If travel can help you figure out who you are and what you want, then it has done that for

Nikki Vargas in spades.

In her new memoir, Call You When I Land, Nikki shares how her outward journeying, both as a young woman barreling toward a marriage she knew she was not meant to be in, and later as an ambitious magazine editor whose publication soared and crashed and burned, all brought her inward journey into focus.

In the first part of this conversation, Nikki and I talk about what she has learned from failure and why short-term shame is a small price to pay for bringing your life into alignment. And in the second part,

Nikki puts on her senior travel editor hat and shares her insights on planning trips that

help you answer life's most pressing questions. Nikki, thank you so much for doing this.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm so excited to be on.

Nikki, take me back to where you are in your life when you come to find travel as a way of

revealing things to you about yourself. It was in my early 20s. I was on the brink of getting married to a lovely person, but just not the right person for me.

I had taken a job that was a good job, but again, not the right job for me.

And I just was going down a path that didn't look like me and it didn't feel like me.

But rather than kind of have the

wherewithal to realize that and stand up and sort of make a change, I had used travel at that

moment in time to run away from everything. Every chance I could get, I was running away,

running away from my fiance, running away from my life in New York,

running away from my job, just running away from the person that I had actively chosen to be

at that time. I went on a solo travel trip to Argentina, and it was a week before I was supposed

to walk down the aisle and get married. And- Which was a tell already. It was a tell. I was supposed to walk down the aisle and get married.

Which was a tell already.

It was a tell.

I will say people thought I was having a mental breakdown.

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