About Me

My Travel Story

If you’ve ready the “About” page on any other travel blog, you’ll know that this is the part of the website where I tell you all about how I was an adventurous child. I’ll talk about how I grew up and just knew that I needed to escape my small town and see the world. Then, before I knew it, I was on some epic backpacking journey across all seven continents.

Does that sound cliché? Maybe. But I feel like that’s the story I read on every other travel blog. But for me, absolutely none of that is true. So what does my travel story actually look like?

I did grow up in a small town and often complained that it was boring and there was nothing to do. In my defense, it was small town. I grew up on the outskirts of a town of 10,000 people. While many of my school friends lived in “the city”, I was one of the rural “country kids”. My summers and weekends were spent trying to figure out what fun we could have in our backyard or on the computer.

But deep down inside, I think I was ok that. My hometown didn’t offer much and the outskirts of town wasn’t any more exciting. We found our own fun and made it work, but I never really thought about travel. At least, I never thought about it the way I think about it now.

Technically, my family traveled, but it looks nothing like my travels now days. Our family summer vacations consisted of weekend trips to campgrounds around northeast Wisconsin. I visited family who lived out of state and my family road tripped to Ohio to go to Cedar Point Amusement Park. While I did travel internationally before graduating high school, that travel consisted of trips to all inclusive resorts in Mexico. At the time, that’s what I thought travel was. I hadn’t explored much and I didn’t really have a desire to do so.

Despite all of that, when I got to college, I signed up for a study abroad program in Ireland and flew to Limerick in January 2014. As cliche as it sounds, this is when I really discovered travel and how much I enjoyed it. In my four months of Europe, I traveled all over Ireland as well as some parts of England, Scotland, and Italy. Again, this sounds super cliche, but it’s what happened. I needed to actually get out and travel to see what I was missing.

I returned from my study abroad with dreams of travel. I wanted to keep exploring and seeing new places. I had just gotten my first tastes of real travel and I just wanted more.

However, reality looked a little different. Instead of traveling, I finished my final year of college. I graduated and started a “real job” to start paying off the thousands of dollars of student debt I’d accumulated over the last four years. It was time to enter the real world and that didn’t involve jetting off to some new destination every weekend.

It took some time, but three years after leaving Europe, I was finally on a plane back. My mom and I spent ten days in London and the Scottish highlands. It was a fantastic trip and showed me that despite the years had passed, my wanderlust was still there and travel was still so exciting.

Over the next few years, I traveled at every chance I got, gaining more confidence as I embarked on solo trips. My student debt was paid off and I felt stable enough in my own apartment, I started traveling as much as I could. Each trip seemed to get just a little more adventurous. I had big plans for the future and it looked amazing.

Then came Covid.

My travel plans, like everyone else’s, went out the window and everything ground to a halt. I wasn’t traveling and I wasn’t even planning any trips because I had no idea when it would be safe to start traveling again. Still, I kept thinking about travel and what I would do once things actually got back to normal.

It took well over a year before I left Wisconsin again. Even then, it was just across the state line to Iowa, so I barely left the state. But I was traveling again and it felt amazing. Just like what happened when I returned to Europe after that three year break when I finished college, my wanderlust was still there.

The summer of 2021 was sprinkled with long weekend trips around the Midwest. Then in fall, my mom joined me on an epic road trip through the American Southwest and I solo roadtripped through New England. 2022 was even busier with road trips through more of the Midwest, Colorado, and the U.S. East Coast.

Finally in 2023, I traveled internationally again. I went back to Europe on an amazing 10 day journey through France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. And later that year, I flew to South America for the first time and spent 9 days in Chile. Plus there were plenty of trips around the United States sprinkled in the middle. 2024 just kept building on it with trips to Scandinavia, Colombia, and plenty more of the United States.

Now in 2025, I’m still trying to figure out exactly where my travels will take me this year, but I’m enjoying as much travel as I can. And if I’m not traveling, I’m preparing for the next trip. It definitely keeps me busy, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

So Why Start a Blog?

AtlasObsession isn’t my first travel blog. I actually kept one during my study abroad as a way to keep friends and family updated. I treated it more as an after thought and it has long since been deleted from the internet. However a few bits of those old posts have found their way into several posts across this site.

As I traveled more, the idea of a blog has always been in the back of my head. I love to talk about travel, but my friends and family don’t necessarily want to listen to every little detail that I have to share.

The period of no travel during the height of the Coronavirus pandemic made me start revisiting my old trips. One day, out of boredom, I wrote the first draft of an article. Since then, I’ve revised, written more, and decided that I want to share it with the rest of the world.

Then, after a lot of discussions about blog names and way too much research on how to get a blog started, AtlasObsession was born.

Why AtlasObsession?

Coming up with a good blog name is not easy. As soon as you come up with the perfect name, you learn someone else has already taken it. But eventually, AtlasObsession popped up and I loved it.

Not too long after discovering my love travel, I developed a love of maps. Whether that’s staring at GoogleMaps for hours while planning a trip or collecting the free tourist maps in every city I visit, I do love a good map.

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