Professionally Speaking
Some of the most useful travel information comes from people who live and work where you want to go. Travel Squire gives you the “best of the best,” featuring insider destination tips from hospitality and travel industry pros. We talk with the most knowledgeable concierges, expert tour guides, seasoned expats and savvy locals.
Working full-time for a travel guidebook publisher can almost be painful in the wanderlust it sparks. A quick glimpse of a European spire or glittering wilderness on the cover of a new issue will have me pining to plan a trip there. Not unlike my time put in working at City Bakery during college when I never tired of eyeing the goods. When I’m fortunate enough to actually act on my whims, I feel that I need to properly digest my travel in order to really enjoy it. Without proper processing, it can dunk soundlessly into long term memory and I would hate for my vacations to disappear like so many pretzel croissants consumed during my time at the bakery.
Changing yet Staying the Same
People often ask me how a mother and her two daughters could survive in the travel industry for so many decades. Well, in our case it came naturally and the knowledge accumulated through the years provided perspective, a rich foundation and the courage to change.
Elizabeth Adams, now 93 and still writing, was the travel editor of Town & Country Magazine for 25 years before she started a business with her two daughters, Mary Elizabeth Wheelis and Martha Morano. We came from different disciplines: editorial, public relations and sales. We soon learned that all three strengths were absolutely necessary in building and sustaining a successful business.
As the train crept slowly out of the St. Petersburg train station I gazed out and saw her, my kind-hearted stranger. She was smiling and waving as she blew a kiss, then turned and walked back toward the city. I waived and smiled back at Katirina, knowing that our paths would probably never cross in the future. I’ll never forget her.
Although I travel on average two months each year outside the country, ironically I still consider myself a homebody. Few things on the road beat my dull, daily routine here in Harvard Square … walking Bello, my Bernese mountain dog along the Charles River, writing in my study, reading at Hi-Rise, the city’s best bakery down the street, running three miles at my gym and, of course, seeing mentally ill inpatients at the hospital. I’m a travel and food writer, but also work as a clinical psychologist with an active practice made up primarily of folks who are poor and suffering from severe mental illness. So despite the pleasure I take from the rhythm of repetitive days, I have to leave home. Traveling clears my head, rejuvenates me and wakes me up to possibilities.
I love to travel, but I got the travel bug a little later in life than most since I have my own business and never felt that I could get away.
For the first seven years of operating The Hall Company I never left New York City until I realized that all my colleagues were traveling, the journalists I worked with were all going on press trips and I was working day and night, plus I wasn’t adding anything enlightening to the conversations I would have with these folk when they returned. I had not had a 38 course dining experience at El Builli or even one at French Laundry for that matter. I didn’t eat and drink my way through Tuscany or the South of France. What a bore I was!
“Who knew that you could bake a cake with a light bulb?” I can still hear my dad saying that after trying the first cakes I made with my Easy Bake Oven. Indeed. Who knew that food adventures could take me from Boston to Berlin and from Sicily to the Caribbean?
In spite of growing up in a food-loving Italian family in Boston, I thought that I wanted to be a horticulturalist and went off to the Berkshires for my first degree. It took only a year to realize that plants could be my hobby, but food had to be my life. I studied pastry arts at the International Pastry Arts Center in New York and worked as a pastry chef for years in and around Boston before moving to Providence. My life, certainly my career, seems to have been built around culinary adventures and road trips ever since.
I was 16 years old. I was completely infatuated with the concept of becoming a chef and devoting my life to good eating. The year I spent living in Helsinki, Finland provided an amazing backdrop to taste, eat, and explore my developing palate in ways I would have never imagined possible. Due to the cold climate and shortened growing season, the emphasis and value of fresh, local ingredients is ingrained in the Scandinavian way of life, and in many ways contrasts the extended growing seasons found in more temperate climates. The mild Finnish summers become celebrations of the vibrant flavors the Finns have craved for the infinite months of winter.
I love African cities. There, I’ve said it. I love African cities! For most travelers to Africa the experience is traditionally about the wildlife – the plains of the Serengeti, the wetlands of the Okavango Delta, the tribal richness of the Maasai. True, Africa has the largest migration of land mammals left on earth and has seen the most extensive and successful conservation efforts in history, but overlooked is the richness contemporary African cities have to offer. In fact, many American travelers never experience Africa through the eyes of Africans, especially urban ones.
