While living in rural Massachusetts, Lauren Aloise would travel the world in her imagination by exploring travel magazines. Her trips to New York City to visit family were another opportunity to see how differently people could live. That curiosity led Lauren to do a summer program in Sicily, Italy, when she was 17. While many of her friends were spending their money on cars, she decided to spend hers learning Italian abroad.
Later, while trying to get a job in the hospitality industry during the Great Recession — not exactly an amazing time for the American economy — Lauren received an email about the “aux” program, an opportunity to live in Spain for a year and teach English. She decided to say yes and moved to Seville, where she met her husband while doing a language exchange. What was supposed to be one year eventually became a new life abroad.
Lauren quickly realized she was not cut out for the teaching world, so she decided to leverage her passion for food and explore different ideas. She created a blog, started hosting cooking classes at her place, and one day stumbled upon the idea of creating food tours. That’s how Devour Tours was born — a food tour company that later grew across Europe.
In this episode, we talk about how that trip to Sicily changed her perspective on the world, and the events that led her to create Devour Tours and how she leveraged her passion for food, had a good eye for opportunity, and later made the decision to sell the company and eventually leave. We also talked about the identity shift that came with motherhood, her reflections on that transition, and how she is now thinking about her next steps.
Connect with Lauren
- Substack https://projectrecharge.substack.com/
Connect with Transplants:
- Follow on IG https://www.instagram.com/transplants.pod
- Substack/newsletter - https://wearetransplants.substack.com/
- Laura's IG https://www.instagram.com/laura_peruchi
- Follow on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@wearetransplants
- Questions, suggestions, or random thoughts you’d like to share? Or maybe you’d like to pitch yourself for the podcast or suggest a guest? Send me an email at [email protected].
