MF Experiences

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Something Worth Doing With People Worth Doing It With

We don't run retreats. We don't host masterminds. We don't sell transformation — that word has been strip-mined and we'd rather let you keep yours.

What we do: we take things we're already doing — sourcing food in foreign markets, cooking with intention, thinking about systems, walking through cities that hum differently — and we open up a few seats.

Small groups. Real places. The kind of days you'd plan for yourself if you had six months to research and twenty years of knowing where to look.


What an MF Experience Is

An MF Experience is built around a place we're going to be anyway and things we'd want to do whether or not anyone else showed up. We're not performing a trip. We're inviting you into ours.

The format varies. Sometimes it's two days in a city with a market walk, a cooking session, and a workshop that goes somewhere unexpected. Sometimes it's a single evening built around a meal and a conversation that doesn't have a moderator.

What stays constant:

  • Small groups — 4 to 10 people. If we can't learn your name before dinner, we've overbuilt.
  • Real meals — sourced by Maria from markets she knows, prepared together, eaten without an agenda.
  • One workshop — Randy leads. Topics live at the intersection of systems thinking, creative infrastructure, and the operating design of your actual life. Not theory. Not slides. Not a pitch deck dressed as personal growth.
  • Unstructured time — built in, not left over. The walks between things are part of the experience.
  • A long tail — every participant enters the MF General Store ecosystem with ongoing access to what we're building, learning, writing, and making. The experience doesn't end when you fly home.

What It Isn't

Not a wellness retreat. No yoga mats, no ceremonies, no detox protocols, no group shares.

Not a business retreat. No pitch practice, no networking bingo, no "accountability pods."

Not a tour. We don't have lanyards.

It's closer to: what if the people behind a store you trust invited you to spend a few days with them in a city they know, and the price included the meals and the thinking but not the flights?


Who This Is For

People who are good at their work and curious about how other people design their lives. People who cook, or want to. People who read long articles and follow footnotes. People who've been to a conference and wished the best part hadn't been the accidental conversation in the hallway.

If you've read more than three things on this site and thought "I'd want to sit across from these people" — that's the signal.


Current Experiences

The Eixample Edit — Barcelona

July 15–16, 2026 | 6–10 participants

Two days in Barcelona's Eixample district. Market sourcing at La Boqueria with Maria. Cooking what we find. An afternoon workshop on building infrastructure that serves your life instead of consuming it. A dinner at the kind of place you find by asking the right local. A farewell lunch.

See the full itinerary →

Bucharest Undercurrent

July 25–26, 2026 | 4–8 participants

A day and a half in Maria's city. A walking texture-read through Lipscani. A multi-course Romanian dinner where she orders. A morning workshop on processing weak signals in complex environments — applicable to business, creative work, and the system you call your life. Coffee, pastries, and a curated list of what we'd do next.

See the full itinerary →


How It Works

  1. Choose an experience and reserve your spot through our booking page.
  2. 50% deposit holds your place. Balance due 45 days before.
  3. You handle your own flights and accommodation. We send a neighborhood guide with our picks.
  4. Show up. We handle everything from there.

All experiences include programmed activities, workshop(s), and specified group meals. Flights, accommodation, travel insurance, and meals not listed are your own.


Stay Close

Experiences are announced first to newsletter subscribers. If there's one that's right for you, you'll hear about it before it's public.

We also write about the thinking behind experiences — how we design them, what we learn, what surprised us — in the Experiences & Stories journal.


MF Experiences are produced by MF General Store. All workshops, content, and programming designed by Randy and Maria Mountainfjord.