I’m Andrea (duh). I’m taking a break from a career in the tech world to travel and explore other parts of the world… a different kind of venture, if you will. This blog documents the best stories from my travels, and will also offer tips and guides to help you plan your own adventures.

Why the career break?

I decided to start this blog to chronicle my travel experiences and adventures while taking time off from work. After fifteen years of working at tech startups, I was fortunate enough to see one of the companies I had joined at an early stage (employee #8 and first woman, to be more precise!) have a (relatively) successful exit. This afforded me some freedom and provided the perfect opportunity to step back from the daily grind, take stock of my life and explore my passions outside of my professional ambitions.

How did the travel obsession begin?

Gradually… and then all at once. Growing up, we did not travel internationally as a family and I did not study abroad in college. While I was focusing on my career and building companies over the years, I simultaneously caught the travel bug. In 2014, I moved to New York City from the west coast to open my company’s second office. I loved the energy, excitement and hustle of New York, and it was there that I met a group of friends that were constantly planning trips, talking about travel and jetting off to all corners of the world. Soon, my girls’ trips became treks to places like Costa Rica, Greece, Croatia, the Bahamas, Amsterdam, Provence, Bali, Barcelona and Iceland.

Around the same time, my little brother had embarked on his own odyssey, subletting his San Francisco apartment and taking on a software development job that allowed him to code from anywhere in the world, in any time zone. After a string of long term relationships, I suddenly found myself single for the first time in ten years and New York’s proximity to Europe made it easy to take quick trips to some of the most incredible travel destinations in the world. While I was still very focused on my work life, I started to plan long weekends to meet my brother in Paris, London, Mexico City, Stockholm, San Sebastian, Rome, Buenos Aires, Sydney and Hong Kong (okay, I may have spent a bit longer traveling to those last two cities, but I legitimately did do Buenos Aires over a long weekend).

My co-workers started to ask which country I was visiting over the weekend, I began to spend what little free time I had planning more trips, I became engrossed reading books and blogs about travel. Clearly, I was hooked.

Why a blog?

I like to travel, I like to write. When I decided to quit my job to travel for a year (give or take), I knew I would need some ongoing projects to keep myself focused and give myself a purpose. When I started to tell people my plans to leave work and travel, they kept telling me, “You should start a blog.” I agreed. It is a way for my family and friends to follow along with me on my journeys (and hopefully some of them will be joining me in person as well!)

In addition, people are frequently asking me for advice on where they should go, where they should stay, what they should do when they get there, etc. By documenting everything on a website, it will make it a lot easier to just point people to a link vs. finding my list of recommendations for whatever city and copying and pasting into an email complete with witty comments.

Even if nobody reads this, it is a great tool to keep myself thoughtful and to reflect on my experiences, and it sure will be fun to look back on when the time is done and I’m back at work (at least I hope so).

What’s next, when this year is over?

I don’t know. I haven’t been unemployed since I started my first professional job at age 23. Nor have I taken off a week, or even a day, in between jobs (I actually had my last day at one company on a Friday, moved from San Francisco to Seattle over the weekend, and started day one at the next company on Monday). So, it’s quite daunting to suddenly not have a routine, to not have any idea what my life will look like in a year. But I know doing the scary thing is the right thing. In the meantime, I’m just focused on living in the moment, enjoying visiting new places, seeing new things and meeting new people. I’ll just have to wait and see what the future will bring…

Read more about how I began planning my exciting next venture here.