November 24, 2018
Tag: travel
December 10, 2017
Why Fly United’s Basic Economy?
It’s the holiday season! If you’re like me, you love traveling even during the busiest of times. This means you may have also traveled so much that you make mistakes when it comes to booking flights. I reached that point last month when I accidentally booked the wrong dates for a destination wedding I was going to attend, catching this mistake just 2 weeks before the event. Since I booked with United, there was a hefty change fee of $200 to switch the travel dates. Beating myself up and wishing I had stuck with Southwest #NoChangeFees #NoBagFees, I quickly decided to ...
December 5, 2017
Bruges
Eight reasons to travel to Brugge this fall. Best of Bruges 2017. Why you can’t miss this Venice of Belgium. You can’t visit Belgium without a stop in Brugge. Don’t be Brugge-y. And all the other catchy travel article titles about Brugge… By the time I reached Belgium this October, my twelfth country to visit in the year, I was spent. I had really lost a sense of purpose in my travel after being overwhelmed with tourist activities in Prague and having a deeply enriching cultural immersion in Peru over the summer. I made a promise to myself that ...
November 26, 2017
Peru
It’s been 3 months since I’ve returned from my summer in Peru and I’m just now able to process the experience. Not that it was so heavy or deep or that I drank too much coca tea but it was a lot. Friends and family continue to ask me why I went, what I did and what I learned from the experience – all complicated questions. I wrote a full post on why I quit my job for this long-term stay abroad but the long story short is that I wanted to improve my Spanish and get living experience ...
November 16, 2017
Miami
Remember when we used to pass notes in grade school? We sketched our best friend’s name or I love so and so or acronyms for every new and made up phrase (lylas, ttyl, bffe) all over sheets of blue-lined notebook paper, folded it into some indistinct shape and passed it from desk to desk hoping not to get caught by Mr. Smith. We’d communicate in style, glitter pens on paper in bubbled or graffiti letters, saying just as much with the fonts we created than with the words themselves. It’s a lost art. A friend of mine who teaches middle ...
November 7, 2017
Prague
Prague wasn’t my idea. It was Veronica who first suggested the Eastern European city when we agreed on a trip to Amsterdam after I raved about my first visit in the fall of 2016. We had a bunch of recommendations from friends, family, and our Airbnb host, but the ultimate plans lay in the hands of the infamous Google Doc. Y’all are familiar with it. It’s that printed out document that includes the itinerary planned down to the minute. If you don’t know what I’m talking about then you’re probably not the Type A planner to build one out or even ...
November 3, 2017
How I Navigate My Way Through Anywhere (No Service or Wi-Fi Needed)
Adding an international phone service plan when traveling abroad is just one more expense to budget for when planning a trip. It is worth the expense if you plan on using it to the fullest: making calls, sending texts, and using data to search for things on the fly while in a foreign country. I’ve noticed during my travels that the only thing I really need to stay in communication with my friends and family is WIFI and even that has been hard not to come by while traveling abroad in Europe and South America. Thus I’ve found other ways to ...
September 26, 2017
Why I Quit My Day Job for 2 Months in Peru
Before you roll your eyes and say “yet another story about a millennial who was over her well-paying job and quit to backpack around the world and blog all about it and convince everyone else to do the same,” just hear me out. I was sitting in a team meeting at my job, a job that I loved and appreciated from the start. Together the team was problem-solving a frustrating, ongoing issue that account managers were experiencing with our network. During the time, we joked about the problem and work and maybe a TV show involving a talking dog, I don’t ...
September 22, 2017
Cartagena
I almost didn’t make it to Cartagena. Missed my flight from Peru to Colombia and spent an extra night in Cusco wondering if the trip was really meant to be. If the universe was conspiring against me. If the expectation of a good time in Colombia was destined to be unmet and the reality of my situation was a better bet. But it always works itself out. It was an awkward ride from the airport in an Uber. Uber is illegal in Colombia but the app still functions, so it works? If asked by a cop what I was doing ...
September 22, 2017
When In 