I went up to talk to my dad. They live in South Dakota. My parents are still alive. They're 87. And I asked him if it was okay if I could take it over and do it my way basically. And he was more than happy to be like, yes, of course.
And then that's when I kind of started digging through all of his old notes that were up in the attic, just kind of wasting away found his old map that we used to have in our house when I was a kid. It was like a paper map with push pins and yarn of what he had left and what he had done and so on and so forth. And I took all of that and started making it my own. And I honestly had no idea how I was going to do this. I just started biking and I hadn't really done road biking here in Denver. You can get around on trails everywhere. So I had a lot of fear when you talk about being on that fear and excitement. I had a lot of fear, but I was excited to try to take this on. At the same time, I think I also probably thought this is a way that I can honor my parents, that I can honor the fact that I've grown up enough now to know that how important they are and how important it was that they instilled in me this desire to be different and try new things and go out and explore and all of that.
So it was my way that I could connect with them in a way too and try to live out this whole idea that he had started. So yeah, so I started my first, basically what I did, I'm doing a whole YouTube series about it. So each capital I have 26 to do. And like I said, about 8,000 miles, 9,000 miles. And so I went to South Dakota, we recorded everything. I interviewed my parents for the first time on what this was all about because I didn't know. I didn't know as a kid. So it was really fun digging into all that and interviewing them separately and together and just trying to learn more about it because that piece really wasn't documented. So I did that. And then one of the capitals that he hadn't finished yet was Pier South Dakota. So he was walking from St. Paul, Minnesota to Pier South Dakota, and he was more than halfway probably when he stopped.
And that was one of the last ones he did. And he just had never finished it. So I took my bike up there and I started where he stopped and I biked into pier. And then I stopped about a mile outside of the capitol and my parents came and the three of us walked in together so that I could kind of have a handoff of this big beautiful project that my dad left me and my dad could finish that one off was the idea. So that's how it all started. And that was in 2022. That was last year. I did my first 1st of July and now I've done five. So that's kind of the big plan, the big project.
Christine: Yeah. How amazing. And to think too, again, you were like, I might try biking, and now you're biking all over the world or all over the country. And especially looking at, as you mentioned, he was kind of more on the East coast capitals were closer together, it was more manageable walking, and now you're looking at covering some great distances, especially out west and also some great elevations and environmental changes in climate as you're traveling. And so I can imagine the logistics become overwhelming and intimidating
Sherry: Once I start digging into each route. Once I decide which routes I'm doing for the year it is, I go through this process and I think, God, I hope this gets easier, but I don't know if it will where I'm terrified. I start to look at all the details and the Google maps and the street views and trying to figure out how am I going to figure all this out? And it does become really overwhelming, but once you just get on the bike and start pedaling, it all just melts away. And now you have time to sit and think. It reminds me so much of the Camino de Santiago where you just have to eat, sleep, walk. And I said before when we talked about the Camino, I think that was, I was actually hiking the Camino. That was one of my big aha moments was hiking the Camino.
And in the middle in the Ed, which is kind of like the Midwest of the Camino, it's the middle, very farm, big distances between villages. So lots of people skip it, but I'm like, I'm not skipping it. I'm doing it. This is like my Midwest. So I was walking it, and at one point, it was in the spring when I did it, there was a farmer out tilling his field, and that smell of freshly tilled dirt hit me. And I just had this moment that took me back to my childhood, and I realized, I'm like, oh my God, I am walking across Spain. When did I become my father?
What the hell am I doing? And it was that moment where you realize, wow, that had more of an impact on me than I ever thought. And we end up being our parents in many ways. And it just hit me like that. I never put that together. I always thought I was like my mom. And I think that was the moment where I realized my dad with all these crazy adventures and things that he wanted to do and desire to be different, I was my dad. And it was just this humbling moment, I guess, of aging. But yeah, thank you so
Christine: Much for sharing that awareness with us. I know some of the other unexpected benefits that you realized that you were kind of also pulling through these threads of your identity as a traveler and as a blogger was bringing visibility to lesser visited cities in our own country. As you search the map and look how you were going to navigate, as I mentioned, the experiencing that we can start something new at any time. And another thing that you'd mentioned too is being an inspiration for women to learn and be more adventurous and push ourselves. So yeah, what has that revealed to you as you've started to witness some of these benefits?
