Childhood Dreams

For as long as I can remember I have been obsessed with travelling. As a child I would spend hours pouring over encyclopedias learning about other cultures. Or I would obsesses over maps, slowly spinning a globe memorizing the names of capital cities of countries I didn’t even know how to pronounce. The more I learnt, the more I was intrigued.

Growing up in the UK and having cousins that lived in the West country most of our holidays were around the South and West Coast of the UK. We visited places like Dorset, The Malverns, Shropshire and our family favourite – Pembrokshire. Although I appreciated these adventures I was always hankering for more. Yet I wanted to see something different, to travel further away, see lands more exotic where you would hear different sounds and smell different smells. That’s what I was really interested in.

An exotic family trip to Thailand when I was 17 was the stimulus for a year long gap year spent in New Zealand, Australia and South East Asia.

Several years later, after University I moved to London and got my first graduate job. I worked incredibly hard that year to shift some of my university debt. Mostly this was done by continuing to live by student standards and once everything bar my student loan was paid off I started saving like crazy. This thrifty attitude happened to be very fortuitous when my life was suddenly upended overnight out of the blue and I found myself back living with my parents. Just 5 months later I was jetting off to Buenos Aires with an open-ended ticket.

South American Adventures

I started my trip in the very lively city of Buenos Aires where I attended Spanish school whilst I learned the lingo and got familiar with Argentine life. After my month was done and with a slightly improved Spanish vocabulary I traversed the Andes to go meet a dear friend in Chile for a 3-week road trip from the Centre to the North. It sounds a bit clichéd to say a trip changed my life, but it really did. On the penultimate day before I left Chile and crossed the border, I met my (now) husband smack bang in the middle of the Atacama desert.

United States

They say when you know you know and for us at least this was true. We spent a month together in Peru before venturing together to Santiago where we lived for 6 months. Another year or so of chasing one another around the globe and we married in San Francisco in 2011. Logistics of visa and wedding planning meant that we got married alone with only our photographer for a witness and our wedding day was one of the most joyful and fun-filled days of my life.

We spent some time in the Bay Area, San Francisco and Boston before I deciding it was time to head back to Europe.

A return home

Another round of visa applications meant we had to be separated for about 15 months which was tough but we made it work by taking lots of trips which meant we saw one another roughly every 2-3 months. Fortunately I had this little ball of fluff for company so needless to say I never felt lonely.

It has been 5 years since I moved back to the UK now and I have never felt more settled. Interestingly, the pandemic has forced me to start re-exploring places I visited as a child, and the bonus is I get to bring my beautiful pup along with me!

Travel Writing

Saving the best for last, I enjoy telling stories. These will often be of the whimsical, imaginative kind. As soon as I start to travel my imagination goes completely wild. I have incredible experiences whenever I travel and I love telling the stories of the people I meet.