Our Journey: From Broke Backpackers to Full-Time Travel Bloggers
Our story takes us back to 2016, when we were just two young backpackers with nothing but a bit of money in our bank accounts and a dream to travel the world. Never in our craziest dreams did we imagine what would come next.
We went from two single backpackers on a one-way ticket to building a life of full-time travel! Looking back, it’s kind of wild to think about how far we’ve come — not just in distance, but in lifestyle too.
We’ve gone from living a traditional lifestyle where the forecast predicted 9-5 jobs, comfy cushions, and a mortgage to living a completely unconventional lifestyle of full-time travel without a home base and nothing but our suitcases and laptops with us.
In this post, we’re going to share our story of how we went from young, broke backpackers to full-time travel bloggers who now make a living from travelling to incredible places around the world! So grab a cup of coffee (we’ve got ours), and come along for the ride…
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Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links which means if you decide to use the links and make a valid purchase, we will receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. Thank you for your support!
Have you heard that song by Men at Work? It goes like this “A land down unda”. Yeah, that’s where we met, in the small town of Rainbow Beach in Queensland.
We were both doing an East Coast Australia road trip with our friends – Jo with a friend from Denmark, and Dom with two British friends he’d met in Sydney – and pretty early into both of our trips, we met in a small sleepy town called Rainbow Beach.
The town is known for being the gateway to Fraser Island (now named K’gari), which is the trip we were both going on, and, randomly (luckily), we were actually in the same hostel room the night before the 3-day trip.
Over the next two nights and three days, we spent most of the time together exploring the world’s largest sand island, enjoying the jeep rides, beaches, floating down the river, and taking in all the cool sights during that trip.
After the trip, we parted ways but stayed in touch and ran into each other again a week later, further up the coast in Airlie Beach, the gateway to the Whitsundays!
Jo continued her pre-planned journey and left Australia to go to the Philippines, but after about 10 days, she decided to hop back on a plane to Australia on a working holiday visa.
Eventually, we both ended up in Sydney and moved in together after knowing each other for only a month, and we’ve lived together ever since (with the exception of some long-distance in between).
Also read: Best Travel Insurance for Working Holiday Visa
From working holiday visas to remote working
At first, I was going to title this section “From Dreams to Reality,” but honestly, our goal was never to work remotely and travel the world. In a way, it just ended up happening based on our situation and our goal of being together, but it wasn’t really a dream of ours (not at first, at least).
As you can probably tell, we love travelling, so for a few years, our goal was to keep travelling and find a way to be together. Our visas in Australia expired, so we had to find a different country to go to together.
Since Dom is from Canada and Josie is from Denmark, we were a bit limited visa-wise (and we weren’t old enough for partnership visas at the time), so our best option was to do working holiday visas.
After Australia, we moved to New Zealand for a year, where we lived and worked in Milford Sound. From then on, we moved to Denmark for a year, where Dom ended up doing a working holiday visa while Jo started university.
While Josie was in school studying, we were planning a 6-week trip to Canada over the summer holidays. Being a broke student who had tweo pay rent without being able to work made it seemed almost impossible for her to be able to join Dom in Canada, but she refused to accept that.
So instead of saying “I wish I could go”, she asked herself the question “how can I make this work?”.
“How can I make this work?”
With some good computer knowledge, organizational skills, and a willingness to learn, she went online searching for work.
Quite quickly after, she found a freelance gig as a virtual assistant (the skills that made her stand out back then, she still uses to this day in our business).
From there, it was basically a snowball effect of client after client, to the point she was basically making a full-time income working remotely within 6 months of starting her freelance business.
Along the way, my (Dom’s) visa in Denmark expired and couldn’t be renewed, so he decided to move to the Czech Republic on another working holiday visa. A few months later, Josie dropped out of university and joined me in Prague.
There, I also found a way to teach English online, and while we were both doing our own work online, we decided to start our blog, Red White Adventures – a fun project we could do together where we could share our travel experiences with friends and family.
From then on, life has been one big adventure, and we’ve now been running our blog and content creator business for 6 years!
Looking back at everything, it felt more like things just happened – they weren’t necessarily planned. We always wanted to work within the travel industry because we love to travel, but over the years, one thing kind of just led to another.
And here we are today, 9 years later, sharing our experiences and helping others do the same. Never in our wildest dreams would we have thought this was where life would take us, but we’re so grateful!
Creating Red White Adventures
Red White Adventures really just started out as a platform where we shared our travel experiences. Sort of like an online scrapbook with memories from our adventures!
Thanks to Josie’s virtual assistance background and handy technical skills, we managed to set the blog up quite easily. We’d post every two weeks for the first year while we were both working our separate online jobs, and casually growing the blog together.
It’s cheesy but so true, “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey,” and I feel like that’s the way we’ve always felt with the blog. Of course, once we started growing it, the financial benefit was nice, but we always loved the journey and growing the blog together.
We love coffee and going to coffee shops to brainstorm and work together on blog posts, collaboration pitches, travel plans, or ambassador partnerships has always been one of our favourite parts about it.
I truly believe we’ve always enjoyed the journey and still do.
