About

Talisha Awbrey

– Founder

My first camping trip was from Indiana to Colorado in the back of a station wagon. I remember holding my grandmother’s hand as we rode the gondola across Royal Gorge. I also remember my mother trying to make me pee in the wild on that trip. My mother still laughs about it — I flat-out refused, because the grass, in my three-year-old opinion, was ‘tickling my tushy.’

That station wagon turned into a van, then a Class A, riding with my parents. By the time I graduated high school, I’d been to 49 states — every one but Hawaii — and most of the national parks in between. Years later, with kids of my own, I did most of it again: twenty years in a Class C, watching my own kids see the same country I’d grown up in.

Somewhere in there between university and adulting, I spent a few years living off-grid on a sailboat in the Caribbean. Then more than a decade on the water on the eastern seaboard — weekend runs to the Bahamas, long stretches on my 42-foot catamaran, crewing on various bluewater cruisers, plus almost four years at anchor on a 28-foot sailboat I called home. I spent a year working on a cruise ship, just to see travel from the other side of the crew door. I taught sailing and navigation. I hold — held, technically, it’s expired — a captain’s license, plus wilderness and offshore medical certifications, because when you’re three days from the nearest hospital, “I read an article once” isn’t a plan.