About Suzi Albrecht
About Me
I’m a travel junkie road warrior and happiest when planning my next trip! I’m currently on a year-long sabbatical around the world. I did/do love my career, but I’ve been holding out for this year of travel for a long time, and finally decided the time was right. While I’m a licensed PMP by trade, photography is my other passion, with history and food coming in close behind. So you’ll see me running around taking pix on a lot of street food tours in ancient cities all around the world. I have TONS of pix and videos of this so stay tuned as I plan to get them up quickly.
My Background
I’m a digital marketing project manager with a passion for travel, photography and food. I love culture. I’m into health and fitness. I run a couple miles a day, and love power yoga. I also love to cook and admit my favorite appliance is my Vitamix. I’m a great chef copy cat. If I taste something, I can usually recreate it. So, I like to taste as many dishes as I can, as often as I can, so I can expand my cooking talents.
Growing Up
I grew up like an army brat, except my family was state department and not military forces. But we engaged with those families in the different areas that we lived, and we moved about every four years or so.
I was born in Columbia, Missouri, to parents who lived in the married dorms at the University of Missouri. This is back when kids got married really young, and there were actually married dorms. Times have changed! But the school remains great – and produces excellent journalists. Go Tigers. Go Mizzou!
I moved to Seattle Washington next, occasionally visiting the slopes in Canada for some ski time on weekends with my dad. I was mostly a rope-pull kid at the time, literally hitting the slopes. I loved the beauty and tranquility of Seattle and Puget Sound. I remember doing a lot of boating, going clamming, doing some water skiing and going to a picturesque trout farm on a school field trip. I remember the life-changing moment when I had my first oyster, which was dipped into a pot filled with melted butter on a gas stove. Odd that a young kid would love something so strange and ugly on the food front. But I was truly hooked.
After a few independence days in Seattle, where we all wore matching stars and stripes pants hand sewn by my mom, we took our patriotic celebrations up a notch and moved to Washington DC. We stayed in an apartment on high up floors in government housing for a bit, and Billy Joel played on the radio. This was a short stay though, because we soon moved to Rome.
I remember my first day in Rome. There were scary looking men in camouflage uniforms holding machine guns in the airport, and I saw my first nude boy, who was peeing on a wall right outside on the street. These visions were stamped in my mind, but soon replaced by much nicer views of pizza and pasta, and a really beautiful school called Marymount. It was an all-girls catholic school and we sometimes engaged in social activities with the nearby all-boys school, Notre Dame. They were both strict, and Marymount was taught by nuns. They were both English speaking boarding schools.
I lived at home though, in a ground floor apartment the city, which I remember well, because on a ride over Rome in the Goodyear Blimp, we actually saw my mom running out on the terrace when she heard the engines in the sky above her. And because a couple unkind neighbors occasionally emptied their trash by dropping it off their terrace and onto ours. That was quite the unforgettable visual imprint.
But there were nice neighbors too. I learned to speak Italian fluently because it was the only way to communicate with friends outside of school. My best friends outside of school were Italian and Japanese girls who lived in my apartment complex. We did not initially understand each other, but we liked getting gelato and eating pine nuts off the ground, so we got along just fine.
While in Rome we toured all of Europe on holidays and weekends. We saw a pope get elected by waiting patiently over and over for the smoke to turn white in the Vatican. Fumata bianca. My dad boosted our ski time up a notch by taking us to the Italian alps frequently, and to Austria one Christmas. I upgraded from tow ropes to tiny button lifts. It was like out of a fairy tale. We had Tortellini en Brodo sprinkled with fresh aged parmesan in NorthernItaly. We went ice skating on a natural pond outside at night in the Austrian alps. I had my first Weiner Schnitzel and hard apple cider. And my first of many soft cooked eggs, in a colorful ceramic holder in a ski-in-ski-out bed and breakfast that had duvets stuffed with blankets instead of comforters.
Our other memorable trips included climbing Mount Vesuvius outside of Naples in Pompeii, and wearing sea socks on rocks in the clear waters off Elba. And during sunset, looking out over the village to the Mediterranean Sea in Positano on the Amalfi Coast. Walking down winding steps to get to dinner, and eating shrimp with eyeballs still on their heads, and it was normal. Fritto Misto, Frutti di Mare. We climbed mountains in Germany, including the real one that Disney was modeled after, and the ruins of massive Greek temples. For a school field trip I went to Spain to see Madrid and Barcelona, had my first fish soup, visited arenas where they held bull fights, and brought back tons of colorful ladies hand fans that opened and closed with a quick flick of the wrist. Bailar!
When we returned to the U.S. from Rome, I was very different from the other girls. My hair was not as big and flared, and my skirts were much longer. I didn’t wear makeup, yet. I stood out and it took a bit of adjustment. But I was soon an average American teen going to high school and having fun in the rolling hills and valleys outside of Washington DC in Fairfax, Virginia. I grew to love the weather and taking the metro in to the city to have lunch with my dad. He worked at the State Department main offices, where we walked right across the street to the Smithsonian and did self-guided audio tours of some pretty spectacular global exhibits.
We had some fun family vacations in Ocean City, Rehoboth, Myrtle Beach and Nags Head. And we drove to Florida a few times to fly over to the clear blue water of the Bahamas. I carried on in Virginia for a few years and decided that as much as I loved it, upon graduation I wanted to leave. I had always loved the ocean and found I feel very alive when I can smell the sea breeze nearby. So I decided to move to Florida.
I went to the University of South Florida and lived in Tampa. Then I graduated and moved to Fort Lauderdale and lived there for a few years. I got certified as a scuba diver and went boating and to the Florida Keys often. Then my family moved down from Virginia to Orlando, and I moved up to Orlando to be near them. I’ve lived in Orlando for awhile now, longer than anywhere else. I got my masters at the school with top notch post-grad programs, and campus voted most beautiful, Rollins College.
My professional background is technology and communications. I’m a digital project manager and I work with IT and communications teams to build big websites and manage all aspects of massive web marketing campaigns. I like to travel as often as I can, and I hope to share a number of my trips, and tell many of my stories with photos here on Travel Tao.