Hello, my name is Carrie.
I started exploring the world by yacht after college as a first mate doing offshore deliveries and charter work in the Caribbean, Europe, Mediterranean and the Middle East. When a college partner-in-crime turned journalist chronicled my experiences in the yachting publication, Soundings, “Blue Grass Native Finds Blue Water Adventure,” I took it as quasi-validation of my marine biology studies.
I returned to the States with every intention of studying maritime law, but sailing had ruined me for the straight life. After a short stint in a lobbying firm, I opened an adventure and ecotourism travel business. I spent 10 years sending my clients on their own adventures on all seven continents and followed in their footsteps as often as I could.
On and off since 1999, I have been traveling through the outback, doing research on a book about my great-great-great-granduncle, Ludwig Leichhardt, who led one of the great expeditions in Australian history in 1845, à la the American explorers Lewis and Clark, and then vanished in while trying to be the first explorer to cross the heart of the continent.
On Leichhardt Expedition 2000, I retraced his successful 1845 expedition, a 3,000-mile journey from the Darling Downs in Queensland to Port Essington on the Coburg Peninsula, to learn how he traveled and to see what information I might find along the way that would inform my search for clues to his disappearance (the expedition garnered major media coverage throughout Australia). I have pored through his journals, field notebooks and letters, and the manuscripts of his contemporaries. I’ve analyzed search party reports and journeyed through remote bush areas interviewing stockmen and Aborigines. In the recesses of a library, I uncovered a letter that changed the course of my search. I now have a theory about what happened to Uncle Ludwig.
I was once a flight attendant on private jets, a semi-mindless job that afforded me the flexibility to write, easy money and the opportunity to experience the best perk money can buy – traveling by private jet. It is the only way to fly and makes me wish I could have what comedian Chris Rock admits he doesn’t have either, but calls, “private jet money.”
I hatched the idea of The Well Heeled Traveler when I bought a round-the-world ticket and took off for a year after I split from Former. The thought at the time was "Sex and the City" abroad with concrete information about the chic places to stay and where to have a drink alone without feeling like a hooker.
When my year ran out (sad), I landed a gig as the Travel Editor of Leader’s Edge Magazine. I spent 15 years covering all things discerning – travel, restaurants, luxury goods, wine, spirits, cars – and working with two of the finest editors on the planet. I’ve been on the straight and narrow now for a while, living in New Orleans, where I have a marketing business.
This iteration of The Well Heeled Traveler chronicles my current and past travels, wine tasting with friends and experts, sampling new restaurants and old faves, my adventures in New Orleans, and pretty much anything I feel like writing about.