One of my biggest accomplishments for the year has been resurrecting this blog and getting caught up with a lot of belated posts. On New Year’s Day, I wrote down as one of my goals “update your blog” and it only took me until mid-November to start making it happen. Well, better late than never!

Since starting this blog, I’ve traded in long trips for short ones (one of the big insights from my four months in Southeast Asia was I enjoy having a “normal job”) but I stil have had an amazing year filled with lots of great adventures.

Why did I pick a spa getaway at The Silverado? Perhaps I’d seen photos of its charming, ornate original building, a grand white mansion from the late 1880s flanked by elegant palm trees. Perhaps I’d heard others casually mention they’d dashed off there to retreat for a weekend, or a wedding. Or perhaps I just saw it listed on a hotel website and it piqued my curiosity and desire.

Many times when we think about travel, we immediately think about going somewhere new. That kind of travel is all about novelty: new landscapes, new cultures, a new understanding of the world around us.

But there’s another kind of travel, one that may be a bit overlooked or underappreciated: traveling to places we’ve already been. Some of my best trips, incidentally, have not been to brand new locales, but returns to places I’ve lived and loved, from New York City and Miami to London and Madrid.