For us, with the blog, there isn’t really a final destination. It’s more about taking it day by day, week by week, and month by month – learning things and improving along the way while also helping people travel, because that’s why we love what we do.
Where are we now?
6 years after starting Red White Adventures (we created this blog in 2019), Jo is now working in our business full time, helping people travel through our blog posts, our digital guide, and on our Instagram @redwhiteadventures.
Like any business, we’ve had challenges and had to pivot slightly along the way. We’ve had months where income was lower than expected (not to mention a pandemic about a year into our journey), but after 6 years, we’ve grown and learnt so much in this industry.
By always learning and growing, it has put ourselves in a very good position to be able to continue doing what we’re doing while helping travellers and like-minded people.
We’re proud to say our blog readers continue to grow monthly (last month, we had 59.000 readers), along with our social media reach and followers.
This is amazing since those (you!) are the people who allow us to keep doing what we’re doing. Thank you so much for being here!
Our goal is to continue growing our platforms and sharing the best advice we can with people. We love connecting with other travellers and helping people visit the locations we’ve been to and love – so we will keep doing that, and we’ll see where Red White Adventures takes us moving forward!
Over the years, we’ve also been very fortunate to have some incredible collaborations with brands that believe in us, such as TravelPayouts, Marketing Greece, and SafetyWing.
What we believe in
After blogging for over 6 years, we’ve learnt a lot about not just the industry, but about ourselves and what we believe in, what we like to share and promote – and what we don’t. We know what our values are and always keep them front of mind, both when travelling and when creating content.
Some of the things we believe in and try our best to share are how to be a responsible traveller, how we slowmad (digital nomads who travel slowly), and always being prepared for your trip (this includes having proper travel insurance!).
We really want to emphasize slow travel. Especially in the digital nomad world, we truly believe that, long term, this is the best way to travel.
Our lives are so fast-paced these days that if we can manage to slow down a little and appreciate the small things in life, we will be happier and make the most of our experiences.
We think this is the best way to make deeper connections with the places you visit, the people you meet along the way, and get a better understanding and appreciation of their culture.
We understand this isn’t exactly possible for everyone, but for us personally, we like to go more off the beaten path and visit places where we can fully immerse ourselves in the culture and get to know the places on a deeper level.
It’s about more than just travelling and checking a place off our bucket list – it’s about connection, understanding, and a deep appreciation for the places we visit.
Important reminder about safety
As a little side note about going more off the beaten path… Some of you might think we’re talking about going to super remote places that some people might not deem as safe (even though sometimes this is also about perceived safety, but that’s a topic for another day). That’s not what we mean.
What we mean is that we go to places that are generally deemed safe, and then we get off the beaten path from there. We don’t just check off the top 10 bucket list items.
We connect with locals, we ask them for their suggestions, and we connect with them through places, culture, and food. And guess what? We’ve always felt safe doing this!
Honestly, after almost a decade of full-time travelling, we’ve never really felt unsafe. The only concern we’ve had with regard to safety is our health – because without our physical and mental health, we wouldn’t be able to continue this lifestyle.
This is why it’s so important (and we can’t stress this enough) to have proper health and travel insurance when travelling. We never travel without it.
If you don’t have travel insurance, we highly recommend checking out SafetyWing. They recently launched their SafetyWing’s Nomad Insurance Complete, making global, long-term coverage possible.
Nomad Insurance Complete isn’t just an “emergency-only” plan; it’s a comprehensive global health-and-travel policy built for people who live abroad long term who want full health insurance with extra travel protections. It even covers you at home with no coverage restrictions!
Learn more about SafetyWing here.
What can you expect from us moving forward?
Moving forward, you can expect to get even more authentic travel experiences from us. With the rise of AI, we believe it’s more important than ever for travel creators to show up authentically and share real travel experiences – which is one of the reasons we decided to create this post in the first place!
Moving forward, we’re going to keep sharing first-hand travel experiences through our blog as well as our newsletters and social media platforms.
Our bi-weekly newsletter includes where we are currently travelling, what’s going on in our life and our business, helpful travel tips to make your life easier, travel discounts, and a whole lot more…
On our social media, you’ll also notice that we’ve shifted from more generic travel inspiration to more detailed travel guides that provide a ton of value about the different destinations we visit.
Moving forward, we want to continue to provide real value through authentic content that will inspire people to travel more and better, while giving a ton of inspiration for where to go and what to do in each destination.
Our goal in the future is to host more meetups, group trips, and coliving experiences, to meet up with awesome travellers from corners of the world. We’re really excited about this, and we hope you are too!
Lets connect
Now you know more about us, we’d love to hear more about you! Please send us an email (hello@redwihteadventures) or follow us on Instagram (@redwhiteadventures) and share one of your favourite travel experiences with us.
We love connecting with other like-minded travellers, and hearing from our readers always makes us so happy – so please reach out!
Now, we’re going to keep working hard and trying to catch up on blog posts that we haven’t had a chance to publish yet. I’m just about to go make myself a warm cup of coffee and enjoy working with this awesome mountain view in the background.
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