YCG Travel

Meet Natalie,

Your YCG Travel Advisor

Hi, I’m Natalie.

I’m so glad you’re here, whoever you are. Whether you’re an avid adventurer or saving up for your first plane ticket, you came to the right place. I can’t wait to help you plan the trip of a lifetime.

Life has taken me all over. And, in every new chapter, I’ve been a different traveler. Though my priorities, companions, and bank accounts have shifted over time, one thing that has always remained, in all of life’s season, has been my pull towards adventure and my love for rich, cultural experiences.

Read a bit about how my personal travel style has evolved over time and led me to pursue travel planning.

Broke & abroad

Picture this: it’s 2016 and I’ve just finished my first year of teaching. My roommate and I arrive in Lima, Peru too early to check into our cheap hostel so we hit the bar and befriend some of the staff. We end up missing check-in hours and crashing for a few hours on some lounge chairs on the roof before hopping a 6 am bus bound for Cusco. After several days of strenuous trekking and a couple bouts of altitude sickness, we land at the summit of Machu Picchu, to this day, one of my favorite sights in the world.

This pretty accurately represents my first era of travel: very little money in our pockets, lots of beer in our bellies, and a hell of a lot of adventure. Though I am a very different traveller now, these years of spontaneous backpacking travel taught me to travel with a thin wallet and with the flexibility to let a place lead me where it may. That fire for exploration and the unknown that I discovered in these years still fuel my passion for travel and trip planning.

City Living & Loving

After finishing my commitment with Teach for America in Mississippi, I was eager for city living. I moved to DC with my then-girlfriend, now-wife whose rigorous residency program schedule limited us to domestic trips of the long-weekend variety. During these years, I forged countless dear memories in some of the country’s most incredible cities.

In DC, I was proposed to on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and held what will probably be the best job I ever have at a local high school; We took several trips to visit my wife’s family in the Midwest where we’d take in the vibrancy of Chicago and the understated magic of St. Louis; We got married in Pittsburgh, also my home town, and home to what I think is one of the best skylines, albeit small; We sipped wine at the Biltmore mansion on our honeymoon to Asheville, NC, a quirky little arts city nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains; Weekend trips to Richmond, Philly, and NYC would leave us dreading work on Monday, but full with new memories of friends, food, and culture.

These years bouncing around America’s urban landscapes reaffirmed that getting out is always worth. Though my life couldn’t accommodate summer-long jaunts abroad in this era, even a night away in a different beautiful city could relieve any weariness and rejuvenate my spirit.

Family Style

My wife and I left DC, both pregnant, on military orders to Guam, where we would spend the next two years. Becoming parents and moving to a tiny island in the Pacific changed nearly everything about our lives, but once we recovered from back-to-back newborn phases, we set out to take advantage of our prime positioning in Southeast Asia.

Through lots of trial and error, we mastered (or, tried to) the science and the art of travelling with young kids. Travelling with my kids has made me a more competent and confident travel and honed my planning expertise— a mom has to anticipate every possibility!

Our travel itineraries in these years look very different than those of eras passed, but every trip— challenges and all— reaffirmed my own love for travel and the gift of passing it down to my boys.

It is with this spirit that I begin this new era of sharing that love and planning expertise with my clients.