Going Deep w/ Aaron Watson podcast

404 Planning Surprise 3-Day Vacations w/ Lillian Rafson, Pack Up + Go founder

11/11/2019

Lillian Rafson did not plan to start her business Pack Up + Go. But, on a trip to Latvia, she came across an idea that was too good to pass up. Booking surprise travel for vacationers.

She came back to the US, started the business, and hoped to get 50 clients that year. She got 500.

She followed the sharp trajectory upwards and remained bootstrapped the whole way. Now she runs a team, does millions in revenue, and is charting expansion plans.

In this conversation, Lillian and Aaron discuss the inspiration for the business, how she got initial traction, and the way she has built her team.

Pittsburgh’s best conference to Expand your Mind & Fill your Heart happens once a year.

Lillian’s Challenge; Go visit a new neighborhood in your city or town.

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Watson: Thank you so much for coming on, Going Deep with Aaron Watson.

Lillian Rafson: Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Watson:I am really curious to have the audience and also myself learn a ton about your business, but to start it off, can you just explain, Pack Up + Go to folks that might not be familiar with surprise tourism or what this kind of concept of your businesses is? Because it is relatively new.

Lillian Rafson: Definitely. I am the founder and CEO of Pack Up + Go. We are a travel agency that plans three-day trips around the United States, but the catch is that your destination is a surprise until the day you depart. We are the first travel agency of this type in the US, and we're asking travelers to take a leap of faith by signing up for one of our trips. All of our destinations are in the US so our travelers know that they can use their phone, they know the currency, if there's an emergency, they know what numbers to call. So, there's definitely some safety parameters around it, but it is a new type of concept where you know exactly what to pack, you know, what time your flight departs, but you have no idea where you're going.

Watson: So, that could mean number one, I think there's only like 10% of people in the US that have a passport, and some even lower number has actually left the country. So that's a part of the calculus there. And then also you said, you know what to pack. So like, I know that I'm going to a warm climate and should pack my swimsuit versus I'm going to the North and I need a parka or whatever.

Lillian Rafson: Exactly. So our travelers fill out a survey. So they tell us they've traveled recently, what trips they have coming up, what they like to do. Then we plan their trip for them. But one week before they depart, we send them an email so they have the weather forecast, packing tips. So you're right, like a bathing suit or hiking boots, depending on their destination, where to go and when. Then we mail them a physical envelope and we encourage everyone to keep that sealed until the day they depart. So you go to the airport at the time that we've told you, open your envelope to reveal your destination, and then you get your boarding pass on your off. So it's a very easy trip to plan and also super exciting.

Watson:Yeah, it would definitely be stimulating in a novel experience for folks. This has some interesting roots. Can you take us back to when you were in Latvia?

Lillian Rafson:Yeah, my favorite place. I am originally from Pittsburgh, but I was living in New York at a startup there and loved the startup environment, loved the team, but just wasn't super passionate about it. So, I had quit that job to travel and didn't really have a set plan. I was backpacking around, kind of hitchhiking my way through Eastern Europe, through all of these cities that I had never heard of before and hadn't planned on visiting. And I was so pleasantly surprised by all of them, especially Riga, Latvia. And I happened to be Latvian, but I knew literally nothing about this country or the city. I was blown away by it. I was in my hostel and I met two women there who were on a surprise vacation with a European surprise travel agency. And I had just given up my lease in New York and I'd never heard of this concept. I did a quick Google search to see if it existed in the States, and it didn't. And I realized that this was the point of surprise travel, is that the cities that you've never heard of or would never think to visit on your own really might surprise you and you might fall in love with them and they might be your new favorite place to visit.

So I thought, alright, awesome how can we bring this back to the States? And then I started to realize I've been to Riga Latvia, but I've never been to Charleston, South Carolina or Austin or all of these cities around the States. So, I kind of brought all of those ideas together and decided to get started in the United States.

Watson: Yeah and the other element of that we're in an age where there is a ton of experiential consumerism. Instead of conspicuous consumption in the form of “look at my crazy car or suit or jewelry,” or what have you still happening, there's a lot of like where I went, look at how hard it was to get to this place and the status associated with travel. And that also simultaneously leads to something that as I was doing some research is this concept of over tourism, which was an area that was kind of a tourist destination almost gets overrun and ruined. Can you talk a little bit about that because it's also tied to these explorations of novel places versus tried and true location?

