No Mud, No Lotus: Where I've Been, What Broke, and What's Coming Next
An Egyptian lotus flower opening at my hotel in Aswan, Egypt
You may be wondering where I've been. Or, maybe you haven’t—but I’m going to tell you anyway.
If you caught Episode #36 of the Type 2 Travel podcast, you probably already know I've been in a season of building, and rebuilding, and trying to find my center in the middle of all of it. Turns out, a new relationship + a new home + living with kids part time + a business that needed some honest reckoning = a lot of messy middle.
That episode apparently hit a nerve, because it went viral, and the responses I received from many of you reminded me why sharing at your most vulnerable is always worth it (a much needed reminder for someone that doesn’t always love to share those parts).
But here’s what you didn’t hear in that episode:
what was happening, ever so ironically, behind the scenes just as it was airing…
At the end of February, I was heading out for two months of travel, including leading four group trips and a scouting trip to Egypt.
I’d just moved, and hadn’t unpacked my office or my closet (and I still haven’t 🤡), I had a house on the market in the middle of a historically snowy and cold Wisconsin winter that wasn’t selling, and I had an overwhelming feeling that I’d been operating past my limit for far too long. I was working 80+ hour weeks leading up to traveling and feeling the weight of a business that had started running me instead of the other way around.
But even with all of that, I was ready to buckle up, deliver some incredible experiences, and head back home ready to finally have some time to focus on what needed to change.
The Worst Travel Day of My Life
On the very first day of that 2-month trip — after a 36-hour shitstorm of delayed and canceled flights, missed connections, empty promises from airline employees, lost luggage, and pretty much everything that could go wrong en route to India — my one and only employee resigned.
Right as that episode (painstakingly recorded just hours before I left) went live.
People were simultaneously listening, commenting, and messaging me. Telling me how much it resonated. How they had no idea what had been quietly going on behind the scenes of my business—and life. How much they were struggling in their own ways, and how hearing someone say what they were feeling and experiencing out loud made them feel validated and less alone. Others told me how proud they were of me for being so raw and honest about something that most people would tuck away behind a highlight reel.
But by the time those messages hit my phone, the rug had already been pulled out from under me — and everything I'd just vulnerably shared with the world had already gotten so much worse.
And just to set the scene a little more vividly, because the Universe generally loves to give you an extra kick when you're already down…I had no luggage for two days, zero clean clothes, no travel adapter to charge my laptop, a podcast deadline approaching in the next few hours, and a group of travelers en route to India, ready for me to take them to a fancy dinner at one of the nicest restaurants in Delhi.
I'd spent that afternoon sitting in a beautiful five-star hotel, crying into a giant bowl of carbonara and a lukewarm glass of sauvignon blanc, a hotel bathrobe as my only choice for clothing, washing my only pair of underwear in the bathroom sink, and a complimentary toothbrush as my only toiletry because I couldn’t muster the energy to face the outside world and fend for myself.
The room service encounters were—as you can imagine—a little awkward, and I probably owe the staff at the Lodhi Hotel in Delhi both an explanation and an apology. I went to that dinner in the same clothes I'd left home in over two days earlier, feeling defeated in more ways than one.
For reference, I normally prepare for lost luggage — and anyone who's traveled with me can vouch for my thorough 30-page trip guide and my "plan for the airlines to eff you over" lecture. But I'd been working until the final hour before my flight, threw two months of God-knows-what frantically into a suitcase the morning I left, and made the rookie mistake of letting the airline also check my carry-on in anticipation of their impending flight delay forcing me to run my ass through O'Hare to make my connection.
Spoiler alert: I did indeed run my ass through multiple concourses of O’Hare. I did not make it. The airline staff had zero fucks to give. And that day will likely go down in travel history as one of my worst.
Do as I say, not as I do, friends: always prepare for lost luggage. And for the love of God and all that is holy, pack some extra underwear in your backpack.
But I digress…
Survival Mode Abroad
What followed after I got to India was probably the hardest stretch of my professional life. Half of my two-person team, and the eighteen months of hiring and training and future-planning, was gone overnight while I was leading international trips around the clock from across the world with no exit ramp in sight.
