The Virtual Travel & Adventure Show hosted travel expert Samantha Brown on its “Discover America” virtual show held on December 9, in which she offers some tools and insight into how she travels.

Samantha Brown showed clips of the new season of her show, Samantha Brown’s Places to Love, showcasing places like Mt. Washington, New Hampshire, Phoenix, Arizona and the Florida Keys, eating at locally-owned restaurants and discovering breathtaking national parks.

Places to Love is in its third season and will air on PBS. You can also access all of the previous seasons, as well as watch the new ones on-demand for free at Samantha-Brown.com .

As for lessons that we can learn both from the pandemic and from her show, Samantha Brown explains, “What we’ve learned in the last eight months, how people have just so fiercely defended their own communities by supporting local businesses and getting to know that they have all these artists that they didn’t know about, and great stores and the stories behind them -- and knowing that it was up to us to rally behind these businesses and make sure that they survived, and thrived: what I really hope for this is that everyone takes that sense of ‘hey, we’re all in this together,’ that sense of community, and applies it to the places that they travel to, because even though that place is new to you, that’s someone else’s local.”

“We can always approach a destination that way, and when you do, you’re saving money, you’re meeting people, because you’re doing what the locals do, and you’re just spending time in a way that becomes more fulfilling, it slows you down, and it’s just a win-win for everybody,” she added.

Take the path less traveled on your next journeys, marry your sense of community to your sense of adventure, and you might just discover some new friends and a new perspective on whatever destination it is you travel to.

As for travel in the new year, Samantha Brown will be hosting an AmaWaterways Taste of Bordeaux cruise and a railroad journey into the heart of the Canadian Rockies with Rocky Mountaineer .

The Virtual Travel & Adventure Show will have three more virtual events around Asia and the South Pacific, cruising and Africa and the Middle East.