Speaker 1: Hello. Hello. Hello. And welcome to the Travel Brava Podcast. I'm your host, Heather Meseroll.
Speaker 2: And what's up, guys? I'm Ben.
Speaker 1: We are thrilled to bring you to Travel Brava, a place that is destination and culture focused while helping you be the best possible traveler that you can be. Today, we will tell you about our story and what led us here into launching Travel Brava. So without further ado
Speaker 2: Let's get into it. So I'm gonna be asking Heather, our main host, a couple questions about Travel Brava.
Speaker 1: Let's do it.
Speaker 2: What is our goal with Travel Brava?
Speaker 1: We want to bring enrichment to the world through Travel Brava. We wanna help you enrich your life through travel, and we will do this by illuminating destinations that are worth covering and that you may not have thought of before. Teaching you how to travel so it is the experience of a lifetime rather than just an exhausting experience of rushing around to view things because you feel obligated to or just because you wanna say that you did them. We wanna dig a little bit deeper with travel, and we wanna help you dig deeper, understanding the type of travel that you like, and ultimately, really help you to be the best tourist that you can be, so that you are also enriching the places that you go, and leaving them better than you found them. Enriching your life, and enriching the lives that you cross.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's something that I fully agree with. One of the best parts of travel for me is coming across other people, And if I can make their day better, or if they make my day better, that's a memory that sticks with me forever. And that's how I'm going to remember that place. So why did we decide to create this?
Speaker 1: We created Travel Brava primarily out of our passion for travel, but travel with a deeper meaning, but also out of our own necessity. I honestly never really knew where to look to understand how to be a tourist that is offsetting the negatives of travel with positives. I started to kind of worry about the environmental impact of travel, and I worried that, I don't know, maybe my presence was intrusive to the locals. I had all these these worries about the negative impacts of travel. Through this reflection, I really started to research and try to understand and think about how to maximize the benefits of travel, Some of those being, you know, cultural connection and enrichment, reducing negative stereotypes of cultures through interacting with them and understanding them, and spreading tourism money to local economies that sometimes rely on that to thrive, and how these benefits can far outweigh the negatives of travel, like the environmental impact of plane travel, the problem of overtourism in certain places, and bringing rudeness or negativity to a place rather than positivity and happiness.
So with Travel Brava, we wanna teach you what we have learned, and while we highlight cultures and places, always showing you how to be a Brava traveler while you get to travel to these amazing destinations.
Speaker 2: Yeah. That's something that's definitely been big lately in the news and and all over the world with over traveling. This is something that means a lot to us, how to travel to places and not exploit them. But I'll let you do the talking and I'll keep going with some questions. So as much as travel is fun and can really bring out, you know, a wanderlust within you, there are positives and negatives when you zoom out from just your own experience.
So what are some ways you can ensure that the positives outweigh the negatives while you travel?
Speaker 1: First and foremost, honestly, would be to donate, whether it is through your time spent volunteering while you travel or with your money, to a local nonprofit doing work that you are passionate about in the countries that you visit. I always tend to be passionate about donating to environmental nonprofits that use the money to plant trees or preserve ecosystems in the areas that I have visited so that I can have a small part in offsetting our footprints there. Everywhere
Speaker 2: we
Speaker 1: are traveling to this year, we're choosing a nonprofit to donate to, and if we cannot find a way to volunteer for a day or two, we will donate monetarily to them. This is an amazing way to try to offset the negatives of your carbon footprint being in that place. Another way to have a positive impact through travel is interacting respectfully with locals. This is always kind of a tricky one. It's hard to know just how to do this in a respectful way and how you can meet locals and chat with them, But what we will always preach here is to learn a few key phrases in the local language before going somewhere, so that when you show up, you are respecting the culture you are experiencing.
