At any moment in Damon Brown’s house, you might hear snippets of a half-dozen different languages being spoken.
His wife, Parul, grew up in India and is fluent in Gujarati; she picked up Spanish while practicing medicine in Southern California. Damon’s mom is an Italophile and loves to sprinkle Italian into her conversations with her 7- and 4-year-old grandsons.
Then there are Damon’s clients, who are sprinkled around the world. “My boys will break into a meeting and they’ll hear different accents or languages,” he said.
Damon advises non-traditional entrepreneurs and is a public speaker and best-selling author. (His new book, Build From Now: How to Know Your Power, See Your Abundance & Nourish the World, is coming out in January.) He’s also the primary caretaker of his two sons.
He shared the trip that most influenced him, the trick to staying close to the Grand Canyon, and what his biggest travel win has been so far.
My first international trip…
was to Japan. I took myself there for my birthday when I was in my 20s and it changed my life. A visceral memory is seeing a puppy in a far-out Tokyo suburb (Kamakura). I love animals, and I spoke bad Japanese to the dog. It reacted just as one would back home. In a moment, I realized everyone and everything is in its own reality—unless they are fortunate travel somewhere else and have that reality bubble punctured.
As a result of the trip, I learned a whole bunch of Japanese and forgot most of it. But the kids call bears the Japanese word “kuma” and other little wrinkles.
I’ve lived in…
New Jersey, New Orleans, Detroit, Ohio, Chicago, up and down the California coast, from San Diego to San Francisco. Right now we live in Las Vegas. It’s not just like, I’m going to spend a month somewhere—it’s like picking up a circus tent and moving to another city. Having that informed me as a creator, as a writer, as an empathetic person.
What influences a lot of our travel is…
Food. We’re a very food-forward family. Anthony Bourdain is my patron saint—he said you can learn everything about a people by their food. He’s absolutely right. From, say, Northern Indian food, you can learn a heck of a lot about their culture. I’m the one who plans the travel in our family. The main thing is, where do we want to eat? Then it’s, what experience do we want to have around that eating?
For our honeymoon we went to…
Morocco. We said, we’re starting a new chapter, why don’t we go to a new continent? We both got the equivalent of Montezuma’s revenge. I have an iron stomach but Morocco almost broke me in two. But at the end of the trip we went to Ouarzazate, which is on the edge of the Sahara. We woke up at four in the morning and drove out into the middle of the desert, then we got on camels and rode back, watching the sunrise along the way. That was eight years ago and I’m still talking about it.
I’m really big on…
showing by example. Not suggesting things that I wouldn’t do myself. When my kids were first born, I was getting recommended all these baby-bink music things to play. But I was like, I’m really feeling Kind of Blue or John Coltrane. I have that same approach to traveling. So if there’s something odd that we haven’t eaten before then I’m happy to have them see me and/or my wife take a bite of it.
My master travel stroke was…
I saved up frequent flyer points and took our family—we had just our older son then, who was about to turn two—plus our moms to Italy for a week and a half. A few months later our son was like, Dad, I want some of that white cheese. I was like, you mean the parmigiano-reggiano we had it Italy? Sweetheart, that was months ago—we brought some back, but it’s gone now. There are people who say, I could do that with my kids but they’re not going to remember it. I think they do remember it on some level.
You never regret…
the travel you did do. I have older relatives who said, I’m going to wait until I get this thing together, or until that happens. You don’t know where you’re going to be when you’re 65. Some of them didn’t make it. Some of them weren’t in good enough physical shape. If I were to wrap it up today, I’ve been to Japan. My wife and I rode camels in Morocco. We were able to go around the countryside in Italy.
I probably have more than an average…
degree of wanderlust. I had seven or eight business trips planned this year—until the pandemic rolled around.
One of the positive effects of the pandemic is…
people are appreciating what’s local. A lot of the friends I grew up with had rich families, especially when I was in college. They spent the summer in Europe and had been to Brazil and Northern Africa, but they had never been to the 50 U.S. states. At the time I hadn’t traveled internationally, but I had been to three-quarters of the U.S. and had lived in four or five states. Travel to me is about that balance between going out of your comfort zone and finding out what’s going on in your own neighborhood.
We took our first camping trip…
about a month ago. Our eldest is in the Cub Scouts. It was so intense, I write about it in my next book. I’ll leave it at that. But he’s still in the Cub Scouts.
This year we traveled to…
the Grand Canyon. We did Airbnb and my wife was very savvy with it. She discovered you can rent campers. It makes sense—you can rent a castle, so why not? We rented an RV that was parked in a campground about 30 minutes from the Grand Canyon. We brought Lysol wipes and wiped down the entire thing.
We spent the afternoon at the Grand Canyon. There’s only so much time kids can look at a big hole in the earth, but it ended up being really cool. And there’s actually another thing called Bearizona. It’s an American wildlife preserve; you go in there and bears are just hanging out. My boys love animals, so that ended up being the highlight for them.
