Erin spent fourteen years building a career in corporate advertising. From the outside, it looked like success. From the inside, it felt like exhaustion — the kind that doesn't lift with a weekend off or a vacation day here and there. "Feeling burned out and exhausted day after day was not the life I wanted to live," she says. So she did something most people only daydream about: she walked away.
The plan, at first, was modest. A month off, maybe three. But the more Erin sat with the idea, the clearer it became that a few weeks wouldn't be enough. She wanted to fully disconnect — to get lost somewhere unfamiliar and give herself the space to come home different. Three months stretched into a plan for seven. And then Thailand happened.
In the Samui Islands, Erin learned to scuba dive and fell hard for it. The woman who had carefully mapped out a seven-month itinerary tore up her return flight and stayed three months longer. "Very out of character for me," she admits with a laugh. What started as a well-organized sabbatical became a ten-month journey through Europe and Southeast Asia, unfolding on its own terms.
Ask Erin which moment changed her most, and she doesn't point to a beach or a landmark. She points to a vineyard in France, during wine harvest season, filling bucket after bucket with grapes in the September sun. There was something almost radical, she says, about doing work she could see and touch. "It felt incredible to have a tangible work output — to see the literal fruit of my labor day after day and get my hands dirty." After years of deliverables that lived in slide decks and inboxes, this was different: real, physical, and shared in community with other volunteers doing the same thing. It wasn't tourism. It was living like a local, if only for a season.
Travel, for Erin, has always come back to firsts. Her first trip abroad was at eleven years old, as an exchange student in Montmorency, France — the trip that made her a lifelong Francophile and planted the seed for everything that followed. Years later, her first solo trip, to Berlin and Prague, taught her something she'd need on the road for ten months by herself: how to enjoy her own company. How to sit alone at dinner in a foreign country. How to navigate a new city on her own two feet. And, just as importantly, how to miss having someone beside her — which, she says, is its own kind of gift. It teaches you not to take travel companions for granted.
That decade-defining trip eventually led Erin to a new career, one built entirely around helping other people find what she found. Today, as a travel advisor with Brilliant Escapes based right here in Decatur, she gets to hand that transformation to her clients, one itinerary at a time. "I've seen how travel can transform, and I've experienced travel that stays with you long after coming home," she says. When clients first sit down with her, she hears the same thing she once felt herself: an anticipation for a trip that might change something. Watching that hope turn into a story — a client returning home with a new perspective or a renewed appreciation for someone in their life — is, for Erin, the whole point. It's that same feeling she chased in the vineyard: proof of something real that came from her work.
So how does she help someone who's burned out, disconnected, or simply running on empty find their way to a reset? Erin starts every consultation with one deceptively simple question: "How do you want to feel on this trip?" It's a question that cuts past hotel star ratings and bucket-list sightseeing and gets straight to what someone actually needs. For a client craving reconnection — with themselves, a partner, or their family — Erin builds in space to breathe: unstructured days, quiet accommodations over bustling resorts, room to simply be.
Being based in Decatur shapes how Erin works, too. Many of her clients are neighbors before they're clients — people whose kids' school schedules she already knows, whose favorite local restaurants she can rattle off from memory. That familiarity changes the way she plans. "I know their kids' school break schedules and the types of restaurants they love in town, and I can tailor my communications and recommendations based on what I already know about them as my Decatur neighbors," she says. In an era when so much of life happens online, Erin has found that her clients are looking for the opposite: a real, known person, rooted in their own community, to help them get away from it all — and to welcome them back home.
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