Christmas Markets of Europe

Sarah Melland is a writer, traveler, creator, and professional collector of places that feel like they belong in a story. After years of writing through the chaos, comedy, heartbreak, and emotional hostage situations of modern dating, Sarah eventually made a life-changing discovery: instead of letting a man give her anxiety, she could let a city give her wonder. So, she traded red flags for train stations, mixed signals for market squares, dating disasters for cobblestone streets, and the exhausting question of “What are we?” for the much better question of “Where should I go next?”

That shift became the heart of Visit Small Cities, Sarah’s travel brand dedicated to the places that make the world feel magical again. Through city guides, travel itineraries, curated collections, blog posts, quick guides, and beautifully researched books, she helps readers find destinations beyond the obvious: fairytale villages, historic cafés, Christmas markets, strange festivals, cinematic streets, hidden coastal towns, old castles, romantic escapes, and small cities worth getting wonderfully lost in.

Sarah is the author and creator behind a growing collection of travel and curiosity-driven books, including 1,001 Famous Festivals, The Christmas Markets of Europe, and the Visit Small Cities guidebooks and itineraries. Her work blends research, storytelling, humor, history, atmosphere, and a deep belief that travel is not only about checking places off a list. It is about finding the places that wake something up in you.

Before turning fully toward travel, Sarah built a sharp, funny dating persona through Your Dating UnExpert, where she wrote about relationships, red flags, breakups, self-worth, and the beautifully absurd theater of trying to understand men. But somewhere along the way, the world became more interesting than waiting on the wrong person to text back. Travel offered something dating often did not: wonder, freedom, momentum, beauty, and the chance to fall in love with life again.

Now Sarah writes for the travelers who would rather wander old streets, chase a view, find the weird little museum, stumble into the best café, follow a legend, and come home with stories that do not sound like everyone else’s vacation. Her books are made for dreamers, planners, romantics, culture lovers, list makers, seasonal travelers, and anyone who has ever looked at a photo of a glowing European square and thought, “I need to be there.”

At the center of all her work is one simple belief: your next adventure does not have to begin with a perfect plan. Sometimes it begins with curiosity. Sometimes it begins with one sentence, one city, one market, one festival, one strange little place you cannot stop thinking about. And sometimes, thank God, it begins the moment you stop chasing the wrong person and start chasing the world instead.

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