Loren

Before Becoming an Advisor …

Before joining Ciao Bambino, I spent nearly a decade in the U.S. Foreign Service as a U.S. diplomat serving in Mozambique, Venezuela, Australia, Sudan, Washington, D.C., and Thailand. I stepped away from government service to focus on my family in 2011, but we continued to move across the globe for my husband’s work, and we lived in Poland, Ukraine and Newport, Rhode Island. When I resigned from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2011, I started a career as a freelance travel writer for outlets such as Travel + Leisure, CNN, The New York Times, NBC “Today,” Ciao Bambino and others. I founded my blog Rise and Explore in 2017 to detail our adventures and inspire families to travel the world.

My Favorite Travel Experiences

Oh . . . How long do you have?

My wanderlust began at the age of 13 when my family moved clear across the world to Singapore, trading supermarkets for wet markets, American suburbs for city high rises and Sunday backyard BBQs for Char Kway Teow. I spent all of my high school years in Singapore and was able to experience and travel to so many wild and wonderful places. During my senior year of high school, I embarked on a walking safari with the Maasai tribe for a week in the Kenyan wilderness, learning about the tribe’s traditions and surveying the rich, majestic landscape of Kenyan wildlife. I’ve camped under a phenomenal array of stars in western Australia, visited the tranquil, rolling dunes of the Namib Desert, flown over Zimbabwe’s Victoria Falls via helicopter, hiked through ancient rainforests on the Milford Trek in New Zealand and explored Botswana’s Okavango Delta on foot. Argentina remains one of my favorite destinations of all time — taking in the vibrant sights and sounds of Buenos Aires and traveling to El Calafate in the south to see the glaciers; the latter makes you realize that we are just one small part of this giant planet.

My favorite family travel experiences include a trip to the Maldives, where we saw eagle rays gliding underneath the floating dock just after a seaplane landing, cruised alongside spinner dolphins and snorkeled out to the house reef daily. And one of my family’s favorite destinations of all time is northern Thailand (Chiang Rai), with its mysterious mist-shrouded hills, wild elephants and very chatty monkeys. Pairing the scenery and wildlife of northern Thailand with the country’s beautiful Buddhist temples and the wonderfully warm inviting nature of the Thai people makes it a very special destination.

Why I Love My Job

Travel is one of the most valuable gifts that you can give yourself and your family. Traveling the world opens minds, builds empathy and brings families closer through shared discovery. For over a decade, I have captured our family’s travels in writing and shared them with the world, and now, as a Travel Advisor, I get to plan those experiences for others. That is exciting and incredibly rewarding. My goal is to send families on journeys full of meaningful experiences across a range of landscapes and cultures. My hope is that these travels will serve as tremendous memories for decades to come.