Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Women Who Travel, a podcast from Connie Nass Traveler.

I'm Meredith Carey and I'm joined as always by my co-host, Lale-Aa Aricoglu.

Hi.

Today we're joined also by Lori Willever, a travel writer and cookbook author Lori spent more than

a decade as an

assistant and collaborator to the late Anthony Bourdain. You can find her name alongside his

on Appetites, a cookbook with Bourdain and World Travel on a Reverend Guide, which was published

earlier this year. Her latest, Bourdain, the definitive oral biography, came out yesterday

and features memories from more than 90

friends, family members, and collaborators. This week, we wanted to sit down with Lori to chat

about all things travel and, of course, food. So thank you so much for chatting with us, Lori.

Absolutely. I'm very happy to be here. Meredith just read out like a whole laundry list of

impressive achievements, but I want to rewind a little further back and start with a simple question, which is, what role did travel play in your life growing up?

Growing up, my family did travel, but it was, there were a couple of places that we went to, and one of those was up to Lake Ontario.

So I grew up outside of Syracuse, and my family, my grandparents had a little cabin on Lake Ontario.

So that was a consistent place that we would go to.

So that's a maybe two and a half hour

car ride, which as a little kid felt like a very long journey. And it was a place that I loved.

I learned how to swim there. I learned how to fish there. I watched my mother water ski there.

I never actually managed to do it myself. but it was a really special kind of retreat.

There were a lot of families that bought little cabins on the bays of Lake Ontario in the 1950s and 60s,

and my grandparents were one of those families.

...