My Story
I guess you could say I have the travel bug in my blood!
My “Kiwi” (slang for New Zealander) parents were text-book hippy wanderers and, in the early 70s, managed to drive a VW Kombi Van from London, through France and Spain, and then down the entire African continent… all while I was in utero.
Needless to say, their many travel adventures could easily have been written into a New York Times “bestseller”!
After spending the first two years of my life in Cape Town, South Africa, my parents decided to return to their homeland and family, so we took a three month ship voyage, via Australia, to New Zealand. There, I spent the next 13 years in a small beach community without so much as venturing off the Island!
But then, at age 15, my parents made a huge decision and decided to move all of us to Perth, Western Australia… and thus began my experience of the wider world!
I finished school in Perth and then moved to Sydney on the East Coast for work. It was there that I met my now-husband and in our first few years we lived between Perth and Sydney.
In 1995 we did our first trip overseas (for six weeks!) on a round-the-world ticket and did some road tripping about the USA and the UK. I guess that’s when I really discovered my love for travel. Mind you… this was all before the internet, so planning a road trip back then involved lots of paper maps and guide books!
We loved it so much that we did a 4-week trip again the following year. This trip solidified our desire to live abroad, so 3 years later, after our 2nd baby was born, we moved to Northern California when a job opportunity came up, and after 2 years there, we decided we wanted to stay in the US permanently.
We had identified Seattle as our ideal home, after several visits there, due to it having so many gorgeous lakes, mountains and trees, plus a very ‘hip’ culture with incredible food! However, to move there would require new visas, so we made the trek back to Australia and lived in Sydney again for 2.5 years before traversing back over the Pacific to land in Seattle at the beginning of 2004.
Our first 15 years in the US involved a number of different job opportunities, which meant several moves up and down the West Coast. After 4.5 years in super-cool Seattle we moved to the cosmopolitan (and very expensive) city of San Francisco.
After 2.5 years there we finally received our green cards and were able to live and work wherever we wanted! So, we returned to the beautiful Pacific Northwest in 2010 (we had really missed the trees and mountains!), but this time we landed in the southern part of Washington state, just north of Portland, Oregon, in a town called Vancouver (not to be confused with Vancouver, Canada!).
We chose Vancouver because of its proximity to all of our favorite things – 90 mins to ski resorts, 20 mins to downtown Portland (world-renowned for it’s great food, beer and coffee!) and 15 minutes to stunning waterways for boating – as well as its affordability.
Plus Washington State has no State income tax and Oregon has no sales tax, so we got the best of both worlds when we shopped in Portland!
It was during our time in Vancouver that we started to dream about traveling again, now that the kids were teenagers and pretty independent. I decided I wanted to do a trip to Italy for our 20th anniversary, having consumed so many books and TV shows about ancient Rome. My husband really just wanted to go on a vacation without the kids (after many years of our vacation time being used up visiting family in Australia), so he didn’t take much convincing!
Our first trip was (only) 12 days and we squeezed in Rome, the Amalfi Coast, Capri, Tuscany, Venice, the Dolomites and Lake Garda with a fun road trip. We learned a lot along the way (such as how to navigate Italian highway toll booths (the first time was terrifying!), keeping right on the freeway (or you’ll have a crazy Italian driver honking at you from behind) and why its essential to have a small car when driving in Italy! But oh what a blast we had!
That first trip to Italy really whet our appetite for travel, and we decide that we were going to go somewhere every year – primarily in Europe, since we had added so many places to our bucket list after that first trip to Italy! What ensued over the following 5 years was somewhat of an obsession with planning our next vacation (yes, I am one of those weird people that loves to plan things). I would literally be thinking about ideal itineraries and planning them out before we had even departed on the current trip!
Needless to say, we have now done a number of EPIC vacations, usually somewhere between 2 and 3 weeks in length, and mostly involving a least a bit of a road trip (or a ferry trip if you’re in Croatia).
While I feel I still have so much to learn, I am becoming very well versed how to put together a great itinerary (including programming in enough chill time for the hubby, because I tend to want to go, go, go, while he really wants some time out!), and have acquired some great travel hacks.
I have also developed a new love for photography and taking a little extra time to capture the perfect shot – thank goodness for the ever-improving technology of our phones that means we don’t have to lug a big camera bag all over the world anymore!
In 2020 we moved to LA to be closer to our adult kids, which was a huge change from the Pacific Northwest, but we are discovering the beauty of southern California and relishing in being close to LAX airport – making overseas travel that much cheaper! We had to cancel 2 vacations to Europe and one to Australia, thanks to COVID-19, but that just gave us more time to plan our next trip!
So that’s a little about me and my journey to becoming a lover of travel. I hope my blog gives you the inspiration you need to get started, as well as lots of practical tips and itinerary ideas for designing your next Divine Vacay.
Cheers,
Bree
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only a page.”- St Augustine