And this always tends to open up a bit of a deeper level of conversations with locals as you travel, if you just have a couple little key phrases in your back pocket. Some locals will be more open to it than others, just like some people are more interested in in meeting international tourists more so than others. But, you know, when you have when you try to speak in the local language with the right person, it's gonna open up a conversation and can lead you to have a really deep connection with a local rather than just passing through, knowing none of the language at all. So I think trying to have those connections with locals respectfully, being respectfully curious, is a great way to enrich your travel and to enrich the locals as well because they get to meet you and understand more about your culture as you are in in their culture. It's kind of a cultural exchange that I feel like just is beneficial on both levels.
Another note on the language. Everyone likes to see tourists in their own town trying to speak with them in their language rather than expecting everyone to know English. You should never expect everyone to know English when that is not the primary language in these countries that you're traveling to. Do you have to be fluent to travel somewhere? No.
Absolutely not. But I do think to be respectful and to be the best traveler you can be, and certainly to be a Brava traveler, you should know a few phrases. So that you don't have to go through the humbling and awkward experience of just giving someone a blank stare when you have no clue what they just said to you. You can at least have the phrase, you know, I'm sorry, I don't speak whichever language in your back pocket, so you can respond to them, so that they know that you just don't know their language. With this, trying is all you need to do here.
You do not have to strive for perfection. I think striving solely for perfection kills progress. All you need is a little effort with this one, and you're gonna be a much more respectful and well appreciated traveler with the locals.
Speaker 2: Yeah. One thing that I do know how to say in including English four languages is, sorry, I do not speak whatever the language is. And I just I've been in this situation too many times where I just I'm like shocked like I I go to order you know some lunch or something and I'm just shocked when I'm not prepared like maybe I'm fresh off the plane or something I'm not prepared for fully like another language coming at me a 100 miles an hour so that's the one phrase I like to get in the back pocket because at least I can fire that back and they'll know right away like okay I'll speak maybe they'll speak slower who knows maybe they'll be rude but hopefully they'll be able to communicate a little bit better with me just because I was able to tell them I don't speak their language.
Speaker 1: Yeah, whether that's through them using a little bit of hand gestures or something like that, or giving you a second to, if you're gonna pull out a translator, it just helps to just get the ball rolling so that you're not just blankly staring at them and then speaking in English expecting them to know English. This is what we will always help you do. We will equip you with the phrases that you need to just have those basics down. Hello, goodbye, I'm sorry, I don't speak Italian, Spanish, French, Turkish, whatever it may be. So that, yeah, you have those right off the bat.
And one more answer to this question. So, how can the positives outweigh the negatives? I could go on for a long time with this one, but we'll always layer this conversation into the destinations that we spotlight. So we'll talk a lot about it through Travel Brava, end to end. But lastly, I will say, to wrap this one up, a huge one that I'm very passionate about is spending money locally.
Try to ditch the chain hotels, anything that is not local because then you're gonna be just giving money to people that are not at all in the local economy, and then your presence really isn't benefiting the local economy. So ditch the chain hotels, go for locally run mom and pop accommodation options, eat at family run restaurants, support locally owned and operated tour companies. This really ensures that you are spreading your wealth directly to the local economy and to the right people. But, yeah, without this, you are really just traipsing through a place without leaving any benefit in your wake.
Speaker 2: So does Travel Brava have a set of rules that help people travel, or is there a working document? Where where do you have all this stuff?
Speaker 1: I'm a pen and paper type of person, primarily, so I have notebooks and notebooks of What? The Travel Brava Guidebook. I have notebooks and notebooks of notes, and one of those pages of notes has the Brava Traveler Guidebook. So there's sections of this guidebook to help you travel Brava. There are rules that you can live by, and we're gonna be peppering those in as well.
So get used to hearing some of those. But the local dollars 1 is
Speaker 2: That's straight out of the Brava Traveler Handbook. Guidebook. That's straight out of the Travel Brava Guidebook section two. Travel Brava. So spending dollars locally is straight out of the Brava Traveler Guidebook section two, help the local economy spend your dollars locally.
Bingo. So you're gonna hear that a bunch in our podcast. So just a warning, you'll be getting little tips out of the guidebook with each episode. How will we show up as Travel Brava?
