Hello there, and thanks for stopping by!

I’m Theresa, and you have stumbled upon the labor of love that is my travel blog.

So who am I exactly?

So who am I exactly?

I am your every day accountant, with the travel dreams of a nomad, but the introvert tendencies of a homebody. I live right outside Cleveland, OH with my husband and puppy. I am clearly obsessed with travel, but in my free time I am also all about yoga, pie and a little vino from time to time.

I work full time as an accountant, and every year I squeeze as much time out of my vacation days as possible to get out of town with my hubby. This could be near or far, and we are always on a budget. That’s not to say we are “budget travelers”, but we certainly aren’t luxury either. We just figure out what we have to work with, and make it happen!


How was Fueled By Wanderlust born?

To be honest, it had never occurred to me to start a blog until after three years of planning trips with my hubby.

That all changed when I started planning our first trip to Europe, which consisted of a 10 day trip to England and Scotland.

This was the longest trip I’d ever planned, and was something I seriously doubted I’d ever get to do in my lifetime.

There are a few reasons for this. One big one was I assumed it would be too expensive. The second reason is that it was way outside of my comfort zone. I’m a bit of an anxious flyer, and it was a longer flight than I’d ever taken that required crossing an ocean. Plus I was intimidated by the fact that it was a whole new country on a whole other continent that I knew very little about. To top it all off, I thought I had to live my life on the timeline of getting all of my fun in before the age of thirty, after which I’d be required to start having kids and any kind of travel fun would be over forever (or at least until retirement).

Thankfully, I decided to let all that stuff go, and instead to allow myself to venture outside my
comfort zone. This was not due to any extraordinary power that I have, but rather the resolve to do something despite what my mind or other outside forces are telling me.

In this blog, I want to prove to you and everyone else out there that you can overcome these same fears and limitations if there is something that you want to do.

I’d love to tell you that the fears eventually go away, but the truth is that I still face them all the time. However, those negative voices do quiet down over time and become easier to manage. Thanks to experience, I now know how to plan in advance financially for all the things I want to accomplish. I also know what my travel anxiety triggers are, so I know how to avoid them or better deal with them as they come up. I also now know that everyone’s journey to starting a family looks different, and it’s definitely not a one size fits all.

I’m here to help you plan for your travels, and to help you stop getting in the way of your own dreams.

There is no time better than now to start changing your mindset. I guarantee that if you want something badly enough, there is a way to make it happen, even if it cannot happen immediately. I don’t care if your only goal is to go to a beach – any beach. If you work hard and plan accordingly, you will find a way.


My early non-travelling days

I wasn’t always the traveler I am today. My family went on a couple vacations to the Jersey Shore growing up, but that was pretty much the extent of it until I graduated from college. Despite this, I was always curious about other countries and certainly exposed myself to anything travel related as much as I could. I remember having an Atlas when I was little that I loved to flip through. In high school I watched “Passport to Europe with Samantha Brown” and took Spanish and French. I even hosted a French exchange student in my junior year. Unfortunately in college, being the poor student that I was, I was not able to take the opportunity to go abroad like so many other students do. However, I continued taking Spanish even though I had no practical use for it!

Unfortunately, I was similar to other students in that I left college with a nice heap of student loan debt. My husband and I focused like crazy on getting it paid off as soon as we could. It took us a few years, but we got most of it paid off and that’s when the travel started. Our first trip was our honeymoon and we have not stopped exploring together since then.


How we make travel happen

Every year we do our best to make the most out of the time available to us to make trips. We try to plan in a way where we have sufficient time to truly experience each destination without using too many vacation days from work. We budget to ensure we do not return from a trip buried in credit card debt. It takes work, but I enjoy doing it and it’s the reason why I have been able to travel to such amazing places!

How we make travel happen

The most important lessons I have learned are to travel slow and have gratitude. The more I travel it becomes less about checking destinations off a “bucket list” and more about experiencing the places I visit. Plan every trip assuming you will return and don’t feel like you need to see it all in one go just because you think that’s what everyone else is doing. We all see and experience things at our own pace, and there is nothing wrong with that.


What can you expect from this blog?

Here are the main topics you can expect to find on Fueled By Wanderlust:

Posts about my favorite place: St. John USVI
Travel itineraries to help you plan better trips
Budget tips to afford more travel

I always strive for authenticity – something we are all too aware is lacking in our culture today. I love to write about the various places I visit and in general have positive things to say. However, since I pay for my own trips, I have no reason to hold back on giving my honest opinion, for better or worse.

To keep my blog unique, I take all my own photos, write all my own words, and plan all of my own trips. This may not lead to perfection, but what it does lead to is real and unique content that is fun to write about.

To be honest, I am quite disillusioned with social media at the moment, and the way that it has impacted travel. I can’t help but wonder if many people are really traveling for the experience, or if their main motivation is getting the perfect photo. For that reason, I am not the most active on social media, and have trouble finding the motivation to post. That said, I do try to keep in touch from time to time, and you can find me on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

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Thanks again for stopping by, and I hope to see more of you around here. Happy traveling!

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