The annual Northwestern Girls' Trip marks 25 years of marvellous adventures & priceless friendship

In October of 1999, three American expats living in England answered Northwestern University’s call to represent the institution at London’s Fulbright College Fair. They hadn’t known each other on campus, but the girls had all graduated within four years of each other and quickly hit it off. All eager to take advantage of the opportunities for tourism offered by life in England, they thought they might be good travel companions. In March of 2000 they put their suspicion to the test.

The rest is history.

Tomorrow, it’s officially 25 years of gloriously entertaining, adventurous, relaxing, story-spinning history. Our annual Northwestern Girls’ Trip hits the milestone when we board our British Airways flight to Naples.

There have been changes over the years. In the early days we were more likely to do multiple, short trips across the year. As we settled in to life in the UK and our jobs got progressively bigger, we focused on just one significant, annual journey. We’ve never missed a year, though parental illnesses, work travel, breast cancer and Covid all proved challenging. In 2020 we slipped a glorious road trip to Devon and Cornwall in between lockdowns but in 2021, despite two attempts, we only managed one day as a complete group due to positive Covid tests amongst us. Over time, our working lives became so busy we learned to compare diaries and pencil in the date for the next year as we were wrapping up the current trip. Once the dates are resolved, girls' trip is sacred.

In 2017, we expanded our trio to a quartet. It was a big decision, given the perfect balance we’d established, but we’d all known Suzy almost as long as we’d known each other. And though she hadn’t graduated from Northwestern, she’d worked for me twice … the first time straight out of uni … and I’d taught her much of what Medill taught me … so we granted her our special girls’ trip honorary degree. 

Finding ideal travel companions is no easy task. People like to move at different paces, do different things, and have different price points. Learning to go on holiday together was, by far, the biggest challenge of my marriage and one that took years to sort comfortably. From that first trip with the girls, however, it was clear that we were naturally in tune with each other’s preferences. 

The ideal girls’ trip should have a near-perfect balance of history, culture, fabulous food, vineyards, shopping, and indolent self-indulgence. We are all naturally curious and love to learn. We sightsee in high-energy bursts, then collapse happily into spas, wine bars or quiet spaces with a good book. We love an off-the-beaten-path experience. We’re also a gregarious bunch, and we’ve talked our way into a notable number of upgrades and remarkable extra treats. Perhaps the most extraordinary example took place in a forgettable town in central Spain. We were the only foreigners in the restaurant during a local festival. Our enthusiasm so charmed the waiters that they gave us a tour of their extraordinary wine cellars, dating back to Roman times, while we were waiting for a table. They lovingly described every course of the festival menu as we ate, then cracked out their home-made post-prandial firewater and invited us to drink with them after the restaurant closed. (Hillary will never let us forget she was the designated driver that day.) The older we get, the more we’ve noticed that young waiters rather enjoy a bit of mild flirtation from a group of women who could be their mothers. Though none have yet equalled those grizzled old Spaniards. 

Though we didn’t set out to define our journeys this way, they’ve become characterised by affordable luxury and often being just ahead of the curve of travel trends. Many places … most notably Speyside, Spain’s Duero wine road, Porto, and Split in Croatia … enjoyed time in the spotlight of the travel press just after we visited. We are the best travel documentary the BBC hasn't made. 

The affordable tag, of course, depends on your point of view, and our price point has crept up over the years with incomes and stress levels. But we’ve always focused on finding special places that are excellent value for money rather than just opting for whatever gets written up in a glossy magazine. These days we tend to look for four-bedroom apartments to rent rather than heading for upscale boutique hotels, and we’ve discovered the value of pooling our resources to hire private guides for outings.  

A set of girls’ trip guidelines took shape over the years. We travel over a long weekend, generally Wednesday or Thursday to the following Monday or Tuesday. It’s the least interruption to busy work schedules. Travel time should be no more than four hours. If you are celebrating a decade birthday (40, 50, etc.) then the destination is your choice alone. In other years, it’s a group decision based on a shortlist, with the final call made by vote or … in one memorable year … Lisa’s mother pulling the winning name on a slip out of a bowl after a Michelin-starred dinner. 

