Hello, and welcome to my new blog, Jet Lagged & Hungry. In 2017, I decided I wanted to sell my business, pack up and take off on a trip around the world. After convincing my ever-so-accommodating husband that I wasn’t losing my mind, we started planning. We saved every extra penny, took side-jobs and sold everything we could think of in preparation. In April of 2018, we packed our backpacks and set off on our journey.
The trip lasted 18 months and I tried my best to blog my way through each country. After returning to normal life, travel became a distant memory. I stopped posting, stopped looking at my blog all-together and eventually let my website hosting lapse. I saw the messages from Bluehost but thought I could always renew it later. Then the pandemic hit and I stopped thinking about it. What can you write in a travel blog while sheltering in place?
After some time, I decided to get back to it, even if only to read through old adventures and get inspired during the pandemic, remembering the good times. It turned out, when BlueHost said my account was expiring and I should renew it before they take it down, they meant it. They eventually deleted it all.
It took me a while to accept that the website I’d created years ago while sitting at my favorite coffee shop in Hawai’i Kai could be gone. I’d spent countless hours writing in guesthouses in Portugal, Bosnia, India and Turkey. The effort of editing photos or re-writing posts because they didn’t sound quite right was all wasted. Frantic, I scoured the internet looking for archives. I contacted WordPress and BlueHost with no luck. My denial lasted a few months before I finally chose to change my mindset. I was 100% to blame and should have taken the emails seriously. This wasn’t a terrible thing that happened to me, it’s something I let happen. And maybe, I’d done it on purpose.
I chose the name for my old blog, “Aloha and Arrivederci” while living in Hawai’i, to represent my love for the place I called home and for the country I always wanted to revisit. A few years and a few lessons later, I became embarrassed of the name. I was yet another mainlander taking a beautiful Hawaiian word and claiming it as my own. My intentions were to honor the feeling of Aloha in all my travels, but that didn’t matter if I was appropriating the culture I loved so much. I’m not Hawaiian or Italian, and now I see that I should be cherishing those cultures in a more meaningful way.
So here I am, starting over from scratch. Sharing my love of travel, adventure and storytelling in a way that feels more authentic and respectful. I’m eager to share what I’ve learned so far, while continuing my quest to understand more about the world and myself. It’s great to be back and I’m glad you’re joining me for the ride.