Sherry: I think I spent so much time traveling internationally that going to from capital to capital on a bike in the US was my way to really explore the US and get back in touch with my own culture. Most of the time in this whole big route, you are spending time in rural America. I mean, the city portions are very small, honestly, and I love rural America where I grew up, yet I think at this time where we have such a divided country in so many ways, it's really interesting for me and informative for me to be able to travel through some of these areas, small towns, I have a love of them. And to me it takes that everything that I've been doing with travel, which is go places where people don't go and puts it on my domestic kind of plan that's doing that.
And so these tiny little towns and meeting locals and seeing the countryside and understanding the farming. Like I did Montana last summer and I learned so much about cows just on the bike. I can't even tell you. I had to ride through a cattle drive at one point. It was nuts. But just stuff like that and to really be able to look at our own culture and appreciate it in that way that I can appreciate Vietnam or something like that. So I wasn't planning on that being interesting to me, but it was, the other thing is when you talk about the lesser traveled areas, the thing about the capitals is historically they are in cities that are not the cities you think of when you think of the states. So there's a few, Denver, Colorado is the capital, Boston is the capital, Phoenix is the capital.
So those are what you would kind of think of. But most of the time they chose the capital historically based on it has to be in the middle of the state so that all the farmers and everyone could get there to pay their taxes in the shortest amount of time kind of thing. So that leaves you with towns like Pier South Dakota or Helena, Montana. These are not the most popular towns. What is it, Olympia, Washington. It's not Seattle. So I love the fact, I love the underdogs. I love bringing visibility to the underdogs. So I love the fact that I can now go into these towns and explore them the way that I would explore Paris or something like that and write about them and show them to people. And they're the lesser known towns. They're the underdogs. And so that's been really fun along with getting to know and understand our capital buildings, which is fascinating. So there's a lot of great travel elements to this. Not only is it a journey that scares me, but yeah, it's great travel as far as the type of travel that I like to do. I'm trying to think of your other questions now. I got help ons.
Christine: I think it's okay. I just wanted to kind of bring them into the conversation for our listeners to think about too, which was about starting adventures at any time and really inspiring women. But I wanted to go back to the point that you just mentioned of extending the same curiosity and appreciation for cultural differences in our own country, own country. Because I think when we travel, we really expect that we need to do that. When we travel internationally, we expect that we need to do that, and we're so quick to be more compartmentalized or more aligned with whatever it is we believe in our own country. We're less flexible here and more adaptable there. And I love that you talked about how this allows us to look at our country in that way because I think it's really important. And as you were talking about biking through Montana, which happens to be where I grew up. Oh, that's right. And my dad went to a small town where he graduated with I think four people in his high school school. And so I have actually constantly had to have that, my own conversation with that and understanding the cultural differences, political difference, value differences within my own existence. But I had never really, I guess looked at it through what you said of this is the way we need to play that same respect and curiosity forward in our own country. And I think that's a really, really valuable point.
Sherry: Yeah, I mean for me, I think anytime I'm on the move, I'm curious is just who I am, and it's probably what drives me in a lot of this stuff. But yeah, I've learned more about these small communities and you start to see similarities between them and things like that. You can start to piece it together just like I would, like I said, in another foreign country, and you touched upon this before because also this is a way to slowly travel and I'm not hopping on a plane and just showing up somewhere. I think you get a different appreciation for it too because you're spending a lot of time in those areas. I'm only going about 50 miles a day, and I do that. I could go further potentially, but actually for me, I really want this to be about travel too, and taking the time to be able to see these small towns go to the little cafe that's known for their apple pie or whatever and bring visibility to some of that stuff. I've met some really interesting people, interesting towns. Lots of the towns that I end in, they don't even have hotels or there's maybe one hotel.
And even when I was biking across Montana last summer, it happened to be the time where they had the, oh, what's the motorcycle rally in South Dakota?
Christine: Sturgis.
Sherry: Yes. So I'm biking west. They're all motorcycling east. And it was kind of fascinating because every hotel, you'd also be with all these people, so you kind of understood more about even that. It was just fascinating to see. And you don't get to see that stuff unless you get off the beaten path into small towns. Go slow and learn how to appreciate it a little bit.
Christine: This reminds me of two other people that have great slow travel projects and human kindness projects. We don't really have time to get into it right now, but maybe we'll have to have a side conversation about that. One last thing I wanted to touch on with you is really how we maybe bring some of this idea of slower travel into a more mainstream travel space. And then I know in addition to travel writing, you also lead some tours for OTTs world readers, and we talked about before about this idea of more time to do less. And when you look at it from a travel designer and a tour operator perspective, traditionally what's valued in a trip has been these ideas of eight countries in 10 days or seeing as much as you can, doing as much as you can. How do you think we start to encourage travelers and operators to embrace creating more time, to do less, to really experience a place? And why do you think that's really valuable that we start to shift that narrative as travel providers?
