From First Post to First Class

Just kidding. I don’t see First Class coming up any time soon in my future.

The main goal of this blog is to document my progress on getting a working holiday visa in Australia for 2021. You can only do a working summer in Australia until you are 30 years old and I will be about to turn 28 this time next year. I am about to move into a new house and for the next year I will work toward paying off debt, saving money, and starting to cull my belongings so that I’m unattached and ready to begin exploring the world by next June. With coronavirus, obviously everything is up in the air (especially travel-wise), but that’s why I think it’s a good idea to plan now while there’s still time before the age cutoff, and worst case scenario, I will have more money, researched work I’m passionate about pursuing, and hopefully learned that I don’t need so many material things to make me happy. And I’ll have this blog!

For now, I’m Mandy! A 26 year old preschool teacher from Florida. My first time out of the country was in January 2019 when I went to London, Dublin, and Paris. I learned about solo travel, budget travel, I stayed in my first youth hostel and I was absolutely hooked. That was the first time I realized that travelling was attainable even for someone like me, coming from a family with very little money growing up and thinking European vacations were only for the rich. Nine months later I would go back to Paris and then spend a week in a camper van chasing the Northern Lights around Iceland. It felt like something out of a fairytale, or at least someone else’s life, but I had made it my own. A week or two from now, I was supposed to be leaving for my third international trip to Mexico as a treat yourself for practicing Spanish every day for over seis meses, but obviously, a global pandemic derailed that (but I am still practicing Spanish every day!). Now I devour all the travel content I can find and have committed fully to being an ex-pat before the age of 30, even if I start with only a few months in Australia. In the meantime, I am both reminiscing and planning, and immersing myself in all things travel. One of my biggest dreams in life is to one day walk the entire Via Francigena, a 1000+ mile pilgrimage trail from Canterbury, UK to Rome, Italy, but there are so many bucket-list items to explore!

I have had so many friends asking how I manage to travel so often that I’ve finally decided to use this as a way to share some of my tips and to organize the ideas that I begin researching for my own interests, as well as keeping track of my progress toward Australia. I have looked into potential jobs overseas like au pairs, WWOOFing, house-sitting etc. and would love to hear others’ experiences or ideas. I would also love if I could inspire more people to learn to travel cheaply and get to experience more of the world by writing about finding cheap flights, the best times of year to explore certain places, and sharing stories from all over the globe.

The journey begins June 1! Allons y!