Speaker 1: Travel Brava is gonna have three main methods of showcasing destinations and helping you be a Brava traveler. The first and the one you are discovering right now is through the Travel Brava podcast. I am insanely passionate about this one. I love podcasts, and I think they are an excellent tool to get inspired, learn new things, be entertained, use your commute time in a good way. So we will show up here with series of episodes, deep dive in countries as we travel to them, with episodes dropping every single week.
So when we uncover a new destination, we will always start with a country overview episode. The goal of this overview episode will be to really help you understand the culture and a bit of the history of the country, which we really feel is important to really appreciate where you are and enrich your experience, but also to give you everything you should know before visiting that country. So this will include foods and drinks to try and look out for, what are the local delicacies you should be looking for, phrases to have in your back pocket like we just talked about, and overviewing areas of interest that are exciting and might be places that you want to look into. After the overview episode, we will deep dive different topics relating to that destination for several weeks afterwards to help you really get a well rounded view of the country. Outside of the podcast, we will also have blog posts that will get into the nitty gritty details and help you plan your trips.
If you are inspired through the podcast, we hope that you can then go to the blog and love the blog for helping you actually plan your trip and to uncover places to see, things to do, the logistics of visiting an area, like what is the currency, what's the voltage, how should I get around once I am there, all of that type of thing. And then lastly, we have a lot of fun documenting our travels, and we will share scenes from where we go and where we highlight on social media to help fuel your wanderlust while giving you other methods to dive deeper into the background of a pretty photo or video. Ben's a fantastic photographer, so he's he's chief photograph and videographer at Travel Brava.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And Heather writes the scripts and does all the research and everything else. So that's been all about what we're gonna be doing here as the Travel Brava podcast and what else you can expect from us at Travel Brava. But I wanna find out a little bit about you, Heather. And maybe you guys wanna find out a little bit about me.
So let's start at the beginning. How did we meet?
Speaker 1: Our story. We met in an apartment at Virginia Tech. Go Hokies, baby. Yeah. Ben and I met at Virginia Tech.
I walked into a party, saw him there. He had long blonde hair, stuck out immediately. And I wanna say the rest is history, but it's not. We didn't actually date until a year later. He was leaving for Australia a couple months after we met, so we hung out, had a good time, said our farewells for nine months, and then the second he came back, we started hanging out again.
We dated for seven years maybe before we got married, and we've been married for two years.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I said what did I say? I said take care, And then I left for Australia. So Heather, what was your earliest and most memorable memory of traveling that really made you wanna keep traveling more and more and more?
Speaker 1: I was actually reflecting on this the other day. I my earliest travel memory is traveling with my family to Breckenridge, Colorado. And this should have been a huge hint to what I love in travel, and this is something that I think is important to understand about yourself. What do you like in travel? Because if you pick the types of places you love, you're going to love where you go.
If you force the cities but you're not a city person, they're the easiest places to get to, the flights go right there, the easiest to plan, there's always a plethora of information out there on them. And some cities are great, and if you're a city person, awesome, but if you're not, don't just go to cities. You're gonna be overwhelmed, come back from your trip exhausted, and kind of have a skewed perspective of the culture and the country that you just went to. So I know I am not a city person, so that's where we will tend not to go and not to target and spend most of our time. But this early memory of travel to Breckenridge, I love mountains.
And I didn't know this. For years and years of my life, I I just never really experienced them that much. I grew up in Virginia, so there are some gorgeous mountains there, and I always did like them. But my family vacations were always beach vacations, which I also love. Love the beach as well.
But I never really was exposed to mountains outside of this Breckenridge, Colorado trip. But I always remembered loving that trip, and I could not put my finger on why. And then Ben and I went out, we went out to Oregon and went to Mount Hood. Something about that too, it just kinda clicked, like, I just realized how much I adore being surrounded by mountains. So I think that's part of the reason Breckenridge stood out to me, and it's just an amazing little town and just having the time there with my family.