Lillian Rafson: Definitely. Over tourism is a major issue in the travel industry. And it's something that we talk about a lot as a team as well. By definition over tourism is the result of too many tourists going to one place, and it has detrimental effects on the local infrastructure and ecosystem and for the well off residents. What a lot of people don't talk about is that tourism is good for local economies up to a point, and a lot of it is also seasonal. So, Chicago is an amazing place to visit, but there are so many tourists there in the summer because it's beautiful. But if you go in the off season, yes, it is definitely cold, I'm not going to discount that, but there are a lot of benefits to it as well. You get much better deals on luxury hotels or the restaurants that normally have a three month lead time for reservations, you can suddenly get a walk in table that night. So there are definitely benefits to distributing the seasonality of tourism. But using a surprise agency or introducing the element of surprise also kind of breaks the mold of where people travel.

So Charleston, South Carolina for example, is experiencing over tourism right now, but at Pack Up + Go, we know that Savannah, Georgia, which is two hours down the coast is also an amazing city that has a lot of things in common. So, if we receive a traveler survey and you know, we think that Charleston would be a great fit, Savannah might also be a great fit. So, we have the opportunity to distribute where travelers go in order to offset some of the over tourism effect.

Watson: And what's fascinating just to take the spectrum. As a personal example, I went to Greece this summer and we were in San Terreni and we're talking to a couple that ran the hotel that we stayed at and they were talking about how, if you go to the edge of the Island and look at the sun set, you'll just basically be standing there with like 4,000 other people and like elbowing each other and it’ll be an hour and a half to get a ride back to town because everyone is there for that moment and then leaving for that moment, and it's just overcrowding. When you could go to the other side of the Island, that's the highest point, and it's very calm, not a lot of people there and it's a staggering view. That partially came to us because of my girlfriend, Ashley, is savvy in looking for those things, but it is a genuine part of the actual experience to not just be in a crowd of tourists for wherever it is that you're going to feel like you're having something of a unique, personal experience and not just. Moving along in a herd.

Lillian Rafson: Totally. I just heard a stat a couple of days ago that blew my mind. It was something like 50% of travelers, for leisure purposes, express disappointment in their trip because of an issue related to over tourism. So, maybe it's somebody who was visiting Santorini and was so excited to see that sunset and really built that up in their mind. And then they showed up and there are 5,000 other people there and they can't get the picture they want, they can't even see the sunset, it takes forever to get a cab home, and so that experience is really, and because of over tourism. We're in this weird place right now, especially with social media, expectations are so high for vacations because you've seen it on other people's Instagrams. You've seen influencers in all of these places and you want to replicate that experience or have the same type of experience for your own vacation, but you're not considering that so do a lot of other people at the same time. And so it can really negatively impact your own vacation.

Watson: So, talk through some of the resources you and your team go to in terms of identifying where those opportunities are. Because what I would imagine, the risk of a business like yours is in any way, shape, or form making it too cookie cutter, having it feel deeply unique. However, you're still going to have some tried and true this is just a great time, all of our surveys, every time we send someone to Savannah, Georgia, we get sterling reports back. So, we're going to keep sending people there, because it's working. There's like that weird balance that you have to strike.

Lillian Rafson: Yeah. It's definitely a balancing act. And one of my favorite Pack Up + Go facts actually is that the destination that has across the board, our highest reviews, is Philadelphia. And every time I tell people that they're like, “you have to be kidding me.” But I think that Philadelphia is such a good example of what Pack Up + Go can offer to a destination.
So, we know that a lot of our travelers will open their envelope, discover that they're going to Philadelphia, and they might feel a little bit of disappointment at first.

Watson: So, it helps to manage expectations a little bit.

Lillian Rafson: Exactly, but then they arrive and they stay in a hotel right in Rittenhouse square.
And it's all of the charming brownstones and everything's really walkable and Philly is pretty similar in layout and in terms of culture and offerings to Boston or DC or parts of New York. And so I think that it exceeds expectations versus a destination like San Diego, for example, where I think expectations are really high when travelers open their envelope, and maybe they don't realize that you have to drive between different neighborhoods and it's not walkable as they might've imagined.

So it is definitely a balancing act. We know that oftentimes a lot of travelers have similar interests and we can offer very different regimens stations within a destination, but if you know somebody who has already visited San Francisco, for example, we will always avoid it for your trip because we want to make sure you have very different experiences so it never feels like a rinse and repeat situation. We do have people planning each and every one of our trips, it's not an algorithm spitting out a destination for you. We want to make sure you know that we have considered where you have been, what you're interested in on this vacation and that we have really considered those options for you.

