Beyond the Usual: The Rewatch

In 2017 I opened an episode with a stat that sounds like the last thing you'd lead with: over half the population of the Palm Beaches is 65 and older. Then I said, don't worry, we're gonna rock it.

This episode rewatches that promise against the footage: Canvas's outdoor murals, the Silver Ball Museum's vintage arcade, Delray Beach's chain-free restaurant strip, Saltwater Brewery's eco-conscious packaging, a Pontiki boat tour past Mar-a-Lago, and a massage at O Spa to close the trip out.

The actual lesson isn't about the Palm Beaches. It's about what a hook needs to be built from: not a twist, not a gimmick, just one assumption your audience already holds, said out loud, and answered by the end.

One client. 3 theme parks. And one real risk this whole episode reads as an ad.

This episode rewatches a hosted trip to Grupo Xcaret's 3 sister parks in Mexico's Riviera Maya, timed around Dia de los Muertos. Xplor brings the jungle adventure: an amphibious mud ride, a 400-meter underground cenote swim, and a zip line finale through waterfalls. Xenses brings the sensory disorientation: a pitch-dark room you feel your way through and an upside-down town that flips your sense of up and down. Xcaret brings the culture: the Day of the Dead cemetery, the Mayan underworld of Xibalba, and a night walk through the jungle with the spirits.

The real story isn't any one park. It's the guardrail I used to keep 3 sponsored products from collapsing into one long commercial, and whether it actually worked.

On this trip to Samana, in the Dominican Republic, I went in planning to cover waterfalls, horseback rides, and a boat trip through Los Haitises National Park. What I didn't plan for was realizing halfway through the shoot that the most compelling thing on camera wasn't the destination, it was the man showing it to me. This one's about finding your main character when it isn't who you expected, plus a hard-won lesson about who you bring on a shoot, and the usual check on what's still open from this episode.

How do you actually turn a hard drive of soundbites into a finished script? On this episode, I rewatch the Indy 500 leg of my first self-produced travel show and break down the script-building process: the outline grid, inserting section notes, placing soundbites like puzzle pieces, fact-checking, and reading the script out loud before recording.

Then we rewatch three days of VIP access to the 100th running of the Indy 500: a dinner with all 33 IndyCar drivers, breakfast with Mario Andretti, Gasoline Alley, and race day in front of roughly 400,000 people. The driver she picked to follow, Alexander Rossi, ends up winning as a rookie, plus an update on where he's racing now.

How do you find a story once the trip's over and you're staring at a hard drive full of footage? On this episode, I rewatch the Grenada leg of my first self-produced travel show and break down the post-production process: nightly footage logging, scrubbing with a notebook, working with transcription services, and cutting even your own favorite on-camera moments if they don't serve the story.

We cover Grand Etang National Park and its mona monkeys, the Seven Sisters Waterfalls hike, the High Wire Challenge, the Underwater Sculpture Park, and a day trip to Carriacou. Then I check what's still open ten years later, including how the island's recovering from Hurricane Beryl.

Poll question: none found in this transcript.

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How do you find a story when everything's happening too fast to process? On this episode, I rewatch the Kaua'i leg of my first self-produced travel show, six vendors in one shoot, and break down how to find a story once you're already on the ground and in over your head.

Five tips land right where they happened: asking questions out loud instead of faking expertise, the one-sentence test, noticing what wasn't on the itinerary, spotting the same idea in unrelated places, and trusting the moments that actually got to you. I also check what's still open ten years later, and it's good news across the board.

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In 2018, I was in a canoe in the Amazon rainforest at night — pitch black, no city lights — when our guide reached into the water with his bare hands and pulled out a baby black caiman. This is Season 2, Episode 3 of the rewatch, the longest episode in the entire archive, covering six days on the Rio Negro aboard the Motor Yacht Tucano. I sat down with two climate scientists before heading into the jungle, visited a village that isn't bookable anywhere, and relearned the hardest lesson of solo shooting: you can't capture everything, so figure out the story first.

In 2018, I sat in a 100-degree Mayan sweat lodge for 90 minutes. The shaman was singing, the darkness was total, I was supposed to release everything — and part of my brain was still running the shot list. This episode covers Coba's ruins, a pyramid that's been closed to climbers since 2021, a cenote blessing, and the framework I now use to tell whether a cultural experience is genuinely authentic or built for the camera.

Puerto Rico Tourism invited me on a press trip six months after Hurricanes Irma and Maria. They gave us the official statements. Then my photographer and I went to the streets to find out if any of it was true. This episode is about what it means to accept hosted access in a real crisis zone and report beyond what the host wanted covered — including a resident named Norma who told us directly what FEMA never delivered.

I said that out loud at Cannes Lions this year, and I meant it. My production company hosts a cohort there, which puts me in rooms with people who run global marketing for some of the biggest brands in the world. This episode breaks down how the advertising machine actually works, where creators genuinely fit in it, and what I watched happen at Cannes that never made it into anyone else's recap.