We did so many outdoorsy things, which we usually don't do on our trips. We usually go to the beach and really relax and just kinda hang out, but in Breckenridge, we did white water rafting, we biked through the mountains, we did some hikes. It was it was, a wonderful trip that my parents took us on, and that is my first travel memory. And it's something that now is full circle with me realizing how I love to travel, which is really to gorgeous scenery and nature and doing a lot of outdoor activities.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I love the mountains too. Maybe probably second to the ocean, but I do go a long time without them since we live on the East Coast Of New Jersey. So, I love the mountains, but we are mountain deprived where we call home.
Speaker 1: That's for sure. But we love it. We we live by a beach, so it's it's awesome. What is your first travel memory then?
Speaker 2: So as a kid, we would always go on surf trips. I surfed even as a little kid. I had an older brother who surfed also. So our dad, he's a surfer. He would take us on surf trips.
So we'd be able to surf every day, usually go in the wintertime. So we'd be like escaping the cold And we would always go to Puerto Rico. And I still love Puerto Rico. I would always go back. But as much as I like it, I want to see new places.
And I feel like I can always continue to go back there. But my first memory, we were 10 years old. I was was 10 years old and we went to Puerto Rico and what I thought was so cool was deplaying the plane and going onto the tarmac and then walking into the building, know, because like usually in The US, it's like, you know, you go straight into the airport, but in the little airport in Agua Dia, Puerto Rico, you go down onto the tarmac. So it's like early in the morning, we walk out of the plane and it's 70 degrees and humid and it feels so good. And it felt so cool just to de plane that way.
And I mean, Puerto Rico, it's super accessible. It's super family friendly but like I felt like we were going on this like far out surf destination and my dad brought us to all these spots that were like down dirt roads and stuff that you know he he knows about. So we went to Puerto Rico a bunch after that trip, know, we go back every year, but I feel like all my trips were always surrounded by surf. So like I'm willing to go anywhere if there's a wave, it doesn't have to be warm or tropical, like I'll travel in the winter for a wave, which is tough. Heather likes to travel in the summer months of wherever we are and that's usually flat season.
So you know, sometimes we get lucky, we get it figured for the right season, right place, right time. But that's what it is. There's not always waves. But yeah, since that, like I felt like, like I was only 10 years old and like, I felt like, you know, I was going to travel, like I wanted to go to far off destinations mainly for surf. Now, you know, my horizons have opened up a little bit more and I like going hiking and backpacking, experiencing cultures, but, you know, I'm always down for a surf trip too.
And, from then on, I was always open to going places to explore. To me, going places that are less known and feeling a little bit of exploration is really what I like the most about traveling.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Ben will never say no to a surf trip. Are you kidding me?
Speaker 2: Unless I'm saving money for a Italian wedding. That's true. I think I had to say no to one that year.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Ben Ben surprised me one year because I I had known him for years at this point. We had been dating for years and I'd always known him to only really travel for surf trips and the occasional hiking trip. He he always has liked hiking too. And fishing and sailing.
Ben's a beach boy, but he's he's a mountain guy too sometimes. But I offered to him my mom and my dad were supposed to go on an anniversary trip to Italy, but COVID, you know, kinda delayed them. So then they ended up just doing a domestic trip. And a couple years later, my mom said, let's still do the Italy trip, but let's do it with the whole family. So I put it out there to Ben, said, you know, I was fully expecting him not to come because it wasn't a surf trip, or a hiking trip.
And to my very pleasant surprise, he was like, oh, hell yeah. I'll go. And so that was I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that was one of Ben's first trips that was not with surf or hiking and really just a cultural experience, seeing seeing a place just for what it is without the surf or the mountains pulling in there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was definitely the first trip where eating and drinking was the main priority. So I kind of like this. This is fun. I'm sure on this podcast, we're gonna get into all our travel that we have done together, but what's some travel that you've done where I wasn't there? List us off a couple destinations.
Speaker 1: One destination that sticks in my brain and opened my world to cultures that are different from my own was my trip to Jordan. I took this when I was young. I was 14 or 15. And I was very lucky, very fortunate that my mom let me and her go to Jordan. We visited, a She
Speaker 2: let herself go? We visited actually, this
Speaker 1: is kinda funny, I was dating the guy at the time. I was so young, but his mom was in the embassy, and he was from where I was from. And they left, they were moving there to Jordan because she was in the embassy. And she said to my mom, you know, when else are you gonna be able to come to Jordan and know someone there? You guys should really come.