Watson: Makes sense. Now you've, you've mentioned walkability here, and as I'm listening to the way you think about this, it's clear that there are things that are drivers of satisfaction for these trips and then maybe other elements or variables that superficially seem important, but actually aren't as significant as people might make them to be when it comes to the success of one of these trips. Can you talk about some of the drivers of walkability, but other elements that really seem to drive customers?

Lillian Rafson: The weather. The weather is really hard. It's really hard for us to control. No, we know that it does have a major impact on how you feel about a destination, whether you've planned it yourself or whether someone else planned it for you. We do see a lot of seasonality around that. On the flip side, for over tourism, when it's beautiful weather and a destination, that also means it's more crowded, which can negatively impact your experience there. So, I would say, the variety of food options, in terms of global cuisine, in terms of price points, definitely has a major impact on satisfaction. Walkability, absolutely, and variety of things to do. So we know that Seattle, for example, is one of our top rated destinations as well, because it has such good museums, really cute neighborhoods and shopping you can do, but it also has a lot of outdoor activities. So no matter the weather or the season, there's always a lot to do. You're never in a place where it's mostly just outdoors and if it happens to be raining that weekend, you're kind of stranded.

Watson: Yeah. So how do you make the balance then of, you're not necessarily dictating where the person's going to go to dinner or are you Booking activities as well in advance?
Are you basically saying, here's the suite? Cause I'd imagine there's also reservations involved in, “Hey, if I want to go on some crazy like rock climbing, adventure,” that kind of has to be planned more than a day in advance.

Lillian Rafson: We always guarantee that we cover travel and accommodation and curate itineraries for our travelers.
And we always make a dinner reservation for them as well because we know that oftentimes when you land in a new city and you are sorting through a lot of information and you're not sure what to do, it's just nice to have one thing in place that you can take or leave. So we know some people cancel those reservations and go somewhere else and that's totally fine. But when we do have extra room in our travelers budget, we'll book them activities. So if our travelers indicate that they love craft beer, maybe it's a brewery tour, or if they're really interested in fishing, maybe it's a fishing excursion or a concert or a comedy show. So it really depends on their survey, their budget, time of year travel dates, everything.

Watson: Right on. So you mentioned budget and part of the kind of initial way that we connected was through understanding that first of all, this was a business based in Pittsburgh, which I was not aware of. And then also just the success that you've seen being so early to this. I had at least heard of it happening in other companies, but certainly not being at it for the period of time that you have. You came back to the States with the idea, can you just talk a little bit about the progress that you've seen with this business? And also importantly, the fact that this is bootstrapped not taking any sort of outside funding?

Lillian Rafson: Yeah, it was a crazy start. So after I heard about the concept in Riga Latvia, I had about eight weeks left on that trip, which was perfect because I had this idea and then I was just traveling around, essentially talking to my target demographic. So it was with other travelers and asking what they would want to know on the survey and, and how they would plan their trip and where they would go. And then moved home to Pittsburgh and just basically Googled how to become a travel agent. And it was a lot of research, a lot of Google. I've never worked in the travel industry before, so I had no idea what I was getting into. And I love looking back at my initial projections where for the first year I said, you know, what, if I can plan 50 trips this year, I will be so happy, that would be amazing. And in the first year we planned over 500, it was a really busy year. So I had won a very small local pitch competition here that had a cash prize of $3,000, and that was all the funding that we've raised to date. The cash prize was really nice, mostly it was the validation that other people thought this was a good idea too.

And I shared that story on Facebook and a friend of a friend who was a reporter for Business Insider. And so she saw that post on Facebook and wrote an article about Pack Up + Go. At that point I'd planned three practice trips, I had no idea what I was doing. And I was sitting by myself at a desk, in a coworking space and the orders just started coming in. And I just remember sitting there crying because I was so overwhelmed and I just realized, “Oh shit, I have to really do this now.” Like, this is do or die, people have given me their money in exchange for an amazing vacation, and I just got to work. And then we started having repeat travelers and then friends would refer their friends and it just started to grow from there.

So we are almost at four years, and we have done over 11,000 trips now to 90 destinations around the country. So that first year we did about 515 trips. And the second year we did over 1,700 trips. So it grew really quickly, really fast.

