Breanna Wilson

Climbing aboard Barba, a beautiful Jeanneau Sun Fast 37 sailing yacht that has sailed extensively around the North Atlantic Ocean, I know that I’m not on your typical sail boat. Or even a typical research expedition vessel.

I’ll be brutally honest, Kyiv was never very high on my list. Between the recent revolutions, ongoing conflicts with Russia and – I’ll be honest – brutally cold weather, it was a place that, as intriguing as all of this was to me as a journalist, it just wasn’t a place I was sure that I wanted to visit, let alone promote that someone else visit. But I was wrong. And it didn’t take much research, or many conversations, to quickly figure that out.

I’m having a love affair with southern Spain at the moment. It excites me. The landscapes. The people. The food. The wine. The jamón. (Oh, the jamón.) There isn’t much to not love about this part of the country. (Except maybe that everyone except you is on Spanish time.)

River cruising. It’s been a hot topic in the travel world recently, especially with the average age demographic dropping as cruise brands start targeting younger travelers for their voyages around the world. (According to the Cruise Lines International Association’s 2018 Cruise Travel Report, millennials are choosing to river cruise at a higher rate than any other generation.)

Are you a Royal Tenenbaums fanatic? Or a sucker for the Darjeeling Limited? Do you fancy yourself as a Steve Zissou or a Max Fischer type-character? Did you lose your mind when you saw how cool and well executed Isle of Dogs was?

You’re sick of winter and you’re not alone. I think we can all agree that the winter blues have officially set in. And they’ve set in hard. So much so, that this very moment you’re probably daydreaming of days filled with more sunlight, temperatures that don’t require every possible layer of clothing you own and mornings that don’t involve scraping ice off your car windshield or putting on a god-awful pair of 'functional but not fashionable' winter boots.

A city that sits on both Europe and Asia, divided only by the Bosphorus Strait, Istanbul is one of those cities that isn’t completely understood by Westerners. It’s often referred to as the Middle East, which isn’t quite right (except for when it comes to religion and perhaps politics) and more often than not it’s written off people’s radar because it’s considered an “unsafe” place to travel, which isn’t exactly right either.

It’s my first trip to South America and I’m quickly realizing that I know absolutely nothing about the place. While I’ve traveled other parts of the world extensively, South America has always been a place that has eluded me for one reason or another.

As a freelance travel and adventure writer I travel the world covering everything from the world’s most remote destinations to the most daring adventures you didn’t know you could do.

You’re in Barcelona. You’ve seen (and fallen in love with) the Gaudí architecture. You’ve eaten your share of bocadillos. You’ve drunk your fair share of cañas along your adventures. You’ve soaked in all of the quick and beautiful (and completely confusing) Catalan being spewed at you from every angle you could handle. You’ve officially had the full Barcelona experience.

You know Fiji. The tiny group of 333 islands in the South Pacific that have been on your bucket list for, I don’t know, probably forever. Yes, those picture-perfect islands where the water is a shade of blue unlike anything else you’ve ever seen, and the beaches seem too good to be true – but they aren’t. Yeah, that’s the place.

Romania. It’s one of those places that often gets overlooked. A place that doesn’t often make it to the top of ‘must travel to’ lists, or even a whisper of a mention when it comes to the best places to visit in Europe. But it should.

If, like me, you’ve hit the threshold for all things Tulum and Cancun, listen up.
Because it’s time to get back to Mexico’s beach town roots. And that means putting the Baja Peninsula on your radar. And more specifically, the southern part of it: Baja Sur.

There are few things in this world that are more unknown and mysterious than the ocean. That thing that covers 71% of our planet? We haven’t even discovered 20% of it.
But we learn new incredible things about it every day.

They say you’re either an ocean person or a mountain person.
Myself? I’m all ocean, all the time. To me it’s still one of the great unknowns. It’s so close, and so much a part of our planet, and yet we know so little about it. We have better images of Venus, Mars and the moon than we do of the ocean floor.