Michael Steighner

Traverse isn’t really a conference in the traditional sense. It’s more like a series of conversations … workshops, discussions, and shared experiences centered around travel, storytelling, photography, video, and what it means to build something creative in this space.

I’ll be honest with you, walking into a room full of people you don’t know can be uncomfortable. Especially when you assume most of them are younger, further along, or more confident than you are. What surprised me almost immediately was how many people I met who were closer to my age … people who had gone through career changes, life shifts, or personal reinventions of their own.

I’ve learned that some mornings on the road feel less like exploration and more like quiet confrontation. You wake up somewhere beautiful, make coffee that may or may not exist, and realize the view outside the window doesn’t automatically answer the questions you brought with you. Episode #3 of this journey lives squarely in that space.

I’ve learned that some of the most revealing moments while traveling happen before most people are awake. Not because anything extraordinary is happening, but because nothing is demanding your attention yet. In 2019, my second morning in Zurich began exactly that way … too early, slightly under-caffeinated, and quietly grateful to be awake in a city that hadn’t fully turned itself on.

I’ve learned that travel doesn’t always begin when you arrive somewhere. Sometimes it begins in transit, half awake, slightly disoriented, standing in the wrong elevator, already a little behind the rhythm of a place you haven’t yet learned how to move through. That’s how this trip to Europe started for me in 2019, landing in

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing a series of posts that revisit a trip I took through Europe in 2019 — a journey that began in Switzerland, crossed the Alps by train, and eventually led me to Northern Italy. At the time, I was filming daily travel vlogs, moving quickly, responding in the moment. What I didn’t realize then was how much of that experience would stay unfinished — not undocumented, but unreflected.