Back to Where It Started

Hey, Claire the Explorer here. It’s been three years since I last posted and nearly seven years since I started this blog. Remember me? 

Every once in a while, I like to go back and read the posts from my younger self to re-live the events during those years and reflect upon the thoughts and feelings experienced during those moments. I had hoped to continue the blog after moving back to the States, but life fell into a routine, and the juices of creativity rarely flowed.

Now that I am no longer tied to a 40-hour work week, I suddenly regained the passion to write. (Oh by the way, I left my job two months ago. Surprise! You might ask why and what my plans are for the future, but let’s save that for a chat over coffee, shall we?) This was also partially ignited by the decision to take my parents to Spain and Portugal this year to visit the two countries where I feel the most at home in Europe. Going back to the place where this blog first started seems like the perfect opportunity to revive this little hobby of mine. 

I guess you can say both Sam and I have been bitten by the travel bug. We have made an effort to travel to somewhere overseas every year. You see, to take the stress out of deciding where to go every year, we now actually, I mean literally, draw the places out of a hat. We each wrote down our travel bucket lists on to strips of paper, and tossed them all into a hat. Every year around Christmas or New Year, we will draw one or two out of the hat, and voila, that’s our destination for the new year and we will have plenty of time to plan! 

As much as I regret it, it is too late for me to go back and write about most of the trips we have taken since my moving back to the States in 2011. But I can at least attempt to complete the timeline, right? So far, we have visited…

2012 – Sam surprised me with a trip to Florence, Italy for my 25th birthday! I managed to write a short post about the first day, then just got lazy and posted all the photos together after the trip.


2013 – We got married and spent our honeymoon in Jamaica. There is actually a legit post about this!

2014 – This was a busy year! Unfortunately we didn’t get to travel together, but separately we made it to Hawaii (solo Claire), Singapore and Namibia (solo Sam)!