Hello 👋

It’s been 8 years since I last wrote a travel blog post.

Which feels slightly ridiculous when I think about how much has happened since then.

I didn’t stop travelling. I just stopped writing about it.

I kept telling myself I’d set aside some time to catch up with the blog, but years passed and somehow it never happened. Life got in the way, and eventually, I stopped asking myself when I was going to write again.

Until now, because I’m just going to do it 🙈

What happened to the blog?

When I first started this blog, it was actually very simple.

I was travelling for a year and wanted a way for my friends and family to keep up with where I was and what I was doing. Instagram wasn’t as popular in 2014, so this was my way of sharing the trip.

It was somewhere to document what I was seeing, the people I was meeting and how I was feeling along the way.

And somewhere along the line, it became something else too. A record of my life that I could come back to.

Why did I stop writing?

I’ve always felt proud of what I’ve shared on here, but I’ve also always felt like this blog was as much for me as it was for anyone else.

Even if no one else sees this, I’m a person who will come back and reads these posts.

I want to remember where I was, who I was with, what I was feeling and what made a particular place special. I want to look back at a trip years later and be transported back there, even if just for a moment.

But that became a little more complicated when I started travelling with a boyfriend.

We had an amazing time living abroad and travelling together, and I shared parts of that time on here. A short time later, we broke up.

It wasn’t that I was embarrassed about the relationship or worried about people reading about it. I hadn’t shared that much about him anyway. But he’d become part of the trips I was documenting, and when our story ended, I didn’t really know what to do with that.

The big thing is, as I’ve learnt the people you meet or travel with can completely shape an experience. They can make a trip, or sometimes break it. They become part of the memories you make, the stories you tell and the way you remember a place long after you’ve left it.

And often, when a significant relationship ends, you don’t just lose the person. You find yourself trying to distance yourself from the memories attached to them too. And that was really tough for me.

I think that’s what happened with some of those trips. We had some genuinely brilliant experiences, but after that breakup, I found myself blocking out parts of that time. The photos are still there (mostly on a hard drive out of sight), but the memories felt harder to access. I could look at a picture of somewhere I’d been and know I’d had an amazing time, but struggle to reconnect with how it had actually felt.

It’s strange how that happens… How something that was once a happy memory can become tangled up with something painful, even when the experience itself was never the problem.

And because this blog has always been somewhere I come back to remember my life, I didn’t know how to write about those trips when I couldn’t quite work out how I felt about them myself.

So I stopped.

I don’t know if that’s why I’ve become more private about the people I travel with, but I do know it’s made me think differently about what I share. These days, I’m much more comfortable sharing a trip with a friend or a story about someone I’ve met along the way than putting a romantic relationship online.

Not because I want to pretend those relationships never happened, but because I’ve realised how much the people in our stories can influence the way we remember them. And perhaps, for now, some parts of my life are things I’d rather keep for myself.

My Instagram travel account became the place where I shared snippets of my travels, mostly the places and the pretty moments. No one else in the frame, just me, cropping out the bad bits and focusing on the good.

Which, when you think about it, is a pretty good metaphor for life, isn’t it? We crop out the bits we don’t want people to see, add a filter, and hope the finished picture tells a good story. What could possibly go wrong?

Turns out, quite a lot. But more on that another time.

Meanwhile, this blog sat quietly in the background.

I kept paying the hosting and domain fees, partly because I couldn’t quite let it go.

And partly because I knew I still wanted somewhere to keep those memories.

But what is a travel blog for anymore?

This is the bit I’ve been wrestling with.

I don’t really read travel blogs for travel inspiration these days. I use TikTok, occasionally YouTube, and quite often just ask people I know where they’ve been and whether they’d recommend it.

And when I do read a blog, it’s often because I’m interested in someone’s personal journey. I want to hear their perspective, understand what an experience was actually like for them and read the bits that go beyond the usual recommendations.

That’s something I’d like to explore more on here.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still share travel guides, itineraries and recommendations when I’ve got something worth sharing. I’m not going to suddenly stop telling you where to eat or whether a hotel is worth the money.

But I don’t want to create another website telling you the 10 best things to do somewhere I spent 48 hours just because that’s what a travel blog is supposed to do.

I want this blog to feel a bit more personal than that.

Because the older I get, the more I realise that travel isn’t really just about the places.

It’s the people you meet…

The strangers who become friends (some of them life long)…

The people you meet on a train and never see again…

The locals who completely change how you experience somewhere…

The friends you travel with and the new things you learn about them…

And more often, the things you learn about yourself.

Maybe that’s what I want this blog to be about again.

Not just where I’ve been, but what those experiences have meant to me.

And I’m curious to see where that takes me 🙂