Our Story
Priscilla Nzessi
Founder, Moments of Sonder Travel

"Travel is not a heaping up of episodes. It is an evolution, a steady submersion of the ego in a stream of life. I built this agency so that others could find themselves in that stream."

Bamileke roots, Cameroon
Born in Paris, France
Grounded in Christian faith
Living and building in California
20+
Trips per year
recent years
25+
Countries
visited
4
Continents of
deep roots
15+
Years of dedicated
travel

"The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof,
the world, and all who dwell within it." Psalm 24:1

01
The Beginning

A childhood
in motion

Priscilla Nzessi was born in Paris to Bamileke parents, one of Cameroon's most distinguished peoples, known for their extraordinary traditions of community, ceremony, and ancestral pride. She moved to the United States as a child, growing up with a remarkable geographic inheritance: a base in California and roots in France, with family ties that reached back to Cameroon.

From her earliest years, some of her most vivid memories were made on the road. Road trips across France with her parents. Road trips across California. Long stretches of highway, windows down, a new town or a new landscape waiting on the other side of each horizon. Before she ever became a travel advisor, she became a traveler, shaped by parents who understood that the world is best understood by moving through it.

Having a base both in California and in France gave her something rare: a young person's access to two distinct worlds, Western Europe and the American West, each one offering a different vocabulary for beauty, culture, and belonging. She learned early that every place has its own story, and that the person willing to listen always leaves richer than they arrived.

"My earliest memories of joy are from the road. My parents gave me the most extraordinary gift, not things, but places."
02
The Traveler

Fifteen years.
Still going.

After college, Priscilla did what she had always felt called to do. She went. Alone, unbothered, and completely open, she embarked as a solo traveler, visiting places she had always wanted to see and destinations she simply stumbled upon and fell in love with. That season of solo exploration lit something in her that has never gone out.

For more than fifteen years since, she has traveled with dedication every single year, revisiting beloved places and discovering new ones, building a personal geography that now spans across more than 25 countries across Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Asia. She has slept under canvas in the wilderness and settled into Belmond and Banyan Tree properties. She has backpacked and chartered. She has camped, cruised, and taken unhurried train rides across entire countries, because she knows that the journey itself, watched from a window at the right pace, is often where the most lasting memories are made. A road trip with the windows down and no fixed arrival time is, to her, just as sacred as a suite overlooking the sea.

She watched the Paris Olympics unfold in real time in the city where she was born, and understood in her bones what it means for the whole world to hold its breath together. She has run through the gates of Disney and Universal with the same unguarded joy she brings to every new destination, because she knows that wonder belongs to anyone willing to be fully present.

"I don't recommend places I haven't felt in my bones. Every journey I design carries something I have personally seen, stood in, and been changed by."

03
The Founding

Why Sonder.
Why now.

In 2024, Priscilla founded Moments of Sonder Travel, turning more than fifteen years of dedicated personal travel into a business built to help other people see the world and witness the Lord's glory within it.

The name was chosen with intention. Sonder is the realization that every person you pass has their own life, vivid, complex, and deeply felt, running parallel to yours and just as full. It is the moment you stop moving through the world as a spectator and start recognizing it as a place inhabited by billions of extraordinary stories, each one as complete and meaningful as your own.

Helping people have those moments of sonder, whether it is sitting across from a stranger on a train in Japan or watching your own child encounter the ocean for the first time, is the reason this agency exists. Travel is the most reliable path to that kind of seeing. And Priscilla has dedicated her professional life to making it possible.

"Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living. It is of constant development and not of fixed judgment that I dare to write: of the steady submersion of the ego in a stream of life." Miriam Beard

This quote, by historian Miriam Beard, has long shaped how Priscilla thinks about travel. Not as a heaping up of episodes. Not as a checklist of places visited. But as an evolution, a steady dissolving of the boundaries of self in contact with the vastness of the world. That is the experience she curates for every client who trusts her with their journey.

A Philosophy of Travel

Travel is not escape.
It is encounter, with the world God fashioned,
with the people you love, and with yourself.

The world is sacred

Every canyon, coast, and culture is an expression of divine creativity. Experiencing the world with open eyes is an act of worship, and every client deserves to encounter it at its finest.

Travel reveals you

The person who stands at the edge of the Grand Canyon, walks a souk in Marrakech, or shares a meal in a Cameroonian village learns something they could not have learned any other way. We facilitate that knowing.

Connection is the whole point

The conversation with your child on a long train ride. The stranger at the hotel bar who says something that stays with you for years. Traveling with the people you love is making memories more precious than any gift.

The Full Spectrum

She has traveled all of it.
So she can design any of it for you.

Priscilla's experience spans every mode of travel, from wilderness camping to private villas. That breadth is not incidental. It is the source of her ability to understand exactly what each client needs.

Luxury Properties

Belmond. Banyan Tree. Private villas. Boutique estates. The finest accommodations in the world, known personally.

Rail & Road

Orient Express. River cruises. Cross-country road trips. The journeys where the getting there is the whole point.

Adventure & Wilderness

Camping under open skies. Backpacking. Safari camps. The places that remind you how large the world actually is.

Elite Events

The Paris Olympics. Major sporting and cultural events around the world. She has been there, inside them, and knows exactly how to get you there too.

The Conviction Beneath Everything

"The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof,
and Priscilla has made it her life's work
to help people finally receive that fullness."

Priscilla's Christian faith is not separate from her work as a travel advisor. It is the reason for it. She believes the world God made is lavish, intentional, and designed to be encountered with awe. She believes that a person who has stood before something truly extraordinary comes home more grateful, more present, and more whole. She believes that traveling with the people you love is one of the most sacred things a person can do.

Every itinerary she designs is informed by this conviction. Every experience she curates is chosen not just for its quality, but for its capacity to move the people who encounter it. She is not selling trips. She is creating the conditions for transformation, and trusting that the world, and the God who made it, will do the rest.

"I came that they may have life and have it to the full." John 10:10

Begin the Conversation

Ready to see the world
with someone who truly loves it?

Start with a $75 consultation call. Tell Priscilla where you want to go, who you are traveling with, and what you need this journey to be. She will take it from there.

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"Travel that changes who you are."
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