From Cofradia to the Cosmos: How My First Journey Shaped Everything

When people ask where my love of travel began, I don’t talk about passports or frequent flyer miles. I talk about being seven years old. On a plane. Crying so hard I could barely breathe.

It was 1976, and my parents, intent on giving me a worldly education, sent my brother and me from Florida to Honduras for the summer. Alone. We were to live with families we didn’t know, in a tiny village called Cofradia outside San Pedro Sula, so I could learn to speak Spanish. But what made it even harder: my brother and I were separated. We were placed with different families, just down the road from one another, but far enough that I couldn’t talk to him regularly or seek comfort in his presence. I was on my own.

The pain of that goodbye, of being separated from my mother, and then from my brother, imprinted something deep inside me. That moment shaped the way I attach, connect, and let go. It’s a thread that has run through every relationship in my life, some nourishing, others wounding, all of them revealing. That plane ride was my first heartbreak.

We landed in a world that felt completely foreign. Frogs in the yard. Chickens and pigs in the street. An outdoor shower. A payphone in the village I never used. I was blonde, haired, blue, eyed, and visibly out of place. My brother, with his darker hair and eyes, blended in better. But I didn’t have him near me, I was truly alone.

I didn’t speak the language. I didn’t understand the culture. I didn’t know how to ask for ice in my water, let alone express the ache I carried. My only solace was a Peace Corps volunteer named Vickie. She’d show up like an angel whenever things got too hard, gently bridging the language gap and reminding me that someone could understand me.

That summer tested everything in me, emotionally, physically, spiritually. I got sick. I grew withdrawn. At one point, I stopped eating altogether. But beneath the hardship, something unshakable was forming: resilience.

I now see that summer as the first layer of the woman I would become. The sensitivity I carry. The way I lead. The deep empathy that runs through everything I’ve created, from Mantra Fitness to the Mantra Method™, to the podcast, to this travel blog. All of it traces back to a little girl on a flight to Honduras, trying to be brave.

Travel, for me, has never been about running away.

 It’s been about remembering.

Returning to parts of myself I once left behind.

And saying, gently but firmly: I’m still here.

Welcome to my travels, past, present, and still unfolding.

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