The Most Type 2 Fun Thing I've Ever Done
My first solo trip in Australia, 2019
One night in Melbourne, near the end of a trip I'd taken entirely alone, I was eating dinner by myself when a little bird perched on the empty chair next to me.
We split a pizza.
Two tables over, a group of strangers were laughing. That real kind of laughing, where you're wiping away tears, struggling to breathe, and can't remember what was so hilarious in the first place.
I watched them the way you'd watch a fireplace: mesmerized. Maybe a little wistful. With a feeling of warmth, even though I didn't know them. I knew that feeling all too well, and in that moment, I longed for someone to share that trip with that wasn’t a bird.
Here's the short version of this story, for anyone skimming: Laura Ericson Group Trips is now Type 2 Travel.
It’s the same small groups, same local guides, and same trips. What's new is the name, the website, and trip leaders who aren't me. This post is the whole story of why, and it starts with that bird.
My dinner partner in Melbourne, 2019
Let’s be real about how all of this started
It was late 2019. I'd impulse-bought the ticket to Australia one evening because nobody in my life could put down their relationships and kids and mortgages for 10 days to fly across the world with their newly single (and very emotional) friend.
Australia was everything I'd hoped it would be. I booked it alone, navigated it alone, and saw things that until then had only existed on my computer's screensaver. I'm still proud of that trip. You never forget your first. 😉
It also taught me something: I don't love solo travel.
The trip wasn't the problem. The problem was that I didn't have anyone to share it with. A million times over those 10 days—especially the first time I saw a kangaroo hopping through a vineyard—I wanted someone I could turn to and say, "are you seeing this?"
I flew home with two souvenirs: proof that I could see the world alone, and the certainty that I didn't want to.
Almost seven years later, that trip is one of the reasons this company exists.
I was alone on that Australia trip for a very good reason. Two years earlier, I had walked into a courtroom and ended my marriage. The TL;DR is that I'd spent the better part of ten years in a relationship that had slowly eroded my sense of self, and when it ended, every part of my life was marked by what I'd lost—the empty side of the bed, the couples' dinner parties I wasn't invited to anymore, the future that vanished before my eyes.
So I did what any newly divorced woman would do:
I panicked about what came next.
I questioned every decision I made.
And then I bought a plane ticket.
A few of them, actually.
When the pandemic started to clear in early 2021, Australia led me to Colombia. Mexico City. Turkey. All places I'd been told were too dangerous for women, especially traveling alone.
Somewhere between a volcano mud bath in Cartagena and a cave hotel in Cappadocia, I stopped thinking of myself as "Laura, recently divorced" and started telling stories about the grasshopper tacos I ate in Mexico (a much better conversation starter) and the quinceañera I crashed in Bogotá. With every layer of self-doubt I shed, I remembered who I was and who I was becoming.
Bathing on top of a volcano in Cartagena, Colombia
the beginning of Laura Ericson group trips
By the end of 2021, that realization hit hard enough that I traded a safe, well-worn 14-year career in higher education for entrepreneurship.
I didn't know anything about running a business, and I had so little experience that I named the company Laura Ericson Group Trips simply because I couldn't come up with anything better. Every time I thought of a name, I’d look up the URL or the Instagram handle, and it was already taken. Naming the business after myself wasn't a brand strategy—especially for someone who actively dislikes being on social media. It was a placeholder so I could get started, and I told myself I'd change it when I found a name that spoke to me.
Five years later, it’s finally happened.
I launched LEGT to build the trips I couldn't find: small groups, local guides who start the week as strangers and end it as friends, and being welcomed to somebody's table instead of photographing it from across the street. No cramped buses. No tourist traps. No trudging behind a guide with a microphone and a flag.
Five years in, we've taken more than 400 travelers to 10 countries and counting. And I've watched people change in all the ways I imagined, and a few I didn't.
Strangers became friends with WhatsApp group chats that are still going years later. Two travelers met on one of our trips and got married. Another couple recently surprised our group and got married in front of the Taj Mahal. There have been more celebration tattoos than we can count—a surprising number of them first tattoos, on people who'd spent decades saying "someday." Women in their 60s boarded planes by themselves for the first time in their lives and realized how capable they were. People went home and walked away from jobs and relationships that were shrinking them.
And the travelers are only half the story—the other half are the local guides, drivers, and families who welcome us into their countries and their lives, because every trip creates local jobs and keeps money in the communities we visit.
Swimming in Grutas Tolantongo, Mexico
Then my own life changed
Somewhere between ATVing across the Sahara and having my first lion sighting in Kenya's Maasai Mara, I realized I’d changed too. When I look back at the woman who started this business, I barely recognize her.
After a long run of dating horror stories on multiple continents, I met a man I love and adore—in my cute little Wisconsin city, of all places.
For the record, I didn't need a partner. By the time Erik showed up, I'd already built a life I loved. But it turns out that building a bigger life creates more space, and I'd made room for him without even noticing. He is an incredible human, and never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that a guy like him existed. A year and a half after meeting, we got engaged, and we’ll soon be married.
It turns out that having a lot of patience, persistence, and high standards pays off, both in business and dating.
It’s cheesy but it’s true: when you know, you know
Which brings me to the realization I had somewhere in the last year:
Travel is no longer my escape hatch. It’s now an expansion of my life.
When I started all of this, my entire value proposition was "travel to escape your life" because that's what I was doing. But that's not what most of my travelers are doing, and even if they are, it’s not ultimately where they want to be. Many of you are running toward your lives, and you want travel to be part of the next chapter.
Which meant the company I'd built for a woman on the run no longer fit the woman I'd become.
