Who am I?

Hi and welcome to my travel blog! My name is Erin, and I’ve been an avid traveler my whole life. I’ve been camping and going on vacations since before I can remember. I still need to get to Myrtle Beach at some point, after hearing about it all the time growing up!

My travel adventures began as family camping trips every summer, with my mom, dad, and brother Derek. These adventures started closer to home near Ohio, in our Jayco pop-up camper. But as my brother and I grew older, our horizons expanded more and more. Memorable trips include the Smokey Mountains, our circle tour of Lake Superior, Maine, Washington DC, and our epic journey out west to Yellowstone. I also got my first taste of international travel in high school, when I took a school trip to Italy.

As an adult, I started doing my own camping trips, with a lot of exploring in Florida (e.g. the Everglades, Florida Keys), a little bit in Kentucky (Mammoth Cave) and West Virginia (New River Gorge), and also re-lived some favorite childhood trips that I didn’t remember well enough (Smokey Mountains & Maine).

In 2001, I got another taste of international travel when we finally did our family trip to England. My grandmother was born in Stourbridge, England, and my mom has over 30 first cousins across the pond. We had been dreaming about a family trip there forever, but it was never affordable until my brother and I were both adults and could pay our own way. So we did the circle tour of England and Wales, meeting more relatives than I can remember, and seeing lots of amazing sights.

In 2003, I did something unthinkable to many people in Ohio, and I moved away! I moved to Seattle, Washington and have been there ever since. And I started doing a lot of shorter travel adventures on the weekends. It’s amazing how many interesting places there are within 2-3 hours of Seattle (Vancouver BC, Victoria BC, North Cascades NP, Olympic NP,  Mountain Rainier NP, Mount St. Helens, Portland OR).

My longer travel adventures from Seattle started out closer to  my new home, venturing to Yosemite and Death Valley in California, Glacier National Park in Montana, and the wonders of southern New Mexico.

And then the real adventures began. In 2009, I had the pleasure of losing my job. I had been working for Washington Mutual, the largest bank failure in US history. As scary as that was to go through, in the end it gave me the means and opportunity to take my first really long trip. To Europe! I thought it might be my only chance to take a trip longer than two weeks, so I gambled and decided to do a six-week trip to Europe before finding a new job.

My six weeks in Europe were drastically different from any of my other adventures, for several reasons:

  • I would be travelling solo for the first time, for most of the trip (no parents, no brother, no ex-husband). My brother would be joining me for one week in Germany. But I wondered, would I get lonely?
  • I had to figure out how to navigate many new forms of transportation (trains, subways, trams, funiculars, ferries). I’d been to New York City once, and the subways were challenging!
  • It would be my first experience traveling in countries where English was not the primary language, and not on a group tour. I’d be going to France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium. What if I needed to talk to people? How would I read any signs or menus?
  • This trip was also the start of my travel blog! I’d been keeping handwritten journals at times before, but now there were these shiny new websites that hosted travel blogs, and wifi was more and more prevelant everywhere. So I signed up for one, and have been blogging ever since.

Needless to say, the trip to Europe was incredible. Eye-opening. Liberating. Exciting. Transformative. Of course, I stumbled at times. I got lost, faced some language barriers, got sick, had missing reservations, and myriad other challenges. But I figured everything out. And learned. And made friends. And saw many amazing sights.

After I got home, I found a job and started focusing my trips on international adventures. I got my family on board and we started out going back to Europe, but focusing on one country at a time (Germany, Austria, Ireland, France, Scotland). We also threw in a couple of Caribbean cruises and a trip to Hawaii.

Then I started to feel too comfortable in our usual destinations, so we started branching out even more. We did a group tour in Costa Rica, and then more recently went to Australia. And that has just wet my appetite for even more foreign and exotic locations, which I will blogging about soon!

Why Blog?

My long-term memory is horrible. I don’t remember a lot before 4th grade, because that’s when I got my first camera. And once I became an adult, I started to realize how little of the details I remembered after a lot of time passed by. So when we went to England in 2001, I wanted to remember every detail of the trip, not just the pictures of where we went. So I started doing a hand-written journal.

Then in 2009 I started blogging on my six-week trip to Europe. Originally, the blog was only so that people back home could get updates on what I was doing. And so that my Mom wouldn’t worry. My plan was to still do a super-detailed journal (now in Word), but only post the highlights on my blog. But of course, I didn’t have time to keep that up very long. So I ended up just blogging, and I’ve been just blogging ever since.

My first blogs were really just diaries of where I went, what I saw, what I did, and what I ate. But more recently I’ve started to get more interested in writing about what I learned, who I met, what we talked about. Not only so that I’ll remember it, but also to educate my readers.

My original blogs are on a now antiquated website called TravelPod. I finally decided that I can’t put up with how small their pictures are anymore. So I’ve moved on from the dark ages, and found the light in WordPress. It’s been a little challenging to figure out, because there’s no custom travel blog template. But in less than a day, I have a template and a plan for how to organize my site. And so far I love it! It will take more time, but it’s so much more flexible. I’m excited to flex my creativity muscles!

For now I’m using the free hosting on wordpress.com, but I have dreams about hosting my own domain and using wordpress.org to become even more creative. I’ll be working on migrating my blogs from TravelPod to here, but in the meantime here is a link for the curious:

http://www.travelpod.com/members/zolina

About This Blog

I’ll be creating a Page for each trip, with a summary of the trip, and a linked custom Google Map to track all of my hotels, restaurants, and sights visited. The Trip Page will also have links to the individual blog posts.

The most recent blog posts will appear on my blog’s homepage, otherwise you can use the menu bar at the top to browse trip reports and blog posts.