| Greetings from Mexico City, where the scouting work never stops, from bubbling cauldrons of streetside carnitas to the most delicate aguachile verde to ever grace a shallow bowl.
While I've been here, I've also been filling the last of our Autumn spots to Catalunya with Alejo Sabugo, Asturias with Matt Goulding, and Chiang Mai with Andy Ricker. The process for joining us on those journeys has a few extra steps, by design. Small group travel only works if the travelers are a good fit.
Our trips are not for everyone. We stay in amazing properties, but we don't do luxury for luxury's sake. We eat refined and rough and everything in between, as long as it's delicious and the food tells us something about the place. As a rule, we like to drink and introduce you warmly to our old friends and have a very good time. We talk about history and language and politics as we go along. We lace our trips with gifts and little essays to infuse the week with as much poetry and character as we can. We always have local co-hosts who are there to show the best and realest parts of their region, not to create some contour-free globalized high-end travel experience.
So we simply couldn't just put a signup form and take deposits online without knowing who it is that is joining the group, how they like to travel, why they want to travel with us and not with larger luxury operators. It takes effort from both sides, but we make sure to have at least a phone conversation before we ever talk about deposits.
The effort has paid off on our first three trips. We spoke with all our travelers before bringing them on board. And as a result, the groups were a beautiful match for us and for each other, which just made all the wines brighter, the pasta more toothsome, the travel smoother.
So, if you want to journey with us to some of the world's great culinary destinations this October and November (or go any of our 2023 trips currently scheduled), here are the four steps:
- Email us at league@roadsandkingdoms.com
- We send details on itinerary, pricing and availability (as a reminder, our prices range from $8k-$15k per traveler)
- If you're still interested, we set up a time for me to give you a call
- Last step is deposit by credit card and confirmation
That may be more involved than, well, any other travel company that we know of. But we understand what a rare thing it is for us to be able to travel like this, to these places. And the small investment of energy and thought ahead of time makes the entire experience richer.
As always, if you want to reach me directly, I'm here with walking around town with a fistful of torta, available at nathan@roadsandkingdoms.com. —Nathan Thornburgh
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