In 2012, a couple years before I begame a travel professional, I did something a little impulsive.

I signed up for a group trip to Europe... London, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Bruges, with someone I had just met at a meetup group. Not a friend. Not even someone I knew well. Just a young lady who was my age and seemed cool, and a trip that seemed worth the risk.

The travel agent who organized it? She didn't come. The group around us spent most of the trip comparing complaints about their roommates and the things that weren't going right. It was the kind of trip that could have been a disaster, or at least just fine enough to forget.

But that young lady I barely knew and I made a quiet decision early on... we're just going to enjoy this. We explored on our own terms, found our rhythm, and by the time we flew home, we weren't strangers anymore. Fourteen years later, that friendship is one of the most meaningful ones in my life.

And for a long time, I thought we just got lucky.

The more I sat with it, the more I realized... the connection wasn't an accident. It happened because we had a shared experience with a purpose... something to do together, a reason to talk, a reason to figure each other out. The trip gave us that. We just had to be willing to show up for it.

Because of my love for travel, in 2014 I became a Certified Travel Advisor. When I transitioned into group travel, I wanted to make sure that what I created would mirror what happened for me on that European adventure by design, not left to chance.

And eventually, I built Unsolved Adventures, where the mystery gives everyone a reason to talk, the travel gives everyone something to share, and the friendships that form aren't lucky accidents. They're the whole point.

You deserve to find your people. This is where it happens.