And I'm so thankful that she said that to my mom because my mom was like, this is that is that is so true. She me and her, me and my mom, we went to visit them, and it was one of the most epic trips of my life. I had never been out of the country. And, I was very fortunate to be able to go out of the country and to somewhere so different at such a young age, but it opened up this world of cultures that are different, so different from what I'm used to. And that gave me such an energy and a passion for seeing more of that and experiencing more of that.
In Jordan, it's so different. There's the language is, of course, different, but the alphabet, the letters, everything, the foods, the people, And it was an incredible country. I'm dying to go back with Ben because it was just incredible. And of course, we had a local tour guide, you know. They had lived there for months and months by the time that we got there.
And so they got really infiltrated there, and they took us around to Petra, the Dead Sea, Wadi Rum, these places that are on bucket lists. And I didn't even realize that at the time. I had no clue what to expect because we just showed up, and they took us around. And they did it such justice. So that that is one of my all time favorite trips, and it's, it's really the trip that fueled my love for travel.
What about you, Ben? What are some trips you went on that I was not a part of?
Speaker 2: So I was just thinking about this while you were talking, and most of my trips were family trips that you weren't there on, so I won't bore everyone with that. But I also went on a few trips with the Boy Scouts when I was a kid. And what actually is significant, by the way, don't hate on the Boy Scouts. It was a bit embarrassing at the time sometimes being in high school, but now looking back on it, what an experience some of the things that I got to do as a early teenager. It was it's so cool.
Like, they're they were epic trips that we got to go on as the Boy Scouts. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You're talking to an Eagle Scout here. Ben's an Eagle Scout.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So what I was just thinking, though, is, you get to go on these camping trips when you're so young. So stuff just becomes normalized. So we did a twelve day. And if you're a boy scout, you probably know what I'm talking about twelve day trip in New Mexico backpacking.
And I think I was 14, maybe I was 15. I was just old enough for the trip. So even though I don't go backpacking all the time, like since I did it as like a young kid, to me it feels more natural to just jump back into it. I learned how to do stuff on my own. So like jumping back into it when I was in college and going backpacking again, like it was easy.
Like I just had to dust off the old shoes and find my pack and my bag and my sleeping bag and all that stuff. I was ready to go. Like I already knew how to do it all. Then my main trip was my study abroad semester in Australia. And that was really cool.
I was out on my own, with a friend who I was a little bit familiar with, not like a best friend. So we weren't bogged down with like our own friendship sort of so like we were open both of us we're good pals now but we're both open to meeting new people and we both kind of had the same mindset with it so we traveled a bunch around Australia while we were there. I went to Bali on my own. Yeah, I loved Australia. I wasn't too close to the beach, but I got to surf a couple of times.
My brother came to visit and we did a big road trip on the East Coast. It was sweet. So hoping to go back to Australia someday soon.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I'm dying to go with Ben. I was so wishing I could have gone to visit him while I was missing him while he was in Australia.
Speaker 2: I was still playing it cool.
Speaker 1: He was. He was playing it cool while he was in Australia. He had me confused. But I think what's interesting as we reflect on our separate travel experiences is that we've both separately always had a love for travel and maybe different types of travel, but we've always had a love for travel growing up, and it was always fueled by these different trips that we did. And we've now shown each other a new facet to travel.
Ben has shown me backpacking, really a lot of adventure travel, and travel to places I might not have ever been able to do without him, honestly. His preparation with these types of trips where he has everything, he knows exactly what he needs to be prepared, I would be completely unprepared for these trips. He has things that he brings that I would never think about bringing. But he opened my eyes to to that type of travel and I think I've kind of opened his eyes to the non surfing part of travel too. So I think we've both added a lot, and now we've really kind of started to hone in on how we like to travel, how we like to travel together.
But I do have a question.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: What gave you the courage to quit your job and take a year off to travel? Making no money and just going for it. What gave you the courage to do it?