Watson: And it's also fascinating that you just actually addressed another one of the questions I had of like repeat visitors, repeat users, repeat customers. First of all, like the practicality of your business, the cost to acquire a new customer versus getting one to re up is significantly lower. And so that has to speak to not only the experience being novel, but, inherently, whatever cadence someone is on for their vacations. If they're taking it for a year, if they're taking one a year, if they're taking one every four years, there's some degree to which they're making the calculation of. Do I just have the time and the ability and the effort to go plan this myself, and then do I want to, is that something that I enjoy and I feel like adds to the occasion Because I know I referenced Ashley before, like part of the joy of the vacation for her is planning it and like coming up with all the nooks and crannies, but it seems like it's really taken a load off. And then,I guess also I'm wrapping multiple questions together, which is not always easy to answer, but the fact that it is a three day trip that you're usually planning kind of lends itself to more long weekends versus an extended 10 day multi location type of itinerary.

Lillian Rafson: Definitely. So we know that the short trip format also makes it more low stakes. So we're not asking our travelers to give up their precious vacation days for a two week vacation that might be the only vacation they take that year. This is just a long weekend. You can take off a Friday or leave after work and have a shorter trip, that's totally fine. A unique problem that we have with our repeat travelers, which I am aware is a wonderful problem to have, is we always want their second or third or fourth trip to live up to the first. And so one thing that we always say in our office is that our travelers come for the surprise and stay for the service. So, we know that oftentimes for our travelers' first trip, they love the element of surprise. They love, you know, the fun and excitement of opening their envelope at the airport, but then they realize “Oh, Hey, when my flight is canceled, it's really nice to have a travel agent on the phone with the airlines, I can just hang out at the airport bar and have a drink until I know what to do”. So there's definitely the benefit of an old school travel agent being there on call to help you. And I think that's really what brings our travelers back time and time again. Yes, it's so fun and exciting to find out where you're going, but you know that you have someone there to help you.

We also know that an average trip takes something like 10 to 20 hours to plan on average and to sign up for one of our trips, it's about 10 minutes. So it is a major time-saver and whilst a lot of people love planning, vacations, myself included, I think it's so much fun to research. A lot of people just find it really stressful and overwhelming, or parents of young kids say, “I don't have time to think about this, but I need a vacation so badly” and so this is a really nice value add for them as well.

Watson: So you've mentioned talking about it in the office. Now, can you talk a little bit about the composition of your team? Because it seems like there's a lot of planning, planners and customer service experts that you have to have in order to deliver for that. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Lillian Rafson: Yeah, that's basically the composition of our team. So we have several shadow planners in house. We have everyone working out of our Pittsburgh office. So we have a number of travel planners, we do have a customer experience team as well, and we do have 24 hour in house customer service in case a flight is canceled, or in case there's an emergency on a trip.
So we always have a cell phone, you can call and a human will answer and be able to help you right away, we're not going to transfer you around to a million people. And then we have a marketing team as well.

Watson: Wow. Outside of this article that was written for business insider. What other channels have you pursued to market this? Because there is an inherent word of mouth. Like everyone already talks about the trip they took, I used this podcast as an excuse to talk about a trip that I took, but outside of the virality of word of ethic, “Oh my God, you won't believe the weekend that we went away and did whatever,” how else have you gotten the word out about Pack Up + Go.

Lillian Rafson: So we basically have a marketing budget of $0 million, because we're bootstrapped, but we are really fortunate that again, it's a very shareable idea. Like you said, people love talking about it and we've actually had several mystery shoppers. We had a mystery shopper from the wall street journal, a mystery shopper from Cosmo, and they came back from their trip and said, “Hey, we had an awesome time. I hope you don't mind if we publish this article about it.” So that was, shocking, crazy. But we've also, we've done a lot of partnerships. So a couple of years ago we partnered with Ford where they wanted to send reporters on a road trip in a new Ford vehicle, but they were looking for a new spin on it. So, they sent in reporters on a Pack Up + Go road trip in a Ford vehicle. So we know we are really looking for cross branded promotions. There is something where both companies have skin in the game. We're sharing the cost of it as well. And it's a more authentic experience. We're not sending an influencer on a trip and paying them to write about us, we want it to feel very organic to that. And I also feel really, really fortunate as a bootstrapped company, and we have a lot of user generated content. So our toddlers come back from their trips and they love sharing their photos with us. And we love posting that on social media because we know that our travelers are not all supermodels traveling to the far corners of the world, they are regular people going to Washington DC or New Orleans, and we love sharing those photos. So we are always projecting a really authentic voice from our actual travelers.

