Life, Love & Goldblum – Interview with Geraldine DeRuiter (The Everywhereist)
Tune into WojCast with Geraldine DeRuiter to discover how travel can be a liberating and transformative experience, because her stories are filled with humor and resilience.
We love Jeff Goldblum, but not as much as Geraldine DeRuiter (syntactical ambiguity totally intended).
On episode 12 Woj and Bobby take a trip with the jet setting Everywhererist to discover the roots of her liberating travel ethos, where failing at a vacation is impossible and getting lost is all part of the master plan.
After writing her first book, All Over the Place: Adventures in Travel, True Love, and Petty Theft, Geraldine is bursting with golden nuggets of wisdom delivered with her timely sense of humour and endlessly inviting nerdery.
After surviving career setbacks, a brain tumor and a non-existent sense of direction she proves that when life gets tricky, Geraldine finds a way.
Geraldine DeRuiter Quotes
“There’s Rick Steves and Anthony Bourdain and Samantha Brown and all of these, you know, incredibly charming, successful people who tell you how you should be traveling. And I think all of that is just garbage because all that does is it creates a system in which you can fail at a vacation and that’s terrible, right?” (2:31)
“You are not determining every factor of it. I think that’s true if you’re doing a startup. I think that’s true if you’re on a trip. I think that’s true if you are writing a book. At some point, it kinda takes a life of its own and it’s going to lead you, so I think you need to be okay with being kind of a passive sort of journeyman or woman on that trip. You know, you need to be able to sit back and let it guide you…” (7:40)
Key Takeaways
- The art of the zig zag (7:30)
- Squishy mortals versus Los Angeles (11:34)
- Why Rand has serious competition in Jeff Goldblum (13:13)
- Steve the Brain Tumor (15:57)
Geraldine’s book All Over the Place: Adventures in Travel, True Love, and Petty Theft (kudos on the Oxford Comma) is available now.
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To gain more insights into Geraldine’s unique travel ethos and life experiences, visit her complete interview.