Speaker 2: Yeah. So this was really hard for me because I'd been with the same company for six years out of college. That was my job. And I feel like I could have retired from the same company, even though not retire at 30, retire at a normal age. So it was hard.
It's a really stable job, but it was just really just did not want to let things. I really just didn't want to let life keep passing by and, know, having the same day to day schedule, you know, time starts to fly by and months start feeling like weeks just because you're in this repetitive schedule. So I just was feeling like feeling at such a loss for missing out on seeing so much of the world that I would only be able to see in little two week clips on, a vacation from work. So that and help from you being so about it and committed. Yeah.
Without you, I probably wouldn't have felt like it was realistic. And I'll throw the same question back to you. What gave you the courage to quit your job and start traveling?
Speaker 1: I think for me, a couple of things happened in my life that led up to it. One of which was Ben and I, after we got married, we between the wedding and our honeymoon, we took three and a half weeks off of work, which was the longest I had ever taken off. And it's a long time by American standards. I know Europeans get a lot more time than we do typically, but during that time, I think I just had a mental break that was long enough for me to maybe realize that I also just didn't wanna be missing out on on so much and only having, you know, three weeks to four weeks in a year to be able to fuel this huge passion of mine, which is travel. And I didn't wanna be chained to a desk for the rest of my life.
I just had this complete pivot. Because I was really passionate about my job. I was also there for six years and it was a was a great company, and I did love it. But, yeah, something switched in my mind at that point, and my priorities started to shift. But also, you know, I feel like I try to live my life realizing or with the perspective that you never know when your last day may be.
It's a bit morbid. But it is true. This mindset started to be what my perspective was after I suddenly and tragically lost my cousin when I was younger. She was 18 and was in a car accident. And so I was 15 at the time, and I think it just completely flipped the way I look at life.
And it gave me this, yeah, this courage to just go for it, and just do what you want to do when you want to do it, before it's too late. Because you don't know when it is going to be too late. So I didn't want to wait till I was 60, 65 to start to travel seriously and have the time to really get to know cultures for weeks on end. And so we just we kinda kept our heads down, put a plan to make this dream a reality, and then here we are. So we are, like we've kind of alluded to but haven't straight up said, we're in the midst of our year of travel.
So we both quit our jobs in January to pursue this dream of having a year off and being able to travel, and travel for longer, doing slow travel, which we've never been able to do before. So it's been it's been incredible so far. And, yeah, that's kind of the the mindset that I have. And honestly, I think Ben and I leaned on each other. We had moments where each of us were really scared to quit our jobs, have no income, do this.
But in one person's day of weakness, the other was strong and like, no, let's just do it. It's gonna be great. We can always come back. We can always get new jobs. So that's that's where we are.
Hopefully, this was helpful to introduce Travel Brava. We are very excited about launching this brand, this podcast, and I hope that it's gonna be really helpful for inspiring, teaching, you know, educating you on on how to travel Brava, how to travel well. We like to travel more slowly. We like to give destinations time rather than jam packing a trip. And honestly, our bread and butter is really smaller towns steering clear of straight tourist destinations and cities, and typically choosing places that have a little bit of tourism infrastructure for sure, but are still a little more off the beaten track.
We love finding places where English is not spoken and where locals like to go. We love mountains. We love beaches. We will often seek out national parks and spots with natural wonders on our trips too. We don't go to places known for nightlife or shopping, that is just not our mojo, but rather we like to go to places full of charm and character and local food and drinks, home cooked by local families.
So this is really what we will be highlighting through Travel Brava. This is the type of destination we love and that's what we're gonna bring to you. So if this is how you like to travel too, you are in the right place.
Speaker 2: I hope this is put a little insight. Maybe you heard a couple other episodes first. Now you're going back, checking out who we are. Hope we gave you a little insight into our lives and how we like to travel and and what we'll be talking about on this podcast.
Speaker 1: We'll see you soon for the first destination series.
Speaker 2: Yeah. We'll see you when we're talking about
Speaker 1: You'll find out. Until next time, guys.
Speaker 2: Ciao. Ciao.