Real, simple travel
I share my real travel experiences to help you make the most out of every trip.
“Travel is about the gorgeous feeling of teetering in the unknown.”
— Anthony Bourdain
What You’ll Find Here
Everything on this website is based on my own actual travel experience. My goal is to provide a realistic look at what you can expect from a destination. (That’s why my photos have people in them and are not heavily edited or staged.) I love sharing tips and lessons I learned from my travels, to help yours go a little more smoothly.
My travel style currently errs on the side of luxury, but accessible. (Though, I have definitely paid my dues as a budget traveler.) I’m a minimalist packer, and rarely check bags. I love city travel the most and thrive on “hustle and bustle.” Public transportation is my jam and I do not turn up my nose at touristy things. One thing I’m not is a foodie, but I promise what I lack in restaurant reviews I make up for in flight reviews.
Lastly, I travel with my husband (Kenny) and one child (Zoe, born in 2020). If you are traveling with kids, you’ll find a healthy dose of family content here as well.
My Story
For as long as I can remember, I have been writing. As a kid, I filled notebook after notebook with stories and dreams and lists. In college, I went to journalism school to try to put that passion to work. Unfortunately, it turned out that my love of writing couldn’t outweigh my anxiety over interviews and deadlines. I pursued a somewhat unrelated career in recruitment analytics.
It was around that time when I put my first words on the internet. I started a little lifestyle blog called EmJoyable (RIP). I wrote daily and unabashedly, sharing every idea, recipe, outfit and craft project that I could think of. That blog didn’t see a lot of traffic, but I didn’t care.
My love for travel was not as inherent as my love of writing. It was a much slower burn. I didn’t travel much as a kid, other than visiting family and the occasional trip to Disney World. My first foray into international travel wasn’t until my senior year of high school, when I found myself in Germany as a foreign exchange student. I loved that trip, but I still wasn’t hooked on travel.
It was another 6 years before I left the country again, this time to run the Berlin Marathon with my husband. We paired Berlin with Oktoberfest in Munich and my first trip to London, and those were the two cities that lit the fire in me. I couldn’t stop traveling after that. Even to this day, those are still two of my favorite places in the world.
In 2017, my love affair with travel got serious. That year, my husband and I quit our jobs to backpack around the globe for a year. That trip lasted 15 months, and we bopped our way through 94 cities in 40 countries and 6 continents. That’s when I started my second blog. After years of hard work, that blogging hobby finally became my actual career.
Spoiler Alert: Emjoyable Explores is not that blog. This is a new endeavor that means just a little bit more — I started Emjoyable Explores as an homage to my younger self. It combines everything I learned about running a successful travel blog with the unabashed authenticity that defined my earliest era of writing. Back then, I wasn’t worried about my blog being “good,” I just wanted to put goodness out into the world. Emjoyable Explores is all about getting back to that, but with much more useful content.
Emjoyable Explores is a destination for real travel advice from a real traveler. I hope I am able to live up to that. I hope you find what you’re looking for and more. Thank you for being a part of this journey.