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 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”, so you can see why I said there was nothing to do.

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 again, it’s not l travel now. 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 that, I still signed up for a study abroad program and flew to Limerick, Ireland 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 see new places, but those dreams had to be put on hold. Instead of traveling, I finished my last year of college. I graduated college and started a “real job” to start paying off the thousands of dollars of student debt I’d accumulated. 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. I spent ten days exploring England and Scotland and had a phenomenal time. Despite the time that 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. I was having a wonderful time and it seemed that every year my trips seemed to get just a little more adventurous. I had big plans for the future.

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 school and paid back my loans, 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.

Now in 2024, I’m traveling more than ever. 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.

And although I don’t get to travel as much as I would like (there’s this pesky thing called a “job” that constantly gets in the way), I still try to travel as often as I can.

So Why Start a Blog?

AtlasObsession isn’t my first travel blog. I 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’ve 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.

So why AtlasObsession? 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 like a good map.

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