“So, what do you do?” as I’m asked by so many different new people I come across, whether it’s for a job interview or from my church. This conversation always starts with me wondering what to tell people first, “Should I tell them the half of me, a part-time paid travel blogger, or the other half of me as a marketer?”
I usually reach for the latter. I figured if I declare my role as a paid travel blogger, I would get a bunch of questions that would get me talking a lot more than I like. For me, figuring this out six years ago, I would’ve not even been proud to say this is what I was doing because like all hobbies, it started with a curiosity to get into something. That something may not even pay off.
Going to places on vacations wasn’t really a hobby but just finding an excuse to escape reality for a city with good food and views that are hard to look away from. Then those travels then became an outdoorsy obsession. My travels then became something I wanted to share for myself by snapping away photos of everything I saw on my trips and then it slowly evolved into wanting to write details behind those trips.
I figured if I wrote details behind each trip, I will remember where I went, what I did, and to relive the experience of that trip because a travel experience should always be ingrained in as a memory. This rewarding obsession had self-taught me to master a jack of all trades as a writer, a marketer, and eventually, a photographer.
Using my education and career skills to get better at blogging
Fortunately, my background in marketing has set the bar for me of where I’d like my work to take off. I’m still working in this field, doing it for paid social ads, but my education was based elsewhere.
I studied strategic communications and public relations and thought my adult career dreams would take off in public relations and I was so, so wrong. I did nothing in public relations, except if you count the times I let my blog get discovered by public relations companies who wanted to work with me to influence my readers of companies’ products or when I found a place to write about my work in other online publications.
It didn’t stop there with desiring to fit the roles as my own marketer, publicist, and photographer. I wanted to make my travel blog stand out differently among the others and since the start, I have always loved including blurbs on my blog posts of the history of a particular place. I always do my research and then jot notes down when I visit a place, per say like a national park.
My why’s
I want to know the fine details of what the heck happened in this place… “How long ago did this volcano last erupt and how did it change the landscape?”, “How did Sedona become this red rock area when it used to be like a tropical forest before?”, “Which Native American tribe left behind these petroglyphs on these rocks?”, “How did Bryce Canyon National Park form these hoodoos?”, “Why are there hundreds of waterfalls in Oregon and Washington’s Columbia River Gorge?”, and the curiosity lives on.
I got so fascinated with history and geology and then swore that maybe I could’ve studied to be a scientist that actually got to take part in field research. But I leave that credit to the actual scientists themselves, and I look back at my past six years of travel blogging and I was able to be given the opportunities to talk about my prized dugged up knowledge.
I know that I may not be involved in the work as a historian or geologist, but the imagination there exists. The strive to understand the world around us and why changes stood the test of time is why I choose to blog about my travels. It’s also why I hike a lot until my shoes get dirtied up. I also travel so I can see places before its landscapes ever run into the chance of dramatically changing like glacier lagoons and witnessing a live erupting volcano in Iceland.
Sharing stories and photographing them, just like the news, changes the world and gets people informed enough to take the step to make a change about it. Just like I love documenting places for people to gain itinerary guides, I also advocate for what is right like leaving nothing but footprints and to make a difference in their own health and wellness.
I want to encourage others to be whatever they want to be because sometimes, we can’t always be just one thing, like I found in my work of travel blogging.
@from1girlto1world I’d put an aurora on this list but I hadn’t seen that yet! Hopefully soon one day!! ✨I’ve seen some really cool things so far though on some of my travels and I am so impressed by how this earth has so many amazing phenomena. This planet continues to amaze me and that’s why I fell in love with the idea of writing about it, making plans to explore places to feed my curiosity on interesting geology, and just getting outside to get my mind off technology. I would’ve also put seeing a meteor crater mark on here, the Milky Way, and the Solar eclipse but the list was long already. What phenomena have you seen on your travels? #travel #earthfocus #beautifulearth #phenomenon #travelblogger #travelstories #travelwithme #travelwriter #bloggers #femaleblogger #adventureanywhere #girlswhoexplore #sayyestonewadventures #sheexplores #outdoortherapy #outdooradventures #explorepage #liveyourbestlifenow #reeltoreel #travelreels #findyourpark #getoutside #getoutdoors #exploremore #geology #worldtravel #naturelovers #naturegeography #naturegram #visittheusa #iloveearth #chasingwaterfalls #chasingpeace ♬ Ridetide AMBIENT VERSION – Pop Goes Ambient
