Returning to the Page

This morning, I found myself staring at a blank page with the same mixture of excitement and uncertainty I felt almost thirty years ago.

The setting has changed. The leather journal has given way to a keyboard. The words will travel farther than they ever could folded between worn pages tucked inside a backpack. But the feeling is unmistakably familiar.

It feels like coming home.

Before Wi-Fi

There was a time when I wrote everywhere. Airports were my favorite. Before Wi-Fi and endless entertainment, there was a kind of stillness to flying that seems almost impossible now. Somewhere above the clouds, suspended between where I had been and where I was going, the world became quiet enough to hear my own thoughts. I’d pull out a weathered leather journal and write until the wheels touched the runway.

I never imagined I was documenting my life.

I thought I was simply paying attention.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped.

Not all at once. Life is rarely that dramatic. It happened the way most important things disappear, quietly enough that you don’t notice until years have passed. Careers grew. Flights became routine. Calendars filled. Boardrooms started to feel as familiar as harbors once had, and deadlines arrived with the same regularity the tides used to keep. Without ever deciding to, I stopped carrying the journal that had quietly accompanied me through the years that shaped me most.

The adventures never ended.

Only the writing did.

I’ve spent a long time wondering why that bothered me so much.

It isn’t because I miss the notebook.

I miss the version of myself who never forgot to notice.

Guadalajara, Age Seventeen

That young man first introduced himself to me in Guadalajara.

I was seventeen years old, carrying a Jansport backpack, no mobile phone, and only the vaguest description of the family waiting somewhere beyond customs. I remember walking into the terminal with the extraordinary confidence that belongs only to teenagers.

I wasn’t scared.

Until I was.

Looking back now, I realize that moment had very little to do with Mexico.

It had everything to do with possibility.

An Education in Islands

A few years later, the Caribbean turned possibility into a way of life.

Those islands became my education. I sailed professionally, but the sailing was only the beginning. Every day off was another invitation to disappear. I’d walk into the airport with cash in my pocket, leave my sailing knife behind the counter, buy a ticket to another island, and spend the next few days wandering somewhere I’d never been before. St. Barths. Anguilla. Nevis. It hardly mattered which island. What mattered was the feeling that the world was endlessly unfolding just beyond the next horizon.

For a long time, I thought I was chasing travel.

Age has a way of correcting those misunderstandings.

I wasn’t chasing places. I was chasing the person I became whenever I arrived somewhere new.

Why I’m Here

That pursuit carried me through Asia, into corporate America, across oceans, through marriage, fatherhood, and eventually here, to Palma, Mallorca, where my wife and I are raising a daughter who speaks multiple languages before she’s old enough to understand what an extraordinary gift that is.

Somewhere between all of those chapters, the journal remained closed.

The curiosity never did.

Perhaps that’s why this feels less like beginning something new than returning to something I should never have left behind.

Between Two Seas won’t tell you where to travel.

There are enough lists for that.

This is a place to remember what travel felt like before it became content. A place to preserve the conversations, marinas, cafés, and crossings that quietly shaped a life. Some stories will lead to practical guides. Others will simply ask you to slow down for a few minutes and remember why we leave home in the first place.

The leather journals are still around…some full, one still begging me to come back.

And after fifteen years…

I’m finally writing again.

Written from Palma, Mallorca.