About Me
How it Started: 30 States Before 30
When I was a little kid, I grew up imagining I’d become a well‑traveled, curious, and brave woman, someone who moved through the world with ease and wasn’t crippled by shyness. But by my mid-twenties, I was falling short of that image. I’d chosen stability over exploration and routine over curiosity, and I kept cycling through excuses to avoid taking any real chances, even though I was unhappy in my relationship, in the college town where I still lived, and with my career trajectory.
But I didn’t want to be this person forever. I wanted to prioritize travel and growth, so my boyfriend and I planned a road trip to the Grand Canyon. But we scheduled it for, you guessed it, spring of 2020. Needless to say, that trip didn’t happen.
Ultimately, instead of traveling with my partner, the relationship ended, I moved to a new city alone, and I transitioned from an office worker to a remote one. Without built-in interactions with co-workers, the structure of school, and the safety net of old friends, I had to stretch in order to make new friends. I met new people, tried new things, and slowly realized I was capable of more than I’d let myself believe.
As the world gradually reopened and my twenties began to wind down, I no longer had the same fears holding me back and I wanted to pursue travel in earnest. I set myself a challenge: seeing 30 states before I turned 30. When I started the challenge, I had been to nine states. Between 2023 and 2025, I visited 21 more, reaching my thirtieth state exactly one month before my thirtieth birthday. During that period, I visited several of the states with friends, including going on that road trip to the Grand Canyon, but I also began taking solo trips with nothing more than an old backpack, which changed how I saw travel and what I could handle.
A Realization
I thought after I achieved my goal that my hunger for travel would be satiated. Instead, my appetite grew. I found myself daydreaming about places I’d been and places I’d never seen. I desperately wanted to dedicate some real time to traveling, but I told myself it would be too irresponsible. I settled for elaborate fantasies about moving, becoming a nomad, backpacking, anything to briefly feel like I wasn’t going to be still forever.
During this time, I was feeling stuck professionally, personally, and creatively, but I felt I had dug my heels too deep into the life I’d chosen to pull back now. I felt myself slipping back into old patterns: playing it safe, settling into routines, talking myself out of things.
Around then, a friend asked me whether I would make all the same decisions if I could start over. At the time, I said I was happy with my choices, but the question lingered. If I was being honest, I would have traveled more, I would not have settled into a lifesyle so quickly, and I would have given my creative interests a real chance instead of dismissing them as impractical.
I’ve always had shaky mental health, but during this period it nosedived. I quit caring about my job, abandoned all my personal projects, and started drinking far too much to cope with being around others and with being alone. After one particularly terrible and, frankly, scary night, I knew I had to make some adjustments.
Now, I don’t want to imply that travel was the key to fixing my mental health because a.) mental health is ongoing and not something that is *poof* fixed by a single thing, and b.) travel isn’t a magical cure that heals you. But what this period did do was make me realize that the life I had built was not the one I had to maintain, and I certainly didn’t have to maintain a life just because it fell within other people’s expectations of how life in your thirties should look.
Instead, I began to interrogate my thinking and reconsider what I wanted out of life. I was 30 and wishing I had done things different throughout my twenties, and I didn’t want to risk looking back at 40 and wondering why I didn’t try doing what I wanted in my thirties. What I wanted was to travel, and I didn’t have a real reason not to try. I had no real commitments (I was single, no kids, no pets, and I had killed the few plants I tried to raise), and I was lucky enough to have a safety net that included a place I could sell to fund the travels, jobs I could return to, and people who would help me land if things went belly up.
The only thing left in my way was fear, which didn’t feel like a good enough reason to stay put.
A Literary Adventure
After taking a healthy dose of courage, I set a new plan in motion: backpacking the world. I was going to start with backpacking Europe in late spring of 2026 and, if all goes according to plan, backpacking Southeast Asia and Australia in 2027.
For past few years, I’ve tried to read a book set in the places I travel to. To name a few, I read The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver before visiting Arizona, Mystic River by Dennis Lehane before Boston, and A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole before New Orleans. The books often enhanced my experiences, so it was only natural that when I had no clue where to start planning, I turned to books.
I decided to try and read two books from each country I planned to visit. Sometimes the books provided historical or cultural context; sometimes they sparked ideas for places to visit; sometimes they lead me to an author’s hometown or a setting I wanted to explore. They didn’t dictate my itinerary, but they gave me starting point. Plus, I got to read some really great books.
A Quick Note
I know with all the chaos, the uncertainty, and the very real struggles people are facing right now, the world doesn’t exactly need another travel blog. And I know I’m in a fortunate position to take this leap. Not everyone who dreams of travel can step away from their life to do it, and I don’t take that lightly.
Because I have the chance to see new places, meet new people, and be challenged, I want to write about what I encounter with sensitivity and awareness. My perspective is not definitive. It’s just my own and it is evolving, shaped by the people I meet and the things I see.
At the end of the day, this blog is a place to share my experiences with friends and family and a space to write regularly again. It’s part travel journal, part postcards home, and part guidebook based on my experiences and mistakes.
If that’s not something you want to read right now, I understand. But if any of it resonates, I’m glad you’re here!