From a spontaneous Moroccan fam trip that spiralled into a river cruise through tulip season to a quiet night in rural Japan with a four-year-old and a Google Translate app, Departures Travel advisor Sam Wallbridge has built her expertise one unexpected detour at a time.
At a Glance
Authentic travel memories in Japan emerge not from famous landmarks but from unscripted moments with local friends. Sam Wallbridge's most cherished memory is an evening in Kakegawa, Shizuoka, where she communicated with a four-year-old through Google Translate, cherry blossoms, and shared laughter—a experience no tour operator can package or replicate.
In a small town in Japan's Shizuoka region, surrounded by cherry blossoms and the faint scent of green tea, a four-year-old boy is typing furiously into Google Translate. The results, Sam Wallbridge recalls, were nothing short of chaotic. "We shared inside jokes, practiced each other's languages and communicated through Google Translate, with some particularly hilarious outcomes from her older son, who couldn't wait to say crazy things into it." This is the travel memory that Wallbridge, a travel advisor with Departures Travel, keeps coming back to. Not a five-star hammam in Marrakesh. Not the windmills of Kinderdijk or the tulip fields of Keukenhof. A silly, unhurried evening in a town most travelers have never heard of, with a family she loves and a toddler who had discovered the comedic potential of machine translation.
That moment, she says, tells you everything about why she travels the way she does.
A Fam Trip That Refused to Stay Small
It started, as many of Wallbridge's adventures do, with a logistical observation and a willingness to act on it. A year into her role at Departures Travel, she joined an Insight Vacations fam trip to Morocco, staying in four and five-star properties and moving through a world of rich inclusions: a traditional hammam, watching women press argan oil by hand, and a sunset ATV ride through the desert outside Marrakesh, the kind of golden-hour scene that earns its place in a brochure. But it was what happened next that revealed Wallbridge's particular brand of travel thinking.
Noticing that most return flights from Morocco routed through Paris, she simply decided to stay. "I realized most flights back out of Morocco were routing through Paris, so I set it up to head there for a week after my week in Morocco." Her close friend, a Parisian she had met on a student exchange at fifteen, welcomed her into the family home. Then, already on the right side of the Atlantic, Wallbridge did what any resourceful traveler with a flexible schedule and supplier knowledge might do. She looked for last-minute river cruise availability.
She found a spot on AmaWaterways' AmaStella, sailing the Dutch and Belgian canals during tulip season, one of the most in-demand and fastest-selling river cruise itineraries in Europe. Her friend joined her for the sailing, and what followed was a week of sensory abundance: a beer, waffle, and chocolate tasting tour in Antwerp, a bike ride along the waterfront at Bruinisse, a Belgian chocolate workshop in Ghent, a lesson on tulip cultivation in Kampen, and a stop at Kinderdijk where a local explained, in genuine detail, how the windmills actually work. At one point, the ship docked beside a small riverside fair, and Wallbridge watched people of all ages pile into bumper cars from the deck. It was, she notes, exactly the kind of unscripted moment that makes river cruising feel different from anything else. "Being so close to just walk off the ship and walk into Amsterdam, or a less than five minute walk from Antwerp's famous Brabo fountain statue, was so great."
Japan, the First Time and the Second
Before Morocco, before Departures Travel, before any of the fam trips and supplier relationships, there was Japan. Wallbridge was twenty-one when she first went. She had quit her job as a barista on impulse, decided she had no interest in finding another one before Christmas, and left for Asia in October 2023 with two months ahead of her and tickets to Japan, Singapore, Bali, Australia, and New Zealand. "Japan captured my heart," she says, with a simplicity that makes the enthusiasm land harder, not softer. She spent three weeks across Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, and describes Tokyo with the restless energy of someone who still hasn't fully processed it. "Tokyo was my favourite just for the sheer number of things there was to do. I love cities and everywhere I wandered, I found something new."
She would have stayed longer the first time if her onward ticket had allowed it. So when the Morocco trip wrapped and her wanderlust pointed east again, Japan was the obvious destination. By March and April of 2026, she was back, this time with two friends, covering Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and Hiroshima. The two women who joined her on that trip, she notes, are now two of her closest friends.