Watson: That makes a ton of sense. Now, I've been trying to figure out the graceful way to ask this question and I can't even quite put it together. You started this when you were 23 and you're talking about partnerships with Ford, you're talking about jumping from basically three, outlines of trips to an inbox for trips to be planned, and the build out of this team. You're in New York doing a startup, but where is the entrepreneurial instinct or framework or kind of composition of this business coming from? Because that's, that's no small task.

Lillian Rafson: Yeah, that's a really good question. A lot of it was just do or die to be honest. Both of my parents were small business owners and they own their own businesses growing up. And I always joke about the fact that when we were at the beach every summer, the fax machine came too. And so I always grew up knowing that yeah, owning your own business is not glamorous. You are always on, you always have to be working. When I started my company, my sister also started her own business, she works in architecture and design, and our brother also just recently started his own nonprofit. So I think everyone in my family has this attitude of let's do it. Why not? And I remember when I started it and I was 23, I was also working at a bar in the nights because I wasn't paying myself and I just had this mindset of alright, if it doesn't work, then I'll go get another job, and at least I tried. I always remind myself that the stakes are very low. I have to take it seriously and do a really good job, but I'm not here to cure cancer. I am fortunate enough to plan laser three-day getaways with an element of surprise. Yeah. You know, I love that our travelers love it, and I am really proud that we have a team now and that we can employ people. I think it's amazing.

Watson: And the fact that you're not Manning the 24 hour phone anymore.

Lillian Rafson: Huge. That was huge. That was about two years later that that stopped. But it's true for the first two years, it was honestly nonstop and I was on call 24 seven and I was still working at a bar for the first year and a half of the company. So, I would literally put in a drink order, run downstairs to check someone in for their flight. Run back up and put the drink on the table. I mean, it was nonstop and I did about a year and a half and got really sick. And that was the moment that I realized, when I was working from a hospital bed, I should probably hire someone, this wasn't going to be sustainable, so definitely and glamorous, but the stakes are low.

Watson: Yeah. Let me borrow in a little bit more to what you just said, which is basically, two types of characters. And this is once again, just like a mentality, you were very blessed, as an outsider's perspective, to have the kind of mentality and framework that you more or less adopted from osmosis from seeing your parents operate. But another part of the mentality is I'm going to hire or bring people on before the need arises, before I break down and I get sick and whatever's going on, or I'm going to wait until the absolute last minute. And people struggle to kind of thread that needle and find that middle ground. It sounds like maybe you fell a little bit more in that second camp of waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. Okay, I need it. And has that switched, flipped in the other direction for you? Or is that still kind of a part of your mentality?

Lillian Rafson: I think I actually switched this past week. So we've one of the mentality: don't hire until you'd need to. And I think that also comes from being a bootstrap business where, you know, we don't have parties with puppies and kegs and pool tables in the office, we run a really lean business. So, hiring people is scary because it's expensive. So, until now I've always been really conscious of that. And, you know, we've held off on hiring until we absolutely needed it and could not manage the workload anymore. But now we're at a place where, you know, just this week, we've been having a lot of strategy meetings internally and thinking about, okay, how can we be proactive? How can we get ahead of this, if we want to scale and take the company to the next level? And so we're actually shuffling our teams around a little bit, and we're going to bring on a few new faces to the team, which is really exciting, but it is a weird mind mindset shift for me to invest in the company, which we need to do, but it's not something that we've done in this way before.

Watson: Yeah. But it's also a humility and a practicality too. You were kind of saying the stakes are low, but there's also a rush and no rush, which is we want to grow. There's an opportunity here. Like there's a wave far bigger than your company or this idea, which is like we said, kind of experiential, consumerism, tourism, and these to play, but also recognizing that because it's bootstrapped, you own all the equity in it. You've seen through the lens of your parents. What being a business owner for an extended period of time can do. You recognize that, you know, it's not about the paycheck that you pull out business here at age 27, it's the scope of what can be accomplished 10, 15, 20 years down the road.

