the scribe

I am April Harrison Stoumbos, a writer and lifelong learner from an island town. I grew up in a place where tourists outnumbered locals five months out of the year, which gave me both a rooted sense of belonging to a place and an awareness of the etiquette for borrowing time in someone else’s. My love for travel started at ten years old when my mom and I stayed in a family friend’s flat in London, or the land of Harry Potter and Monty Python, as I knew it then. My aunts expanded the latitudes of my experience as I grew older, forming core memories with me around the world and inspiring me to go on to study abroad in Spain and spend a month on a solidarity project in Nicaragua.

Then I married a Greek-American whose Yia Yia still insists she lives in her Athens apartment, despite residing in her son’s house for eleven months out of the year. Through coincidence and her insistence, we have visited Greece together six times now. From hostel stays with our college friends to family visits to the village to romantic island getaways and destination weddings, we’ve done all sorts of travel through Greece and even popped over into a few other countries along the way. This site is my insider-outsider perspective on Southern Europe.