And let's not forget that he-who-shall-not-be-named decided to start bombing the Middle East right after I landed in India, triggering a domino effect of flight cancellations and full-blown panic for everyone on my upcoming group trips. Because what’s a little more gas on the fire while my life was already blowing up?
I didn't have a backup plan—I didn't have time for one. Despite how it might look on social media, leading group trips while running a full-fledged business behind the scenes is a 24/7 job. It’s non-stop packing and moving, early wake-up calls, long days on the road, minimal internet, putting traveler needs before my own, and whatever scraps of free time are left at the end of the day…those go to keeping the business afloat as best as I can or maybe fitting in a shower. And, if I’m lucky, I might get a hot one.
I spent the entire spring keeping it all together from hotel rooms, Airbnbs, riads, safari camps, and tents (like, lit-er-al tents) in India, Kenya, Morocco, and everywhere in between. I was triaging current trips, upcoming trips, and traveler communications, planning Camp Lola Whiskey, and somehow still publishing a weekly podcast, all while never sleeping in the same place for more than two nights.
Stability was not a thing that existed for me this spring, and I was in 100% survival mode.
And as it turns out, hiring and onboarding someone new isn't exactly feasible when you're in the middle of the Kenyan savanna with spotty WiFi and a group of travelers counting on you. I know that too, because I tried.
TLDR: It's been hard, y'all — like a scrappy,buckle up, dig your heels in, muster every last bit of courage you have, and put your big girl panties on because shit just got real kind of hard.
0/10 stars, do not recommend.
But I'm still here. And I'm still quietly building.
No Mud, No Lotus 🪷
I know that the most beautiful flowers grow in the harshest soil. I got my first tattoo in Medellín, Colombia — a poppy flower, chosen for exactly that reason. A resilient weed disguised as something beautiful, able to grow through anything. It felt like the right symbol for everything I'd been through in the years since my divorce, and everything I'd built from the rubble of it.
And then this April, going t-h-r-o-u-g-h it in a whole new way, I ended up in Egypt — not entirely by choice, and not entirely by accident. Egypt had kept showing up every time I looked at flights from Kenya to Morocco, and Cairo kept popping up as the only logical layover. I heavily debated going, as it wasn’t really a place I was personally drawn to, but thinking back to an astrocartography session I did with podcast guest Sonia Cruz Oro in January, she reminded me that some places aren't meant to entertain us. They're meant to teach us.
Shortly after that session with Sonia, my life coach, Bonnie, told me in the first 30 seconds of our coaching call that she'd had a vision of me in Egypt this spring, standing on the precipice of something bigger to come, like a phoenix rising.
At that point, I stopped debating and questioning, started planning, and I booked a flight to Cairo.
It was in Aswan, Egypt where I encountered the Egyptian lotus for the first time — the blue water lily that sinks beneath the water every night and blooms again every morning. A symbol of rebirth. Of something beautiful that only exists because it learned to rise.
I don't think any of this was an accident.
I fully believe this chaos, as hard as it's been, didn't happen to me as much as it happened for me. I've been feeling for a while that I'm on the cusp of something new — some next version of this business and this life. I've been telling Bonnie for the past year that I can see the dots of this new way forward, but I haven't been able to fully connect them yet. In fact, I think I even described them to her as “muddy,” slowly becoming a little less murky as the full picture starts to reveal itself.
With every passing month, a few more dots appear. A few more lines connect. The future gets a little clearer.
So maybe, like the lotus, I needed to sink for a little while to learn how to bloom again—to bloom better.
The truth is, the Universe doesn’t usually wait for you to be ready. Most of the time, it just removes the scaffolding and says, “okay, now build.”
So, I’m building some really big things as I’m tearing it all down. I’m in the middle of the biggest changes I’ve ever made in my business, and while it kind of sucks right now, I genuinely cannot wait to share what’s coming. More on that VERY soon, so stay tuned.
We’re still under construction over here, but the good news is that the blueprints are looking really, really good.
