Wanting to travel in a family of staycationers

Hi everyone, welcome to my travel blog! My name is Simona and I have been travelling for five years.

However, it has not always been this way. Indeed, I was born in a family of chronic staycationers: my parents have always spent most of the year working and, once they got their PTO, they would always spend it at home, cleaning or fixing something instead of taking an actual break.

To be clear, luckily I have never grown up poor so, although they could not have afforded some long and luxurious holidays, I am quite confident that my parents could have travelled way more, but it was probably not one of their goals.

During my childhood, this aspect did not bother me a lot, in fact it was quite the opposite: after all, I could spend the whole summer playing with my Barbie dolls without any novelty disrupting my plans. However, once I started high school, I took modern languages classes and started travelling more often as I went to multiple study trips abroad, especially to France and Germany.

For the first couple of years, this handful of trips seemed okay to me, but around the fourth year of high school, I saw and heard about my classmates going on holidays abroad with their families and visiting many interesting places, and I slowly started envying them. While I was visiting one place a year, they were visiting two or three, and I wanted to do that, too.

So, once I turned 18, I committed to travelling as much as I could by myself, so that I could fill in the "gap" in being well-travelled that I perceived.

Since my personal funds were limited to say the least, and since I didn't want to wait anymore, in one year I planned and budgeted a 4-days solo trip to Venice, Italy, hoping to kickstart my adult life in the best way possible.

But, it didn't really kickstart until 2022 because of the pandemic. During that year, I managed to stay one month in Berlin and a few days in Southern Germany. These were still quite similar to the trips I did in high school, as the former was a summer course and the latter a partner city exchange, but they helped revive my will to plan and book trips, so much so that I attended a travel design workshop at university.

Thanks to that workshop, I landed an internship in the travel field and I presented my final project - a tour program - during a tourism-related event in my city.

These experiences made me realize that I had some potential to somehow transform my passion for travelling into a paid job. While extremely grateful for my current internship, however, I also wanted to do something more related to writing, where I could explore any part of the aforementioned potential that might not have been used in my current job and keep my other passions alive - writing and yapping.

Now don't get me wrong, the feeling of inadequacy has not gone away at all and I still feel like I do not have enough experience to talk about travelling, but I will do my best to bring quality content.

Speaking of content, as of now I will focus on my personal favourite types of travel, namely solo and budget travelling, for people who do not travel for a living.

I also believe that respecting the culture of the country that you're visiting and in being as sustainable as possible, so I will also commit to giving some tips about this aspect.

So, if you're looking for a way to realistically travel for cheap and while on a 9-to-5 schedule, you have found the right profile!