Combining resources to hire private guides has led to some of our most memorable experiences. These include a day wandering the slopes of Mount Etna with an oenologist who specialised in Sicilian wine and got us behind the scenes at several remarkable vineyards. 

A proud Basque showed us the little-visited seaside glories and Game of Thrones filming locations of the coast between Bilbao and San Sebastián. 

When a travel agent messed up our reservation in Iceland, a strapping Viking who usually only did high-end tours and had recently hosted Tom Hiddleston stepped in to drive us up to the glacier and take us spelunking in an Icelandic lava tube. 

This Friday, we'll be making new memories as a working archeologist leads us around the ruins of Herculaneum.

Vineyards have been high on the agenda over the years for this wine-loving quartet. Our intense interest in wine, thoughtful questions, focused tasting and … we like to think … tremendously genial personalities have often seen us invited by winemakers into their private cellars to taste stuff they usually don’t open and drinking with them well after official tours have ended. 

We haven’t always followed our own Girls’ Trip guidelines. Two of our journeys stretched over a week and one of those smashed through our 4-hour travel time limit. Lisa’s brief flirtation with moving back to the States meant that she was joining the 2007 trip from New York, so we turned it into a full-scale holiday in Tunisia. This was before terrorist incidents endangered tourism there. Even so, crowds were light outside of the main tourist resorts. Wandering virtually alone through the sprawling Roman ruins at Dougga is one of the great memories in the Girls’ Trip archives. 

Eight years later, when Hillary’s father was coping with an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, we travelled to the family home in Florida to revel in the warmth of his larger-than-life personality while he was still with us. 

Sharing parents has indeed become one of the hallmarks of the original trio. As women living thousands of miles from our families we all had a larger-than-average appreciation of time spent with parents. Over the years, a habit grew up of visiting parents including the other girls in a family meal whenever they were in London. All but two of those parents have left us now, but we have the memories forever. (And hope my dad and Hillary’s mum are with us for many years to come.) 

And so … older, wiser, and in need of a lot more down time than when we started … the girls are off to Naples. This year is a significant decade birthday for me, so the location, lodging and itinerary were mine to call. Culture abounds. I get to try to knock the rust off my very rusty Italian. Food here is lauded as amongst the best in a country already famous for its cuisine. And there’s a four-bedroom apartment with a roof garden waiting for us.  

La vita è bella. 

Here’s hoping for another 25 years. And here’s thanking my friends, God and good luck for the extraordinary adventures behind us. Great times with beloved friends are one of life’s most precious treasures on this endlessly diverting journey through life.

Remarkable Roscioli wine tasting is a must for any Roman visit

If you're a wine lover, there's one name you need in Rome: Alessandro Pepe.

Alessandro is the sommelier for Roscioli, a family-run collection of restaurant, bakery, deli and wine-tasting facility in the winding streets near the Campo de Fiori. His knowledge of Italian wines is, unsurprisingly, encyclopedic ... but he's well versed on the rest of the world's offerings. Combine this with stereotypically Italian passion and enthusiasm, a fantastic sense of humour and completely fluent English and you get one of the most informative and entertaining wine tastings I've ever attended. With Alessandro's assurance that he regularly switches out his wines, this is the activity I'd put on the top of my list for a return trip to Rome.

Roscioli's comprehensive tasting is aligned with food matching; you're not just sampling wines here, but dining on a series of small plates that show off some Italian classics and provide the foundation on which Alessandro builds his bottle selection.  At 70 euro per person for a minimum of eight wines (we ended up tasting 10) and a long progression of nibbles that adds up to a substantial meal, this would have been good value for money even without the enlightened commentary. There's also the delight of the company. The tasting takes place around a large, high table that accommodates up to 12. You all love wine and food, or you wouldn't be there, and that's inevitably the start of good conversations. By the evening's mid-point, it felt more like a dinner party of friends than a table of strangers. That's a feeling encouraged by Alessandro, who's great at drawing all of the guests into the conversation. At the end of the evening, you're all left to help yourself to anything left in bottles (there was plenty) and it becomes a proper party.

