Rachael Danley
Author Bio
Rachael grew up in Portland, Oregon. She has always been a passionate and whole-hearted adventurer. She started her travel by listening to the epic stories her grandparents told her about their escape from Nazi Germany. Thanks to these harrowing tales, Rachael had the unique opportunity to transport herself to Germany, India, Japan, Kenya, and England in her mind’s eye. These visions of her family’s past became her inspiration for her future journeys.
At the age of sixteen, Rachael’s travel career took a marked turn. She left the proverbial armchair and took off to Ecuador as an exchange student. It was there that she came to be known as Raquel and had her world turned upside down. Such turmoil (otherwise known as travel) became the engine of her existence. She was compelled to return to South America for a long time, where she lost herself in noisy cities and jagged mountains. She also crossed the oceans to discover the oddities and beauty of various countries in Europe, where she ate too much gelato and visited thousands of churches. After such experiences, she remains forever changed, and still cannot quite believe that she has been where she has been, nor that she currently finds herself back on her native soil!
Today (she is once more Rachael, Raquel unfortunately got lost somewhere in Spain,) after having graduated from the University of Oregon, she is still trying to make sense of where she has been, where she is now, and where she might be going.
Rachael loves countless, nameless, and endless things about travel. The thing she hates most about travel is that these countless, nameless, and endless things are so hard to make sense of and relate to everyday life. Colors, faces, and smells slip away so fast, and scurry off to hide in the dark realm of memory. She would like to be able to coax out these fragments and make them come alive again by writing about them and sharing them with whoever might be interested. Rachael must confess that her love of poetry (and other forms of the written word) is equal to that of her love for exploring…for her they are two sides of the same coin. Rachael wants to live her memories, and live the kind of life that creates more memories worth living. This leaves her certain of one thing – that such a life must include travel, actual or virtual.
