Whether it's dinner in a cave in Orvieto, Italy, or descending 100 feet underground to a wine cellar in Austria where the composer Joseph Haydn once drank, Brumley has built a reputation for delivering off-the-beaten-track experiences. Some of Seattle's best-known organizations and individuals have come to him for help designing trips, including artists George Little and David Lewis, the Seattle Chamber Music Society, garden writer Marty Wingate, the Pacific Science Center and KING-FM.

Brumley's career in travel dates back to his teenage years when his sister, at the time a cruise-ship tour director in Tahiti, suggested that he try the field himself. His first guiding job brought him to the Canadian Rockies; after that he worked in national parks such as the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone, and abroad in China, Mongolia, Europe and beyond. Leading tours for European visitors was his specialty.

The experience eventually led him to guiding overseas, taking groups on excursions, such as riding the Orient Express or the 6,000-mile Trans-Siberian Express. Like many guides, Brumley headed to Central America when the European tourism season waned in October. “I continued doing that until 1997,” Brumley says. “I lived overseas practically 10 months of the year.”

For a time he became a trainer of trainers, and taught guides for travel expert Rick Steves.

It's not what Brumley thought he'd be doing as a profession. He attended SU to earn a degree in political science, and had his sights on either a career in the U.S. Foreign Service or a tenure-track position with a university. As he moved toward those goals—pursuing graduate studies in international relations and economics after tangential moves that included a stint at ATandT—he still had one foot firmly planted in tourism. “I found I was able to fulfill that need to teach through guiding,” he says.

Looking back, Brumley realizes that all of his experiences fell into place when he created Earthbound Expeditions in 1997. “I was always on the same track, but never really conscious of it,” he says.

Part of his challenge was overcoming his image of a career in travel as frivolous, at least compared to a business career. “I wish I had known earlier that it was safer to travel that path,” he says. The business world, as it turned out, held little appeal for him—“it was completely the wrong fit,” he says—and he gave up pursuing a career in academia when an acquaintance told him how hard it was to get tenure. By then he had lived in more than half a dozen foreign countries, including France, Denmark, the Soviet Union, England, Israel and Central America.

His copious travel experiences had taught him not only what he wanted his own company to do, but also, more important, what he wanted it to not do. He wanted to limit the amount of time spent seeing new countries from behind the window of a bus, and make traveling “fun, educational and enlightening,” he says.

That fit with the goals of Ciscoe Morris, former SU grounds manager and now national garden celebrity, who hosted an Earthbound Expeditions tour to southern Italy and Sicily last year. Morris wanted a tour that was off the well-worn path to Europe's famous gardens, and he decided on the less-traveled Italian island of Sicily.

“There weren't any gardening trips to Sicily,” Brumley says.

But Morris says Brumley found enough treasures for what he called an “exciting and energetic trip,” including a private visit to the garden of a former Vogue magazine model.

“Anyone can go and see a public garden,” Morris says. “While those are great, we wanted to go to private gardens where the public rarely gets to go. One of the things I really appreciate about Matt is how he goes the extra mile.”

For Seattle's Pacific Science Center, the focus was even more specific. Bryce Seidl, the center's president and chief executive officer, wanted a trip that would tie in to the museum's Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit.

“Matt was extremely open to any idea we had that would make the trip special,” Seidl says. The trip, in March 2007, led participants to the ancient port city of Caesarea Maritima, dining in a traditional Bedouin village and bobbing in the salty waters of the Dead Sea. But it was Brumley's guides, including a specialist in early Christianity, who provided the intellectual depth Seidl was seeking. “She was perfect for the interests of our group,” Seidl says.

Organized tours offer the appeal of having someone else worry about all the details, but many travelers rely on them to take away some of the insecurity of being in a different culture where they don't know the language or customs. Brumley says his clients want that same convenience, but they come to him for the ability to push beyond the usual highlights of a country or region. That's good for his guests as well as for him. After more than two decades of travel and hundreds of trips, Brumley still finds it exciting. “My favorite destination is usually where I'm headed next,” he says, “or where I've just got back from.”