Don’t Forget to Like and Follow
I was thinking about going to India with Hannah, or Bali with Ashlyn, maybe Morocco with Emily Rose. But then I came across Yosemite with Haleigh. Haleigh looked so happy. So carefree. Her arms open wide, embracing the wilderness. I, too, wanted to clasp my coffee mug while watching the sunrise and swing in a hammock slung between pines. It had been too long since I’d gone backpacking! I didn’t know Haleigh’s last name or anything about her. No matter. Haleigh made life outdoors look so easy. So perfect. On Instagram, at least.
Recently, the algorithm has been inundating me with women like Haleigh—pretty, approachable, adventurous, always on a trip somewhere lovely. And suddenly all of them seemed to be inviting me to join them. Trekking in Peru. Strutting through Parisian streets. Leaping into turquoise waters in Tahiti. “Travel with me!” their painstakingly curated feeds read, leading to links where all you had to do was click and pay, then pack a bag.
I wanted to go. Follow the followers. See what traveling with a travel influencer was all about. But India with Hannah sounded… far. Better, I thought, to stick a little closer to my home in San Francisco; drive my own getaway car. So I clicked Haleigh’s book-now button, put down a $600 deposit, and, when summer came, headed east to Yosemite, to meet up with a bunch of women I’d never met before.
Most of the dozen others had flown in. Strangers all, waiting at the airport for the sort-of stranger who’d lured them there. And then there she was, in the flesh at SFO: @wherewewentnext, a lithe 32-year-old with a waist-length dirty-blond braid, wearing Stio pants and Chacos, walking toward a van full of her followers. And everyone was quietly freaking out.
“There was this fangirl moment,” Jeanne, a restaurateur from North Carolina, mother of four, and at 51 the eldest of our group, told me later. “No one said it out loud or anything, but you could feel it. This nervous energy. It was like: Oh, my God! There she is! She’s real.”
The post Don’t Forget to Like and Follow appeared first on Outside Online.
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