While we were inspired by Huneeus’s journey itself—an 18-day jaunt through Delhi, Rajasthan, and Mumbai—we were equally moved by how she experienced it, by her willingness to surrender: to the location, to the unknown, and even to circumstance. Who else, after all, arranges a trip for not just herself but eight other people? This was a woman we had to talk to.

And in doing so, we came away with five lessons in creating the perfect trip from a traveler we admire…along with proof that the best journeys aren’t just about the where—they’re about the how, the why, and especially the who.

Lesson 1: Make a Party Out of Any Occasion

San Francisco—As anyone who’s been there knows, India is not, say, Italy. This means that travelers there need to get hepatitis B immunizations. So far, so dreary. But Huneeus turned what could have been a chore into an event: She called her doctor and her travel companions and hosted a “shot party"—immunizations followed by dinner. “There are three parts to every trip: anticipation, experience, and recollection,” she says. “This shot party put me in full anticipation mode.”

Lesson 2: You Can’t Hurry Love

Delhi and Agra—It’s happened to all of us: For years, we dream of a certain place and what it’ll feel like, but then we get there and that moment—the one in which we’re certain we’ll feel for real what we’ve always felt in the abstract—doesn’t arrive.

“It took me some time to come around to Delhi,” Huneeus admits of her first stop in India. “It had taken us 23 hours to get there, and to be honest, at first all I could see was its chaos.”

But it was when she fully engaged in the chaos that Huneeus found herself truly appreciating Delhi. The city, which is home to nearly 17 million people, was the seat of the British Raj, and along with a series of handsome early-twentieth-century and late-Victorian-era edifices left over from its colonial years, it’s well stocked with treasures from the Mogul era, including Chandni Chowk, a sprawling open-air market that’s been in operation since the seventeenth century. It was here that Huneeus first realized that she was, at last, in India: As her rickshaw puttered down the threadlike alleys that link the market in a tangled web, she found herself overwhelmed—and beguiled. “The smells! Coriander, turmeric, paprika—everything all mixed together,” she remembers. “And then there were the bazaars, selling everything from jewelry to spices, marigolds to coconuts—it was hectic, colorful, and completely thrilling.”

After five nights in Delhi, it was off to Agra to visit the Taj Mahal. And it was in Agra that she discovered another, unforeseen advantage to traveling with a group. “India is overwhelming,” she says. “You see the most desperate people right outside some of the world’s most glorious monuments. There’s so much sensory overload that at the end of the day, you basically need to gather in the hotel bar and discuss what you’ve seen. One of the best parts about this trip was discovering that what I saw wasn’t what another person saw—it helped me to clarify my own thoughts about the place.”

Lesson 3: Know Your Passion Point (and Then Indulge It)

Jaipur—Why is it that so many of us feel—or are made to feel—guilty about shopping on our travels, when it’s often through material objects that we learn the most about the culture we’re visiting?

Huneeus, however, not only doesn’t feel guilty, but knows that her shopping helps sustain the economy as well as local artisans and traditions. “I loved the shopping in Jaipur,” she says. “For a design huntress—as I call myself—it was extraordinary.” Indeed, to shop in Jaipur is to participate in a tradition that dates back to the Mogul era. Then, Agra was the capital of the empire and Jaipur was a relatively sleepy second city. But what it lacked in governmental might it made up for in riches: For centuries, the town (which today has three million people) has been the lapidary center of the world, with thousands of pounds of emeralds and diamonds passing through its various stone houses to be cleaned and cut. Like many former royal cities that dot Rajasthan, it has a population of artisans and craftspeople still plying the same trades, from weaving to gem-cutting, that their ancestors once did for kings.