Hi! My name is Haley, and I am a solo, female traveler who has made it my mission to dedicate my twenties to traveling and crossing off all my bucket list items! I’ve traveled to 20 different countries, with 13 of those solo traveling, have visited nearly every major U.S. city, and only have 6 more states before I check off the entire U.S.! At age 26 now, it is funny to look back on the last few years, because I never would have thought that my life would be focused on traveling. When I turned 20, I was a junior in college, pursuing a marketing degree, and pictured my life focused on climbing the corporate ladder, probably married with a kid or two by now. So, to say that I detoured from the original path would be an understatement.
How did I get here? That is a very loaded question, but ultimately, it started during my senior year at college. I graduated in the spring of 2020, in the midst of the worldwide pandemic. In the winter leading up to graduation, I had booked my very first solo trip to meet up with a travel group to tour around Southern Europe for 6 weeks. Obviously, this was cancelled due to Covid, which led me to a summer where I started re-evaluating my entire life.
To say that I had a quarter life crisis at age 22 might be a little extreme, but like many people, the pandemic had me asking myself a lot of life questions; What did I want to get out of my life? If I could do anything, what would that look like? Is the corporate world really what I want for my career? In the end, I came back to the same answer- there was nothing I wanted more than to get out of Minnesota, my home state where I was born and raised, and see the world.
I set a date, made a plan, and started saving every penny to put towards traveling. I figured that eventually the world would have to find some type of “normalcy” again, and when it did, I would be ready to go. I was able to set out on my first solo adventure in the fall of 2021, where booked a one way ticket to Dublin, and spent the following 10 months solo traveling around Europe. I stayed in hostels, managed to get around countries where I didn’t know the language, made lifelong friends, and was ultimately hooked on being in new places and experiencing things outside of my comfort zone. I was able to cross off hundreds of bucket list experiences in these months abroad and did it all by myself. It is a year that changed my life forever and taught me so much.
I came back to Minnesota in July of 2022, excited to be surrounded by family and friends again, and have a bit of a long-missed routine. However, being in a routine did not suite me as well as I thought and this feeling did not last too long, as I started dreaming of new travels soon after landing back in the U.S. After a few months of questioning what to do now that my big year abroad was over, a friend reached out with an opportunity to apply to become a flight attendant. Not knowing much about the industry, I was excited to explore a career that would allow me to travel full time. I sent in my application, and a few months later I was flown out to begin training. I have now been a flight attendant for just under 2 years. This job definitely has its highs and lows, but I am grateful for a job that allows me to travel full time for my career and continue to explore new places and cities!
Traveling has become a part of who I am, in my identity. There is so much to learn about life when you’re in new places and immersed in different cultures. I love meeting people from all around the world who have a different background, getting to learn from them and their lives, and finding commonalities between us as well. I know that traveling is such a privilege to have in this life and I feel very fortunate to have been able to experience as much of the world as I have. My mission with this blog is to help those planning their own adventures, lend advice where I can as a female traveler, and hopefully inspire your own bucket list to grow in new experiences and places.
Thank you for being here and exploring with me!
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