Sherry: Well, I think it's hard. It's hard to convince people that you don't need to go to three countries when you're in Southeast Asia. Just go to one and dig in because Americans have limited time. I get that. And they want to be able to pack everything in as far as how do we get people to change that? I think one of the things is they have to see it in action themselves. So that's one of the things I try to do is show people that you can do this differently. And there are lots of people out there that show that. But I think that's one thing is you have to have in a way, role models. You have to put it out there in front of people. I love the amazing race, but that is not how I want to travel at all. So people need to see a different form.
I think about Bourdain who really dug into one city and the food, maybe it's that. Maybe it's picking something that's really, really important to you, and digging in one place a theme of sorts. Instead of, I'm going to go see all of Southeast Asia. My theme is going to be I want to experience all the soup in Vietnam. So then you kind of center it around something else other than going everywhere to get travel companies to dig more into slow travel and really exploring one place, that's a hard one. I don't know that I have an answer for that. I mean, because it's hard. It's hard to do that and then try to market it to people.
The easy way is to just send everyone around. But I do think that the travel industry, as you well know, has made such great leaps in the idea of sustainable and responsible travel, and this is one of those things that fits into that perfectly stay longer in places, et cetera. I think really the idea of, and I've done this a lot in my travels, was stay somewhere a month or whatever, but even if you just have a week to go to, I don't know, Berlin, let's say, and just stay in Berlin for that week and not all the other stuff. I mean, what it means is you have to dig harder sometimes on how to entertain yourself or how to dig in deeper in an area, but it will be worth it. I think it's a chance for you also to really get to meet the locals more.
So if you're someone who likes local travel and learning from locals, that's one of the ways you're going to do it. If you're moving everywhere, it's just not going to happen. But I love to use the company, oh, what is it with locals, I think, but it's like they have local guides and that's one of the first things I like to do when I get to a place that I don't know is meet a local guide and then you can ask all kinds of questions and figure out more detailed things to do in that area through them, which is a little different, but I don't know. I'm curious what you think about, how do you get travel companies to focus more in one area and not do as much and travel slow?
Christine: I think it's really hard, and I do think there are some great brands that are pushing the point and doing it. I think, yeah, on Tours is doing great. There's some companies that are really trying to encourage people to go someplace and be someplace, and I do think we feel like we're going to miss out. And it's true. You aren't going to see everything, so in fact you are missing things. But also I think the other thing you said is you have to experience it once to understand the value. This is something that's really hard to market. It's really easy to market seeing the Eiffel Tower
Sherry: 20 things
Christine: Because we understand that, but what we don't understand until we've felt it is that connection. I think that's really everything. One of my favorite things that my girls and I like to do when we travel somewhere is find a local coffee shop and then you'll find us there every morning for the rest of the week that we're there. That's how we kind of connect and we start seeing the same waitress and the same person walking their dog and the same cat that wanders into the coffee shop or something like that, and they start to feel like they belong there and they start to experience things in a different way. And that's what my kids really love to embrace about travel. And so I think it's those things that once you see what you're missing by moving, then you can appreciate it. But there's almost, I think almost no way to, like you said, really market it or to sell travelers on it that haven't experienced it. But I also feel like it's almost our responsibility in creating the deeper connections that will eventually sustain travel in the long term to make people really try to lean into that. And I also know some operators have created just days in a full itinerary where they don't have anything planned, do
Sherry: Anything,
Christine: And it's really hard for travelers. They're like, well, but can you give me some ideas of what to do? Then I have a whole day, what could I do? And they're like, well, that's the whole point is that we don't
Sherry: Explore.
Christine: We don't want to tell you what to do. And I just think it is, it's a muscle we don't use. It's a way of traveling. Many of us have an experience and I just think I'd be really curious to see. I think it's an important part of where we're heading in travel and I'll be looking forward to see what we create.
Sherry: I do think it is something that we'll see more of. I have a few thoughts on this yet. I always tell myself that if there's other things I want to do, but I don't want to pack too much in, I tell myself whether it's going to be true or not, that that's okay. I'll be back again. I'll come back here. And granted, if I really start to think about it, maybe I won't, I don't know. But if I tell myself that, I start to believe that and it takes that pressure off of, oh my God, I've got to fit in these other five cities. I'll never be back to Croatia again or whatever.
