"If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad."

An Introduction

If adventures will not befall a young lady* in her own village, she must seek them abroad.

-Jane Austen

Welcome to Diary of a Lady Traveler!

I’m so glad you’re here.

May 2025 marks my two-year anniversary of writing on Substack. The following posts are a good introduction to what you will find here.

I have to start, of course, in Provence, where a solitary man riding his horse unexpectedly down a narrow street in the middle of the night started me contemplating magic in the first place.

And then there was Antwerp, where a cast-iron fountain forged at the end of the 15th century reminded me of the life changing power of love.

In Tuscany, an engraved skull reminded me that: As you are, I was too: As I am, you will also be. Memento mori: Remember you must die.

And while it would never not be magical to walk to the top of Glastonbury Tor, it was really the tour guide dressed as a Medieval friar who told me about the time that Jesus came to England on a business trip with his uncle that really made my trip to Glastonbury special.When I visited Bram Stoker’s Whitby, in Yorkshire in 2023, I discovered that not only can reading books enrich your travel, but travel can enrich your experience of books, too. And literary travel continued to be magical for me in 2024.

I walked in the footsteps of Jane Austen, in Bath and came as close as I’ll probably ever come to attending a Regency ball.

I searched for the real-life stories behind Romeo and Juliet in Verona, and took the 19th-century author Henry James along with me as my guide in the Loire Valley.

And in the beautiful city of Oxford, lingering in the golden gleam, I found Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland.

Sometimes it’s easy to find magic - you’d be crazy not to in cities like Venice and Paris. But I’ll never forget standing on the Academia Bridge in Venice, contemplating the beauty of the city while the sun set over the Grand Canal…or watching the lights twinkle on the Eiffel Tower, and wondering if there’s a word for missing something before you’ve actually left.

*Young is a state of mind.