I spent more than twenty years moving through the world as a U.S. diplomat — negotiating, navigating, and learning how places shape people. I've sat at formal tables in New York and Geneva, wandered medieval markets in the Middle East, and discovered that the most transformative travel rarely happens on a schedule.

People assume a diplomatic career is all motorcades and secret work behind the scenes. (It mostly wasn't - but that's always been the assumption when you're in my line of work, and I've stopped correcting it.) The truth is quieter and, I think, more useful for the way I travel now.

I lived and worked across eight countries and learned, in each one, the thing you can't get from a guidebook: how a place actually runs beneath the surface - who to know, where the real conversations happen, which unremarkable-looking door opens onto the evening you'll talk about for years. Diplomacy, when it works, is mostly that. Reading a room. Building trust fast. Turning strangers at a table into something warmer by the time the plates are cleared.

I never really stopped doing the job. I just changed the guest list.

Sojourn & Soirée is what happens when those instincts get pointed at something purely joyful. I design and host journeys - editions, I call them - in Europe and the United States and, honestly, wherever a place has a story worth walking into. Each one is built the way I used to build a posting: with a local's map instead of a tourist's, with the right table booked and the right people at it, with room left for the unscripted afternoon that turns out to be the one you remember. I handle the logistics the way I once handled a delegation - so that by the time you arrive, all you have to do is show up and pay attention.

I can promise you a beautiful trip. Plenty of people can. What I can actually offer is the insider's version of it - the door, the conversation, the story behind the thing everyone else just photographs.

That's the whole idea. Come see how a place really works.