Because I think that's just how we are programmed to think that hopefully that's changing. It's funny, it just reminds me of, I travel with my nieces. I did this thing called the Niece Project, and I take them different places in the world and I let them choose wherever they wanted to go in the world. And I just remember one of them being like, well, this is my only shot to travel ever. They thought that it was their only time they were ever going to travel. And so this decision of where to go was such a big decision. And it was funny to me because it just, I'm like, no, you're going to travel other places in the world. Why don't we think of that? This will continue if it's something that we love. But then I had another thought, now I can't think of it though, about just the slow travel stuff and having, I think people need to see it. Oh, I know what it was.
Inevitably, I used to work a lot with people who were taking career breaks, so long-term travel maybe anywhere from three months to a year. And inevitably I would tell everyone they'll organize their itinerary or whatever and they will get worn out because you're going to try to do everything you can in that year. I know because I've been there about three months in, you're going to be like, oh my God, I can't keep up this pace. This is crazy. And you're going to slow down and you're going to stay in a city, you're going to get an Airbnb and you're going to integrate with that city, and then you're going to realize, like you just said, you have to experience it like, oh my God, this is a whole different way to travel and this is what I love. And everyone who I worked with who were doing these longer term trips, they would go through that process everyone. It was inevitable because you just can't keep up that pace and it's so much more rewarding to really dig in and feel like you belong somewhere after a little while.
Christine: Yeah, thank you so much for ending on that note. I think that's such a wise sentiment for people to really bring into their own experiences. Before we end our call, Sherry, I want to just go to the rapid fire questions, which I know you're also familiar with, so we're going to jump into those. The first one is what are you reading right now?
Sherry: A couple things, but I'm an audio book person. I listen to 'em when I'm on the bike, actually, not when I'm biking from capital to capital on roads, but when I'm on trails training, I listen to audiobooks all the time. One that I just finished up that I loved is called the Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano. And it meant a lot to me because it was all about this woman who did not want kids, and she was getting, and I'm not giving anything away, she was getting married and her and her husband had talked about it. Neither one of 'em wanted kids, whatever. And then two years into the marriage, he changed his mind and at that point, this all, they have a fight. And then the book basically goes in nine different lives of ways that things that could have happened basically on how they reacted to that fight. And it's fascinating. It's like what could have happened and so on. And it goes through every scenario you could ever think of about having or not having kids. And it teaches you a lot. It teaches you a lot about relationships. So I loved it. I thought it was great.
Christine: Thank you for sharing that. What is always in your suitcase or backpack when you're traveling?
Sherry: I'm going to say a water bottle and not just a water bottle. I use Clean Canteen. And the reason why I love it is because I can never decide if I want to take a water bottle or a coffee, an insulated coffee mug, and I don't want to take both. I don't have room. So what I like about the Clean Canteens is it's just the cylinder and then they have different lids and one is like a coffee lid and one has a straw and you can do more cold drinks and so on. So that way I take one cylinder and then two different lids, and I've got both.
Christine: Yeah, I have the exact same system. And when saw that I was like, this is so brilliant. I love this solution. And the only thing that has I deviate is sometimes I have a grail so that I have the water filtering water bottle, but then I realize I can, once I have my clean water, I can take that in there, but I also cannot have coffee or I like to put electrolyte powder and that can't go in there, so now I'm stuck. Then if I take the grail, I have to have another water bottle. So this is my current hydration dilemma.
Sherry: Yeah, it is a dilemma because I always love to take my own bottle, but I want everything, but you can't take everything.
Christine: Well, to Sojourn is to travel somewhere as if you live there for a short while. Where is one place if there is still some place that you would love to sojourn?
Sherry: That's a hard one. Yeah, I've done that in a lot of places, but I would say one place I am always intrigued with is, and I always said I could spend more time in is Turkey. Ironically, Turkey was when I was 30 years old and got my passport. That was the first country I ever went to, which was a big life changer, and I've been back since a couple of times. But the culture is so fascinating to me. The food is wonderful. I could just live in Istanbul or in a small town on the southern coast and be happy just learning about that culture for a month easily.
Christine: What is something you eat that immediately connects you to a place that you've been?
Sherry: I'm going to say it's actually eat and drink because I love cocktails, I love mixology and I love cocktails, so I'm going to say shishito peppers, which have you been to Barcelona in northern Spain. So they have, you can order the tapas of the blistered shishito peppers. And the thing that I love about 'em is they taste good. They got this nice salt to 'em, but there's always like it's roulette with peppers because there's always one or two that are really hot, super hot, and I love that. I like the risk of it, I think in a way. So whenever I have 'em here, I think about Catalonia, but also that goes along with that. Every time I have what I call a proper Spanish gin and tonic, that takes me back to Costa Brava in Spain. Without a doubt. I never knew that Spain had such a gin and tonic culture or a gin culture, but they do. It's pretty fascinating to me.
