About tnj4884
Hmmm where to start. We, Tracy and Mikko, are starting this blog kind of in the middle (or at least not the beginning) of what will hopefully be a very long trip. We spent the first 4 weeks in South Africa with about 15 of our best friends to celebrate two of our friends’ wedding. Imagine a week in Capetown, an amazing wedding and then a 3 week road trip with a bunch of your friends. It was so fun and so crazy there was no time to blog, hence the blogging delay.
This blog is about our trip, our experiences and how on earth we are going to manage to keep traveling for as long as we can. We have a budget for about 7 mths, but we’re keeping an eye out for job opportunities and hope to keep this thing going forever. The plan is South Africa, Seychelles, India, Nepal and then SE Asia. We are taking everything one day at a time and leaving ourselves flexible for any adventures or opportunities that may present themselves along the way.
My name is Tracy Johnson and I can say that for the past 7 years travel has been my life.
Early in my last year of university, I had the customary panic of What Next?. I was working part time for a trade magazine for the alcohol industry and was depressed to think that the rest of my life would just be more of the same. I wanted to travel, but had no money and no real way of saving money with the salary I was making. Luckily the editor of the magazine, and my good friend, told me about a visa to work and travel in Australia. I did some research, got the visa, bought the plane tickets and by September the next year I was off to the land down under with about $1,500 in my pocket. This was in 2006. I had no intentions of ever moving back, and I never did.
Long story short, I’ve since lived in Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Honduras, Mexico, Spain, Egypt, crossed the Atlantic in the world’s largest passenger sailboat and eventually ended up in Sweden, where I met my amazing boyfriend Mikko. My CV is a jumble of about 20 plus jobs including waitress, bartender, dance teacher, swim teacher, dive instructor, underwater videographer, hostel receptionist (and temporary manager) and lastly as Project Coordinator for The Swedish Ecotourism Society. I was finally able to settle down, save some money and even get a Swedish passport during my 2.5 years in Sweden. So, now I can do the trip I’ve always wanted to do, but never could afford.
Mikko grew up in a small town in central Sweden before moving to a slightly larger city in the north of Sweden. As exciting as this all was to him, at 19 he moved to a small mountain village in the Dominican Republic. A few month trip turned into 9 mths as he grew closer to his host family and started becoming more a part of the daily village life.
Eventually, he made his way back to Sweden for a couple years. A friend decided to move to Barcelona and due to a growing disdain for Stockholm, an ache for adventure and a lack of any other responisibiliities getting in the way, he moved to Barcelona and stayed there for 4 years.
He eventually moved back to Sweden for a few years and got a nice shiny degree in Construction Management. But haunted by the thoughts of an eternity in Sweden waking up at 5 in the morning to head to a construction site in the snow (and some gentle nudging from me), he decided to take some time off to travel and see if life would present any warmer and more interesting options.
So here we are, with a bit of money, an indefinite amount of time and no plans...
My Travel Map:
