About

0 Shares

Welcome to Head Roam.

Head Roam @headroamer Nan — Nan Bauer, back when we used to be able to go places….

I’m Nan Bauer, aka @headroamer. And I want to go everywhere.

But….well, there’s that pandemic. It’s put a real monkey wrench in that whole Passionate Traveler thing.

Of course, it’s handy to blame all our troubles, travel-related and otherwise, on COVID-19. But there are plenty of other monkey wrench factors in our ambitions to see the world:

Money. No matter how much you’ve saved and budgeted, there are limits.
Relationships. Getting stuck on another continent during a crisis is pretty stressful. (Been there; you can read about it below.)
Health. Out of the blue, an injury or illness can knock you out of commission—sometimes for a short time, but often for a while longer.
The environment. Even if you can fly anywhere with points, those plane trips contribute significantly to our climate crisis. (Sorry to be a buzzkill.)
Other stuff. Crises can occur in any given country overnight and—well, if the pandemic of 2020 has hammered home one thing, it’s just how unpredictable the world can be. That’s not going to change.

So what’s a passionate, thoughtful, and highly frustrated traveler to do?

My friends, we are here to help.

Our goal here at Head Roam: To give you, my fellow passionate student of the world, the tools that help you journey to your dream destination—whether in person or from your home.

Get inspired. We know 3 surefire ways to get the travel bug for a particular place: Books, Movies, and Food. We’re busy creating and finding book lists for as many places as possible. (We’d LOVE your help. Email [email protected] with your recommendations and reviews.) Just have one night? Check out our Movie Date Night channel. Why spend a weekend doing the same old stuff when you can go to Ireland, Morocco, or, really, anywhere?
Dig in. The pandemic has made more virtual travel tools available and accessible than ever. They’re excellent for trip planning; they can also help you create a journey that feels like you’re getting away while you’re safely ensconced in your home. We’re in the process of creating forms and formulas for helping you come up with everything from a weekend to a multi-month trek.
Share. If a tree falls in a forest and you’re the only one there…write it down. Then, it doesn’t just happen to you, it—and more importantly, its impact—can be felt, by the people you care about, and by people you’ve never met but who are kindred spirits. We’re working on everything from simple photo organization to how to share those moments that you’ll never forget with the people you care about most.

virtual travel research — My typical research phase prior to any journey looks a lot like this pile of books, my personal library raid when we were prepping to go to Peru.

At the end of the day, Head Roam exists for you.

We’re here for you:

To help you continue that lifelong, crazy journey of connecting with new people, new places, new experiences.
And to tell the tale with style, grace, and in a way that fires other people up to learn more about the world themselves.

Here’s something you don’t see every day: downtown Lima, completely empty of traffic.

And now, a little background info on Nan.

I began blogging around the same time as a lot of people, sometime in the mid-aughts. I morphed from the purely personal Nanarama to Nanette’s Feast, which was going to bring the dinner and a movie concept to life, and which never quite took off. I then migrated to Le Chou Fou, currently still available, and where you can read all about our 4 weeks in Perù when the borders were closed and we waited for a flight to get home. (That adventure is in process of being turned into a book; when it’s done, Le Chou Fou will go dark.)

thank you from Nan at Head Roam — Stuck in Perù during the pandemic. No hair dye, but plenty of wine.

As for the standard resume stuff, I still am a regular contributor of both articles and video content for Edible WOW magazine. I’ve made videos with Harry Josh and Luigi Murenu when I worked at Enlighten, a digital agency in Ann Arbor, MI. A long time ago, I was the Editorial Coordinator for the Criterion Collection.

But of all the things I’ve done, the accomplishment that I feel is most important is my 15 or so years teaching composition, argument, and literature at Washtenaw Community College, also in Ann Arbor. Thanks to that job, I was able to connect with a truly diverse group of people through story: telling our own, and appreciating the countless stories of others.

Connecting and storytelling come naturally to me. I think they’re innate talents that we all have. I’ve got a lot of shortcuts after years of practice, and I’m happy to share them with you. Because I know you’ve got a lot to share back.

Let’s get going.