Christine: Who was a person that inspired or encouraged you to set out and explore the world?
Sherry: That's really hard. So I didn't have any travel mentors really in that sense. So as far as traveling, I don't know what I would answer to that. However, as we talked about earlier, I think my father was probably a huge influence on my desire to be different and to have different adventures in life and to go the other way that was so strong in me that that's what drove me into travel in a way. Since he's traveled a lot with me and we've done some really amazing things when he was a little bit younger, but so in a way I think it would be my dad, even though he wasn't a big international traveler.
Christine: If you could take an adventure with one person, fictional or real alive or past, who would it be?
Sherry: I think I'm going to go back to, because I think this is the thing that's been on my mind a lot. Probably my parents still, they're alive, but I've wanted to take them on a train journey across Canada, and it's just at this point it's really hard because 87 and they just don't travel like they used to. And so I think it's been on my mind a lot because I wonder if I missed that opportunity and that makes me a little sad. But yeah, that's what I've been thinking about lately at least.
Christine: Thank you for sharing that with us. The last one, soul of Travel is really a space for honoring women in the industry. Is there one woman you would like to recognize in this space?
Sherry: I know you asked this question and this one is the one thing that came to mind is there's a woman named Amelia Toxin who back in 2012, she was working in marketing for a cruise company, a small expedition cruise company, and she basically was probably one of the first ever that contacted me and said, Hey, we've been following you on social media and we know you travel with your dad and that you wanted to take your dad to Antarctica, so let's see if we can send you to Antarctica. And I was just like, what? I mean at that point, that was crazy to me, but she was very forward thinking in where this was all going with content creators and so on, and she doesn't work for that company any longer, but she does do her own consulting and she does marketing for travel companies. Basically that's her specialty. So she's someone I think about because that was such a big turning point and kind of in that whole world of new media again of like, oh, wait a minute, you can send bloggers, whatever. We didn't call 'em influencers, even at that time. You can send people on trips and they will cover it in social media and so on. So I would say, yeah. Amelia Toxin,
Christine: Thank you and thank you so much for being here. I am so glad that we finally were able to connect the dots and meet, and ironically, we live very close to one another. I know. So perhaps it will be in person at one of these, I hope so. One of these days. I have love so much hearing about your journey and all of the things behind what have gotten you out into the world and how you really think about travel, and I really appreciate you sharing that with us today.
Sherry: Thank you so much for having me. It's been great. I love to talk about this project, and the one thing I would say is it's also in my hope that as I continue on in this capital project, that I will get people to join me in it. So if any of your listeners are interested in biking a route with me or even helping me with logistics, I always have a logistics person along. It's a really fun time and we all travel together and it can be super fun way to see the United States.
Christine: Excellent. Thank you. Well, I'll make sure that I share your details in the show notes, so if people are interested, I think that would be such a great way for them to be able to experience travel through your own eyes, support you on this journey, and to really help to push you through to the end of this project, which I know is really important to you. Yeah. Thank you again for being here, and I'll look forward to connecting in the real world real soon. Yes,
Sherry: Yes. Let's hope so. Thank you so much for having me.
Christine: Thank you for listening to Soul of Travel presented by Journey Woman. I hope you enjoyed the journey. If you loved this conversation, I encourage you to subscribe and rate the podcast. Please share episodes that inspire you with others because this is how we extend the impact of this show. Learn more about each of my guests by reading our episode blogs, which are more than your average show notes. I think you'll love the connection. Find our episode blogs at www.souloftravelpodcast.com. I'm so proud of the way these conversations are bringing together people from around the world. If this sounds like your community, welcome, I'm so happy you are here. I am all about community and would love to connect. You can find me on Facebook at Soul of Travel podcast or follow me on Instagram, either at she dot sojourns or at Soul of Travel podcast. Stay up to date by joining the Soul of Travel podcast mailing list. You'll also want to explore the Journey Woman community and its resources for women travelers over 50. I'd also like to share a quick thank you to my podcast producer and content magician, Carly Eduardo, CEO of Conte. I look forward to getting to know you and hopefully hear your story.
You can find me on Facebook at Lotus Sojourns on Facebook, or join the Lotus Sojourns Collective, our FB community, or follow me on Instagram either @lotussojourns or @souloftravelpodcast. Stay up to date by joining the Lotus Sojourns mailing list. I look forward to getting to know you and hopefully hearing your story.