Why Travel: The Story of an X-Factor Singer Turned Travel Blogger

There comes a time in every woman’s life when a seemingly inevitable clock begins to tick. Mine hit me when I turned 22. My relationships were a mess, I’d thrown away several promising office careers, and was a struggling artist in the Slovak and Czech music scene. Yeah, I know… what does that even mean?!

Well, I was on this TV singing contest you might have heard of (called X Factor), and even after making it to the Top 8, I left the stage with almost no legitimate offers. I later found out that just like many things in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, you can’t get none if you don’t give none. And money is something I’ve never had much of.

Not making it in music right away was killing me. I simply could not picture myself in another office job. It’s not what I wanted! I spent many nights crying and stressing about how the rest of my twenties, thirties, and middle life would go only to find out that I was over complicating everything by being worried. By the time my birthday came around I was out of money. For someone living away from their parents since age 16, that’s rock bottom.

So, now I was just another copywriting freelancer/singer living in Prague with no real reasons to stay or go. My boyfriend, Tomy, on the other hand had been begging me to leave Prague for practically the whole time I’d known him. His situation wasn’t very different than mine in that he was working his butt off to try and get the “techie corporate dream job,” which kept on being a total disappointment because of how many applicants go through the system. After the last job didn’t quite work out, we really had nothing left to hold us down to the otherwise beautiful city that is Prague.

Tomy and I met through work in 2013, where pretty much every aspect of my job relied on his, as his did mine. Throughout our first year together we learned to work together as a team, even doing a few gigs after I quit my job at the startup. In the summer of 2014 we started a line of leather wallets to test how well we could work together. The project was a success! And the ideas started brewing…

It’s incredible what perspective one can gain from something as simple as an “escape from reality.”

Honestly, taking the first plunge was the most difficult part for me. Reducing all of my belongings to just one carry-on suitcase was difficult, but having to leave my precious dog, Ruby in California with my mom was even harder. Tomy and I vowed to return for her in early 2015.

Once the bags were packed and the dog was thousands of miles away, it was time to pack our bags and go. We chose the island of Gran Canaria as our first destination because of its excellent weather conditions and because we had a nice offer to work on a project there for the month of October. And now here we are on our first grand adventure and loving it!

Only three weeks in and we’ve already gone hiking for the first time, taken surfing lessons, trekked through a desert, learned some Spanish (zumo (thoo-moh or soo-moh) means juice… I already speak Central American Spanish, where juice is jugo (hoo-goh)), launched a blog, mapped out our next destinations until the winter holidays, and more!

It’s incredible what perspective one can gain from something as simple as an “escape from reality.” Better yet, is the feeling of freedom one can earn by accepting that the escape is the reality. I’m no longer crying and freaking out about what I’m going to do next, but rather planning and making decisions about the things I want to see and do on a day-to-day basis. Life is about living in the moment!

And that ticking clock? It’s gone.