The troubles of going “Against the Grain”

While the life of traveling is full of exciting adventures and spontaneous decisions, this journey is FULL of ups and downs.

Over the last few months I’ve found myself lost, wondering, and wandering. When I started this lifestyle back in 2019, the world was my oyster. I was beginning to see life in a brand new set of eyes and truly felt like I could land anywhere in the world with nothing in my way. As we all know, that has changed in a way I never thought would happen in my lifetime. The world was put to a steady halt and so was the life of booking spontaneous one way tickets.

I started this blog so I could share everything about that life, but when it became more complicated I lost the desire to share the troubles I was going through. To be fair… I couldn’t even gather my own thoughts, nonetheless share them with everyone.

To give a quick update from my last post, Laurent and I have now traveled Croatia, France, Mexico, and are now in my home country of the USA. To get to France, we had to go to Croatia. To get to the USA, we had to travel to Mexico. While it may seem like the opportunity to soak up a fabulous vacation, it’s the last thing we wanted. Our goal was to meet each others families, all the while having to spend thousands of dollars out of our yearly budget to make that detour home.

Now that we’re home, we have 3 months on Laurent’s visa to spend time with family, travel, and also figure out where the %^$# we’re going to go after this! We’ve applied for winter season positions in Canada, looked into how I could work in France, or somehow get him to stay in the USA without having to tie the know before we’re ready.

My mind has been completely boggled for quite some time now. Where will I end up career wise? What can I do for work and still be able to stay with Laurent? Should we take a travel break? Get an apartment? If so, where and how?

But really..that’s not what we want. What we want is for Australia to open it’s mother truckin’ borders again so we can follow up with our plans.

But as we’ve learned before, plans NEVA EVA work how we want…like EVA. Jokes on us 😉

Now that I’ve got my bitchin’ out of the way…

We have also had a wonderful time within all of the madness. I finally got to meet the family and friends that made Laurent the man that he is, which made me fall even more in love with him. We walked the streets of Paris, drank beers on the beach in Hossegore, and I got to see my beautiful friend Ema outside of Lyon. We traveled to Mexico and explored the ruins of Chitchen Itza, laid on the beaches of Isla Mujeres, and met some really amazing bar mates on the way.

Now we’re soaking up all the time we can with my family and friends back home before we begin our big trip across the USA! It’s so exciting to see Laurent bond with the people I love the most, and truly begin to understand where his crazy American gal came from.

It’s not the most cheerful of my posts, but it’s a start to getting it back out there. I can feel myself getting out of my funk and become more and more motivated to make this lifestyle work. I’m coming to the close of my 3rd year of traveling, and I’m just not ready to give that or love up because things got hard.

With all of this, I’ve learned that you truly have to fight for what you want. Fight for love, equality, your dreams, family, friends, and anything else that matters to you. It’s okay to go through those low times, and you don’t have to explain yourself to anyone when that’s happening. BUT, be sure to pull up your boot straps and kick yourself into gear to go after the life that you’ve always dreamed of. You never know what you’ll discover along the way. 🙂