I say one line more than any other: something good always comes out of something bad. I said it again this week, sitting across from Meredith Brace Sloss on the podcast, because her story is the whole reason I believe it.

The layoff that started a company

Meredith spent fifteen years building content for Netflix, Disney, Lucasfilm, Apple.  Big rooms, big names. Then, three weeks after she came back from maternity leave, she was laid off. She was on the call and actually asked whether that was legal. They told her they'd already run it past their legal team. Seriously, three weeks with A newborn at home. I found it hard to sit with even as she was telling me.

And here is what she did with it. She built a company called Wanderous.

Why your skincare stops working when you travel

Your skin and hair behave differently depending on where you are. What works in humid Singapore does nothing for you in dry Albuquerque, and squeezing the same tired shampoo into the same little travel bottle trip after trip is why your face breaks out the second you land.

So Meredith matched the products to the climate. There are four: humid, arid, temperate, and cold or windy. Each bundle is five products, a shampoo, conditioner, styling product, moisturizer, and cleanser, in a TSA-friendly bag, chosen for where you're actually going rather than where you happen to live. If you want the short version: pick your bundle by the climate of your destination, not by the season back home.

She also built something on the site called the Climate Compass. You put in your destination and your travel dates, and it pulls the current conditions, the forecast, or the historical averages for that spot and tells you what your skin is walking into. For a cruise, where you're crossing three or four climates in a week, you enter every stop. That's the part that made me sit up, because that is exactly the question my clients ask me when they're staring down a long itinerary and have no idea what to pack. Listeners get a discount on a bundle through the link in the show notes.

The Christmas markets nobody warns you about

Here's how Meredith and I actually found each other. Christmas markets.

She took her first Christmas market river cruise on the Rhine a few years back, Cologne down to Basel, and she showed up thinking she'd see the Cologne Christmas market. Then someone told her there were six. Six, in one city. Half of them were closed the day she was there for Remembrance Sunday; nobody could tell her which ones were open, and she spent the trip on a wonky eSIM trying to piece it together. So she started building a little platform called Festive to gather all of that in one place, market by market, city by city. It's in beta, and if you're heading to a few markets this year and want your itinerary run through it, she'll do that for you. Reach out to her through the show notes.

I told her the six-markets thing doesn't surprise me one bit. I grew up with this. In Germany you can drink wine and beer at sixteen, so at the end of November we'd play hooky from school, walk down to the Weihnachtsmarkt, and have a Glühwein in the middle of the afternoon. Every village has its own. They started as people getting ready for winter, bartering, standing close together in the cold, and that's still what they feel like when you're actually in one.

My December Christmas market tour through Germany

That's the trip I'm taking people on December 4 to 11, 2026. Germany and France, based around Wiesbaden, with day trips out to markets you won't find on the big cruises. One of them is the market at Schloss Vollrads, a castle set above the vineyards, with mulled wine in the courtyard. Rüdesheim is on the list, and yes, we're doing the Asbach in the little cup, brandy set alight, the whole thing. We also hit Mainz, Bad Homburg, Strasbourg, and Colmar with its six markets. Colmar and Strasbourg get all the attention, and they earn it, but the small ones are where the magic lives.

It's a group of eight, and that's it. In honor of turning sixty this month, I'm running Christmas in July and taking $600 off. Book a call with me if you want to talk it through, or read the full trip details and itinerary here.

Traveling as a whole family

One more thing from our conversation that I keep thinking about. Meredith travels multi-generationally, four generations of her family in one place at one point, and she told me the story of her brother getting off the wrong train door in Amsterdam. The doors shut, the train pulled away with the whole family still on board, and there he was on the platform with a look on his face she and her mom still laugh about. That's travel. You forget the hard parts and you keep the oranges a waiter handed your niece and the face your brother made on the tracks. Those don't happen at home.

So if you've been putting off the thing you want to build, or the trip you keep pushing to next year, take it from Meredith. The worst week of her working life is the reason Wanderous exists. Something good is usually on its way out of something bad. You have to keep moving toward it.

Come find me in the Facebook group, Luxury Travel Advisor Sandy: Vacations, Group Trips and Hidden Luxury Escapes, and I'll see you there.

A few questions I get about all of this

What does Wanderous do? Wanderous sells travel beauty bundles matched to your destination's climate. There are four climate types, humid, arid, temperate, and cold or windy, and each bundle holds five products in a TSA-friendly bag. The site also has a Climate Compass tool that reads your destination and dates and tells you the conditions to pack for.

How do you pack skincare for different climates? Match the products to where you're going, not to where you live. Humid places want lighter, oil-controlling products, dry and cold places want more moisture and barrier protection. If you're crossing several climates on one trip, pack for the extremes rather than the average, and check the forecast for each stop before you go.

When are the German Christmas markets open? Most run from late November through Christmas, though smaller ones keep shorter hours or open only on certain weekends. Some close on Remembrance Sunday, so check dates for the specific market before you plan your day.

Which Christmas markets are worth visiting near Wiesbaden? Rüdesheim is a favorite, and the market at Schloss Vollrads, a castle above the vineyards, is worth the short drive. Mainz and Bad Homburg are close by too. Colmar and Strasbourg across the border draw the biggest crowds, but the smaller German markets are quieter and, to my eye, more special.