Why I Started Early & Away

When I was a kid, the library let me check out ten books a week. That was the limit. I hit it every single week, all summer long, and then I re-read them before I returned them because ten wasn’t enough.

I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t reading. And I don’t remember a time when reading didn’t make me want to go somewhere. The books opened doors to places I hadn’t been, countries I couldn’t find on a map, lives that looked nothing like mine. I grew up in a world that was geographically small, but the reading made it enormous.

That’s the thing about books. They don’t just tell you a place exists. They make you feel what it would be like to stand there.

Reading made me want to travel. So I joined the Army.

After high school, I enlisted. Partly because I wanted to serve. Partly because I wanted out. But mostly — if I’m honest — because the books had already shown me a bigger world, and I needed to go see if it was real.

It was.

My husband was stationed at Menwith Hill — an NSA signals intelligence base in North Yorkshire — and we lived in the village next door for three years. I drove past the protesters at the gates. I drove past the radomes. I learned what it looks like when a Cold War listening post is disguised as golf balls in a sheep field. I ate at Betty’s in Harrogate and walked through Fountains Abbey and took the train to York on Saturdays and thought: I need to come back here someday, but differently. Longer. With people who understand why it matters.

That was the early 1990s. The trip I’m running to Yorkshire in October 2027 is, among other things, me going back.

Since then, I’ve traveled to sixteen countries and nearly every state. And the pattern has always been the same: I read about a place first, then I go. The reading shapes what I notice when I arrive. The place deepens what I understood from the page. They feed each other.

The spreadsheets were always there.

Three years ago, my friend David told me about his experience becoming a travel advisor — how much he loved it, how the work felt like it was made for him. And something clicked.

I’ve spent my career in marketing, event planning, and project management. I am — ask my husband Robert or my daughter Kate — a planner. The spreadsheets are legendary. The itineraries are color-coded. The research phase of any trip I take is longer than the trip itself, and I enjoy the research phase more.

Becoming a travel advisor wasn’t a leap. It was a convergence. Everything I’ve loved doing — reading, traveling, planning, organizing groups, building experiences — pointed here. I just hadn’t seen it yet.

I still have my corporate day job. I’m not writing this from a beach with a laptop and a mai tai. I’m building Early & Away in the hours between everything else, because I believe in it enough to do both.

Who Early & Away is for.

I built this for Gen X women — the ones who read seriously, who travel with intention, and who have spent the last decade being the most responsible person in every room they walk into. You know who you are.

The trips I run are small. Eight women. A five-month book club arc before you arrive — five books, five months, two calls per month, one public and one private for the traveling cohort. By the time you get on the plane or the train or the ship, you already know your fellow travelers. You’ve argued about the same books. You know who will want to go ashore and who will want to stay on deck. You’re not walking in alone. That’s by design.

Right now there are four trips:

• A literature festival at sea — Queen Mary 2, transatlantic crossing to the Cheltenham Literary Festival. November 2026. I build your group before you board; you sail with Cunard.
• A tall ship in the Caribbean — Royal Clipper through the Windward Islands, Barbados to Martinique. March 2027. Eight women, five months of Caribbean literature, one week on the world’s largest full-rigged sailing ship.
• A literary escape to Yorkshire — Harrogate, York, Fountains Abbey, a 700-year-old castle hotel, one evening in medieval ruins with wine and a choir. October 2027. I used to live in Killinghall. I know these roads.
• The Long Light: West of Ireland — Gregans Castle Hotel on the edge of the Burren, Irish women’s fiction, wildflowers in June, evenings that last until half past nine. June 2028.

Each trip is built around the idea that the destination means more when you’ve read your way into it. The books come first. The place comes second. And the place is always better because of the books.

Why now.

I’ve been quiet about Early & Away for a while. Building it behind the scenes. Testing whether the idea holds up. Figuring out whether I could actually do this.

I can.

The website is live. The first trips are booking. And I’ve learned — from every book I’ve ever read and every country I’ve ever visited — that the world gets bigger when you stop waiting for permission to go see it.

If you’re the kind of person who packs more books than clothes, who plans trips around what you’re reading, who has ever finished a novel and thought I need to go there — Early & Away is for you.

I’d love to have you.

See what’s coming →