Last week I had the pleasure of doing an interview with Marilyn Ball on her Speaking of Travel radio show and podcast. Not only was it a lot of fun to talk with Marilyn about my travel adventures, that include China to Tibet, but it was surprisingly rewarding to reflect with her on all of the zigs and zags in my life that have brought me here as an adventure marketing agency owner. I hope you enjoy the show as much as I did and please feel free to reach out about of the topics we discuss, including The First Ever Tibetan Buddhist Pilgrimage Tour for Women.
Marilyn Ball of Speaking of Travel Interviews Julie on her show. (Note – this original iheart podcast has since gone offline, here is a 2018 interview on the same topic Marilyn and Julie did after the trip launched.)
A huge thank you to Marilyn for bringing me on Speaking of Travel.
Some Highlights from the April 6, 2016 Speaking of Travel Show – From China to Tibet:
- Marilyn asks me about my upbringing at a small ski resort in southern Vermont and what inspired me to travel.
- I share my experience as a college student in Duke University’s China Study Abroad Program decades ago, when I lived in China for six months.
- I reminisce about what it was like to be 20 and traveling about China, including a favorite 2 day hiking trip in the mystical Yellow Mountains (Huang Shan) and exposure to the culture as one of the early foreign students to live there.
- I share about my unplanned transition from Duke University to Wall Street to raft guide to business school to being a digital marketing agency owner.
- I am pretty candid about fear and how the brave encouragement of a savvy mentor helped me launch an agency that dovetailed directly with my love of adventure travel, sustainability, outdoor recreation and the people who are drawn to these things.
- We discuss my return to China and Tibet in late 2015, after more than 30 years, to help local Tibetan responsible tourism entrepreneurs with their marketing plans.
- Marilyn digs into how Tibet changed me. (She’s great at asking inspiring questions!) We talk about how a casual conversation with a Tibetan colleague led to me sponsoring a young Tibetan student in her dream to finish her last two years of Traditional Medical School in China.
- We end the interview talking about a new Tibetan Pilgrimage Tour for Women that my new Tibetan friends and I dreamed up and are running this fall in eastern Tibet!