Lillian Rafson: Yeah. And it's a little bit scary when I think about it that way, because I still, in some ways, think of myself at 23 when I thought, all right, it'd be great to plan 50 trips.
And I remember the day that first story broke, and we started getting our first orders. I got an email from Shark Tank, NBC Nightly News, Travel channel, and I remember saying to my sister that night, it feels like I have a newborn baby. That's been alive for three hours and I'm trying to figure out where it's going to go to grad school. And that was such a weird thing for me to think about. And in a lot of ways, I still feel that way, even though I'm almost four years in now. And there are so many directions that the company could go and just trying to figure out what is the best path for growth. What to our travelers want? And I think there's a lot of companies and startups who think they know what their consumers want and dive head first into that direction and then realize that there's not actually a market for that. So, we are now finally building out a customer advisory board and trying to talk to our travelers on a really strategic level and say, what do you want? If we can do these four different things, which do you think is the best fit, which would you be most excited about? Because I always want our growth to be organic and logical. So that's where we're at now.

Watson: And it's really interesting where the idea that you basically articulated, I think this is what people want and we're just gonna like go whole hog after it. But. As long as there isn't the actual data, whether that's transactions or sales, or like actual validation of the idea, outside of someone giving you a thumbs up or a fundraiser of some sort you're in something of a delusion. And when it meets at the end, that's a huge deal. But that's also why so many of those types of businesses can fail or even crash well after the point of their forming and coming together. And I think that it's a philosophy that I share. So there's a little bit of like me drinking the Kool Aid along with you, but as long as you're spending your time, validating an idea, an experiment, a premonition that you might have with actual transactions and marrying that to revenue for your business. That's a really good way to basically stay in reality and make. Informed proper decisions where you want to go.

Lillian Rafson: Totally agree. And I mean, the good news is that we know that our core product, our three-day getaways are still, you know, bringing a lot of business and our travelers still love them. So, as long as we can experiment and grow without ever compromising our customer service and that core product, I am feeling a little bit less risk averse now, but I want to make sure that, you know, our baby is still safe.

Watson: Of course, of course. Well, this has been awesome. I have the standard last two questions I want to ask, but before we do that, anything that I didn't give you a chance to say that you were hoping to share?

Lillian Rafson: Nothing off hand, I think you covered a lot of good bases.

Wayson: Can you share with us locations in the US that are underrated in addition to Savannah, or is that part of the secret sauce?

Lillian Rafson: I mean, I can share some of them. I would actually argue that Pittsburgh is one of them. I don't think many Americans would say that they think of Pittsburgh as a leisure vacation destination. But, if you come and you stay right downtown, you can walk to the Warhol museum and you can go for a run along the river and get amazing food all around. And I think that Pittsburgh surprises and delights a lot of people. And some of my other favorite destinations, I would say are Portland, Maine, which, you know, is very busy in the summer, but in the spring and fall again is so gorgeous, so amazing. Yeah, there are so many.

Watson: Seems like another perk of this role is that you get to go do a lot of research for yourself with three day weekend trips as well. I can now. When I was starting, I was so afraid of getting on a plane and not being by the phone. So that's gotten better.

Watson: Cool. Well, I am sure that a couple of people listening have to have a niche for a trip now. So I want to make sure that regardless, people just want to learn more about the business they can. So what digital coordinates can we provide people who want to learn more?

Lillian Rafson: Our website is packupgo.com, like pack up your bags and gp. We are on all social media, packupgo_travel on Facebook and Instagram and packupgo on Twitter.

Watson: Awesome. We're gonna link that all in the show notes, goingdeepwithaaron.com/podcast is the place to find it or in the app you’re probably listening to right now. But as we do at the end of each interview, I want to give you the mic one more time, Lillian, to issue an actionable personal challenge for the audience.

Lillian Rafson:I would challenge all of you this weekend or sometime in the next month, the next season, next year to pick a neighborhood in your own city that you've never been to and plan yourself a little afternoon, staycation, and go check out a restaurant or a cafe or a store, or just turn down a corner in a new neighborhood that you've never explored before and interact with people in your own city that you might not meet on your own.

Watson: I absolutely love that when we recently bought a condo, we were looking at real estate in all these different neighborhoods of Pittsburgh. It felt like there were eight different neighborhoods that we ended up in. They're like, I've never been here before. This is cool. This is different. And there's so much to explore. And Pittsburgh, relative to some of the other cities that people are listening in, is not particularly big. So, there are certainly nooks and crannies to be explored.

Lillian Rafson:Exactly. So get out and explore somewhere new.

Watson: Amen. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Lillian Rafson: Thanks so much for having me.

Watson: We just went deep with Lillian Rafson, hoping everyone out there has a fantastic day.

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