Everything You Get When You Join the Close Circle
What the Close Circle is, and the three guides already waiting inside
A few years ago, I found myself at a crossroads. Decades into a corporate career in HR leadership, one built carefully and, by most measures, successfully, I had to ask myself a harder question than “what’s next.” It was closer to: do I keep climbing a ladder I no longer want, or do I have the courage to simplify my life and answer to no one but myself?
I chose the second.
What followed was less a single decision than a way of living I’ve come to think of as slow living: fewer commitments carried out of obligation, more time spent on the things that actually matter to me, and the willingness to measure a good life by depth rather than by how full a calendar looks. Letting go of a title, a ladder, and other people’s expectations of what my career should look like was the hardest part. Choosing what to build instead was the easier one.
Slow travel, for me, has always been an extension of that same philosophy. Long before it became a popular phrase everyone is now talking about, I was already experiencing trips this way. I’ve never measured it by how much time I had. It was always about depth over distance, about what a place gives you when you stop trying to see all of it, and about letting a trip unfold the same way I now try to let my life unfold: with room to breathe, and without an itinerary written by someone else’s expectations.
That connection between how I chose to live my life and how I’ve always chosen to travel is at the center of everything I am creating here.
What the Close Circle Is
For anyone newer here: the Close Circle is the paid membership side where you have access to additional posts, some practical, others personal and reflective. It’s built for readers who want to go deeper into slow, intentional travel planning and the ability to ask me for specific travel recommendations tailored to their interests and needs.
Members get bonus gifts most months. Here are three gifts that are already inside. I want to walk you through all of them.
The Unrushed Itinerary Method
This was the first piece, and it’s the one everything else grew out of.
The Unrushed Itinerary Method is a values-based framework for planning a trip with intention instead of urgency. It’s built around something I call anchor moments: the experiences that shape a trip and stay with you long after you’ve come home. It helps you answer the question of how do I want this trip to feel before you start diving into full-blown trip planning.
Learning to identify what’s important to you helps you intentionally build a trip around that rather than around a checklist. This ultimately changes the entire planning process.
If you’ve ever finished building an itinerary and felt exhausted just looking at it, this is for you.
I Finally Put My Travel Philosophy Into a Method
Have you ever returned home from a trip feeling like you saw everything… but somehow didn’t fully experience it?
The Unrushed Notebook
Once a trip is planned well, a different question shows up: how do you actually stay present once you’re there?
The Unrushed Notebook is a reflective companion for the in-between parts of a trip. Arrival days. Wandering afternoons. The pause between everything you had planned and everything you didn’t. It’s a set of prompts and invitations you can reach for while sitting at a café table with tired feet and nowhere else to be, designed to help you notice more while you’re travelling and remember more once you’re home.
It’s not something to keep up with. It’s something to carry alongside you. On my last trip to Germany, I used it most on the train, either to or from the town I was visiting that day, to keep me grounded and present.
I Created Something to Help You Slow Down While Travelling
One of the first things I do when I arrive somewhere is leave my suitcase unopened and step out for a little while. I find a table somewhere close by, order a glass of wine, something small to eat, and I sit.
Where You Stay Is Part of the Story
Next, the most recent addition asks a question I think about constantly: how much does your accommodation shape the entire trip?
This guide covers what I call the One Base Strategy, along with what longer stays actually unlock that hotel-hopping never will. Where you stay isn’t a logistics decision. It’s one of the biggest levers you have for how a trip feels.
Some of my most vivid travel memories were never things I planned. They were given to me by a place I stayed, by the people who ran it, by an invitation to sit down at their table instead of my own. Where you stay isn’t a line item to check off before the trip really begins. It’s already part of the trip. Sometimes it’s the largest part of the story you end up telling afterward.
Where You Stay Is Part of the Story
We arrived at The Siena House in Val d’Orcia on a spring evening, still carrying the fog of an overnight flight and a long drive from Rome through the Tuscan hills.
Why I Keep Building This
I didn’t set out to build a library for the Close Circle community. But now that I’ve started, I have no plans on stopping anytime soon.
These three guides are just the beginning. Every month, I create something new for Close Circle members. Some pieces will be practical, some reflective. All of them are built for travellers who care as much about how a trip feels as where it goes.
This growing library, along with the more personal side of what I write here, is what the paid membership is for.
If you’ve been reading along and haven’t joined yet, all three of these gifts are waiting for you the moment you do. The Unrushed Itinerary Method, The Unrushed Notebook, and Where You Stay Is Part of the Story, plus everything still to come.
I hope these become the kind of things you return to again and again, before every trip that matters to you.