About Me
Writer, wanderer, and the human half of a golden-retriever travel duo.
My name is Harper Ellis. I grew up in Oregon counting raindrops on the window and dreaming about every place the clouds were not hanging low over pine trees. I studied journalism, spent my twenties in newsrooms and magazine offices, and eventually realized my best sentences showed up when I was tired, slightly lost, and eating something I could not pronounce.
These days I write essays, guidebooks, and the occasional love letter to a train station. I am thirty-four, stubbornly curious, and convinced that the world is wider than any algorithm thinks it is.
How I became a travel writer
My first paid travel piece was about a weekend in Astoria, Oregon: fog, fish and chips, and a bookstore cat with better instincts than most editors I have known. After that, assignments got bigger: Patagonia, Morocco, a month in Portugal with nothing but a backpack and a dog who refused to stay home.
I do not write to sell paradise. I write because movement changed me. Because strangers shared meals. Because Finn taught me to celebrate small parks in foreign cities like they were national monuments.
What you will find here
- Honest travel notes, the beautiful and the awkward.
- Stories from ordinary days that turned unforgettable.
- Practical tips for traveling with a dog who believes every beach is his.
- The occasional detour into topics I never expected to write about.