My wine revelations from the evening? Unsurprisingly, my love affair with the Sicilians continues. The sparkling wine that started the evening (Terzavia, Marco de Bartoli) was made from grillo grapes and gave off a heady whiff of apricot. It comes from the same region that produces Marsala, a product almost exclusively made for the Anglo-Saxon market. The Italians cleverly keep the sparkling grillo for themselves. Two courses later, as we tried Sicilian reds from Etna and Noto, I was delighted to realise that my trip tasting 'round the volcano meant I could identify the distinctive taste of the area. You get the woody, chocolate and liquorice tones of a heavy red wine, pulled to lightness by the minerality that the vines suck out of the volcanic soil. Served with a taste of red tuna preserved in peppery olive oil, and sweet-and-sour caponata, the combination demonstrated how wine is almost as good as travel. A bite, a sip, close eyes ... and I'm back on the balcony in Taormina.

Alessandro's enthusiastic championing of the Barolo region, plus tastes of Sobrero's Ciabot Tanasio 2011 and Palladino's Ornato 2010, have me thinking this should be the location of our next girls' tasting trip. A small region, passionate about quality, restricting space and resisting the temptation to incorporate lesser quality fields into their DOCG, this bit of Northeastern Italy between Genoa and Turin mirrors the quality and tradition of Burgundy. The wines are dark and fruity, yet with enough earthy, woody tones to bring an interesting complexity.

The standout of the night for me, however, was my old, hard-to-find friend, schioppettino. I've loved this grape variety since being introduced to it many years ago by the manager of Venice's Enoteca al Volto (that city's best wine bar, IMHO), and have jumped at it whenever it's on a restaurant wine list. It's a choice that will always surprise and impress sommeliers, since it'a a tiny-production secret few have been let into. The standard description of schioppetino, which means "little gunshot", is a medium-bodied, Rhone-like wine with a dark colour and notes of violet, raspberry and pepper. The Bressan 2008 lived up to expectations, my only disappointment being that the spicy sausage we tasted with it was too bold for its subtle sophistication. This is a wine that deserves an equally special food; perfection with stuffed rabbit loin or grouse. But that's far beyond the complexity of the food you'll enjoy at Riscoli.

That's not to criticise it; simply to acknowledge that when you're getting a series of small plates at a moderate price, you shouldn't expect elaborate main courses. The menu is mostly cheeses and cured meats, true to Roscioli's origins as a salumeria. If you think Italy is summed up in prosciutto di parma, mozzarella and grating-quality parmesan, come here to have your eyes opened. The most unique of the tastes that evening was the burrata.

The majority of Italian meats and cheeses travel well, and if you have a good Italian store (like The Italian Shop in Maidenhead, England, or Viviano's in St. Louis, USA) you can get your hands on most things. But burrata is supposed to be consumed within 24 hours of its creation, and is considered past its prime at 48 ... so is not easy to find. It's been a trendy feature of high end menus in London for the past year or two, but I've never eaten it as fresh as it was at Roscoli. Firm mozzarella on the outside, a core of gooey, buttery cream spilling out when you puncture its sphere, burrata is the cheesy equivalent of a chocolate fondant.

Other cheeses included fresh ricotta served with different orange jams, buffalo mozzarella, cravanzina, a wonderfully pungent pecorino from Monti sabini, a 36-month-old parmigiano regiano only recently cut and therefore still "living" and testun ... a mix of sheep and goat's milk ... wrapped in chestnut leaves. There was proper pesto genovese, four varieties of cured pork and two warm dishes: pasta all'Amatriciana (simple, well-balanced tomatoes and chili) and a traditional Roman meatball. Which seemed remarkably similar to my mother's traditional Sicilian meatball. I didn't confirm if their recipe combined ground beef, pork and veal slow simmered in a pot of tomato sauce for hours, but I wouldn't be surprised.

My only warning about the wine tasting at Roscoli: if you have any allergies or special needs, be very assertive. I'd emailed in advance about my husband's tomato allergy (always a challenge in Italy), while the couple next to us had notified them that he was a vegetarian. The standard menu came to both. Roscioli managed impromptu work-arounds on the tomato front (double pesto, more prosciutto) but the vegetarian had to skip quite a few courses. I suspect multiple and more assertive emails could have sorted that in advance.