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I’m Kate
For more than a decade and a half, I’ve helped people create a life by design through my lifestyle and travel blog.
I’m a mom of 3, a full-time romance author, and I’ve been to more than 40 countries and nearly all the states.
I’m happy you’re here.
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Latest Blog Posts
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Where Americans Actually Go on July 4th Weekend — The Traffic Data, the Destinations, and the Towns That Dread It
Everyone talks about July 4th as a celebration of freedom, but the traffic data tells a more complicated story. Tens of millions of Americans move across the country the same three days, heading to the same twenty places, and the towns receiving them have very different feelings about it. Here’s what the numbers actually show.
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Lake Vacations Are Back — and What Drove the Comeback Reveals Something About Where American Travel Is Heading
For a generation, the American vacation was defined by beach resorts, international flights, and bucket-list destinations. Lake vacations felt modest by comparison. Now they’re filling up faster than coastal alternatives, and the reasons tell you more about what Americans actually want from travel than any trend report.
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What Parents Who Took Their Kids Out of School for a Year to Travel Actually Found Out
Every few years, a family quits everything, pulls the kids from school, and travels the world. They blog about it. They write a book. What the ones who’ve been back for several years say now — about what it did to their kids, their marriage, their careers, and their understanding of what they were actually looking for — is more complicated than the original story.
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Group Travel Almost Always Leaves Someone Miserable — Here’s the Exact Psychology Why
Every group trip has a casualty. Maybe it’s the person who wanted a different itinerary, the one whose spending limit doesn’t match the group’s, or the introvert who quietly ran out of social energy by day three and nobody noticed. The dynamics that make group travel reliably difficult are not accidents — they’re predictable outcomes of specific social psychology.
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Why Americans Are So Bad at Taking Vacation — and What It Actually Costs Them
Americans leave hundreds of millions of vacation days unused every year. They check email on the beach. They cut trips short for meetings. The research on what this behavior costs — financially, physically, relationally — is not ambiguous. And yet the behavior persists. The explanation is more cultural than economic.
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What Travel Actually Does to a Marriage — The Couples Who Came Back Closer and the Ones Who Didn’t Make It
A honeymoon in the Maldives and a three-week backpacking trip through Southeast Asia can look the same on a travel itinerary and produce completely different outcomes for the relationship. What research and the honest accounts of couples reveal about what travel actually does — and doesn’t do — to a partnership.