The Kakegawa Night
The itinerary hit all the expected highlights, but the moment Wallbridge returns to most is the one that appears on no tourist map. Her former Japanese exchange student hosted the three travelers for a night in Kakegawa, a town in the Shizuoka region where getting around requires a car or a bus and where the green tea museum is a genuine source of local pride. They visited Hattasan Soneiji temple, its ancient stones framed by lush greenery and cherry blossoms, and wandered through a Thomas the Train outdoor museum where the staff, clearly unaccustomed to foreign visitors, posed for photos with the kind of warm bewilderment that makes for the best travel stories.
The evenings were spent with her friend's family, including two young sons, aged four and one, who were, in Wallbridge's words, "so curious and silly." Communication flowed through a mix of broken phrases, shared laughter, and Google Translate producing results that the four-year-old treated as a creative writing exercise. Wallbridge reflects on that night with something close to reverence. "It may be a bit more of a low key memory, but it really sticks out for me. Not everyone has friends they can travel with abroad, but even just making the effort to explore places off the beaten path can be so rewarding."
For a travel advisor, the Kakegawa night carries professional weight too. It is the kind of experience that cannot be packaged, priced, or put in a brochure. It can only be earned through years of showing up, staying curious, and maintaining the kinds of friendships that span continents and decades.
When Things Go Wrong (and Why That Matters)
Wallbridge is candid about the trips that did not go smoothly, and she tells those stories with the ease of someone who has long since made peace with them. In Sydney, she was overcharged by a taxi driver who adjusted his meter mid-journey. Alone, with her backpack in the trunk and a hostel in an unfamiliar part of town waiting for her, she made the pragmatic call to say nothing. In Osaka, she lost track of time on Halloween, discovered at one in the morning that the trains had stopped, and found herself wandering in search of a bathroom and a way home. The Uber ride back was manageable. The lesson was permanent.
Then there was the Japanese post office, which she navigates with clear delight. Trying to describe a sheet of stickers to a postal worker whose translator app had given up, Wallbridge resorted to miming the act of peeling and placing. "The combined triumph we both felt in that moment when we understood was so sweet," she says. On her second trip, the challenge escalated to four separate written declarations that a container of mini Kewpie mayonnaise packets was intended for personal consumption, not resale. These stories do not undermine her credibility as an advisor. They are her credibility.
What She Knows Now
Across Morocco, Paris, the Dutch and Belgian canals, and two trips to Japan, Wallbridge has assembled a set of insights that no guidebook assembles in quite this way. In Paris, she recommends learning even a handful of French phrases, arguing that the city's reputation for coldness evaporates the moment a visitor makes a genuine effort. "Speaking just a little French makes a world of a difference. Even just learning how to say sorry, my French is not good, and your basic manners, can turn a frown upside down." In Japan, she flags the near-total absence of public rubbish bins, the intricate web of social customs, and the hard stop on train services after midnight. In Singapore, she once smuggled in a pack of chewing gum by accident and hid it with impressive speed.
On the question of what kind of trip suits which kind of traveler, she is characteristically honest. Spontaneous solo travel is rewarding but expensive and unpredictable. Guided touring offers learning and connection with like-minded people, and the relief of having logistics handled. River cruising sits in its own category, intimate enough that you can actually talk to your guide, close enough to shore that you can walk into a city within minutes of docking. For Wallbridge, who describes herself as a chronic overpacker, the appeal of unpacking once and staying put is not lost on her.
What Comes Next
She is, she admits cheerfully, in debt after her last trip. It has done nothing to slow the planning. A return to Japan is already taking shape in her mind, this time with ambitions to reach the countryside, the north, and possibly behind the wheel of a rented car. South Korea made a powerful impression in the five days she spent in Seoul at the end of the April trip, enough that she has since taught herself to read Hangul. "Now if only I can learn what it means that I'm reading," she adds. Jeju Island and Busan are on the list, along with Egypt with the same two friends from Japan, a guided trip she is already convinced she needs a professional to help her plan.
Greece, Costa Rica, Bermuda (where she was born), Peru, more of New Zealand, and as much of Southeast Asia as she can manage are all waiting. But it is Japan, as ever, that pulls the hardest. "I don't know when I'll ever get my fill," Wallbridge says, and there is no reason to doubt her.