So I gave it a new name: Type 2 Travel
Type 2 Travel is named for something called "Type 2 fun." If you're unfamiliar, here's a quick lesson:
Type 1 fun is fun while it's happening. The beach vacation, the great dinner, the massage. It's nice. It'll do. And most of the time, it's completely forgettable.
Type 2 fun is hard, weird, or deeply "WTF?" in the moment and legendary in the rearview. Getting mugged by a monkey in Morocco. Dropping your passport in a questionable toilet and drying it with your shirt. Watching my friend shit her pants at O'Hare before we even made it to the gate.
(Yes, all true stories, and you know I have more.)
Basically, it’s the stuff that is zero fun at the time and is now the story you'll be telling at dinner parties for the rest of your life. (More on that here if you’re curious.)
I named my podcast Type 2 Travel over a year ago, and a few months later I knew it was the right name for the whole business, not just a piece of it. I didn't really have to choose it—it'd been underneath every trip I've ever led, just waiting for me to catch up.
Why "we changed our name" doesn't quite cover it
When the whole business is your name, you are the company. Every departure, every email, every welcome dinner—people look for me, expect me, want me. Which is flattering, right up until you do the math on being one woman trying to lead 10+ international trips a year, run a full-time business, and have a life.
I love this business, but it needs to support my life. Right now, it's the other way around. So, because I've always been firmly in the "go big or go home" camp, the name change is a rebuild of the entire business and what’s to come.
Here's what that means:
We've got a new brand, and a new website. New name, new look, new home—we live here now. The whole site has been rebuilt to match what this company actually is today, instead of what it was five years ago.
There's a team now—including trip leaders who aren't me. This is the big one, and I've been in my feelings about it for years. So I'm training leaders I trust. People who've lived this brand—many of whom found their own transformation on these exact trips. There's also an advisory board of incredible women and past LEGT travelers helping steer where we go from here.
Meet the new Type 2 Travel crew
I know what some of you are thinking, because I've thought about it longer than you have: will it be the same without Laura on every trip?
No. It won't be the same.
And if this goes the way I think it will, it'll be better. I stay the person designing every experience and holding the standard—and then I hand you to someone with more presence, energy, and attention to give you than I ever could while running an entire company. That's a gift, not a downgrade.
And I'm not disappearing. This business is still my baby, and you'll still find me out there with you. I'll just get to sleep in my own bed a little more.
More trips, and new ones. Not being on every departure gives me back the one thing I can't make more of: time. Time for scouting new destinations, designing new trips, and finally releasing that Japan trip you've been waiting for. It starts with Georgia this October.
Private travel planning. We do a bit of this already, and it's time to make it official. If you want to pull together a trip to Holi in India with your college best friends, or a week in Colombia with your birding group, we can build that for you now.
An affiliate program. Some of you have been filling trips for me for years just by talking about them. You come home, you can't shut up about it, and the next thing I know your doctor and your hairstylist are emailing me. It's time to reward you for that. I'll have more details soon.
An inner circle. This is the one I'm most excited about. Five years in, the clearest thing I've learned is that these trips aren't really about the destinations—they're about the people. Right now that connection only exists if you happen to be on a trip, so we're building somewhere for it to live year-round: the people who have traveled with me and the ones still working up to it, all in one room. I'll have more on that soon.
What isn't changing is everything else. Nothing on the current calendar is going anywhere. The groups are still small, and the guides are still local. You'll still make new friends. There’s still Camp Lola Whiskey. There will most likely be impromptu bathroom stops, and plenty of stories you'll be embarrassed about in the moment and proud to tell the next time you're around a dinner table.
This business isn't just about me anymore
Not because I'm going anywhere, but because all of this change means more destinations. More departures. More chances for another person's life to be broken open in the best possible way by a point on a map and a group of people on the same journey.
The version of me who started this five years ago built exactly the business she needed at the time. It was proof I could do something new, and do it alone. I wasn't wrong to build it that way—it just needs to be built differently now.
I think stepping back from every departure is the most Type 2 thing I've ever done, and I’ve finally let go of the handlebars.
Because ultimately, this business isn’t about me. It’s about you and the places you'll go, the things you'll see, and the stories that happen when your overlanding truck sinks into a ditch during a Kenyan flood and you stand on the side of the road singing Hakuna Matata at the top of your lungs while a group of men heave it out of the mud.
(I mean, just as an example. Not that it's ever happened.)
It doesn't matter if you've been on one trip with me, seven trips, or you just started getting my emails—all of this is happening because of you. You handed me your trust, your time off, and in a lot of cases your money, and I don't take that lightly. Everything that exists about Type 2 Travel now, and everything still coming, exists because you made it possible. So, thank you. 🙏🏻
Now go look around and see where we’re heading next, because the trip pages are looking especially good on this new site.
Questions I know you have
Does anything change about my existing booking?
Nope! Same trip, same dates, same price, same payment plan, same packing list you're procrastinating on. The only thing that changes is the logo at the top of your emails.
Will your emails come from a new address?
Yes—they'll now come from laura@type2travel.com. Add it to your contacts now so the trip details you actually need don't land in spam. And make sure you join our email list if you haven’t already.
What happens to lauraericson.com?
It forwards here automatically. Old links, old blog posts, old bookmarks—everything redirects to type2travel.com, so nothing you've saved will break.
Is the podcast changing?
Nope. The podcast had the name first—the business is the one catching up. Same show, same feed.
Is Camp Lola Whiskey still Camp Lola Whiskey?
Yes! It’s here to stay, and if you’re having FOMO about missing it this year, you can join the waitlist for 2027.
