interview with travel blogger Lauren Juliff

As many of you may know, my dream career is to become some form of travel writer - be it blogger, journalist or columnist - and so I'm constantly trying to find out more about this fairytale lifestyle. I spend a lot of time reading National Geographic Traveller and checking out cheap flights to Japan and Brazil, and, of course, stalking amazing blogs like Neverending Footsteps. So when I contacted Lauren Juliff and practically begged for an interview, and she agreed, I was overjoyed. Finally, those little niggling questions about travel blogging could be answered - and shared on this here blog.

Again, thank you to Lauren for letting me conduct this interview in the first place, it's so, so awesome that you agreed.

~*~

Have you always wanted to travel? -

- I think so. I often tell the story of heading off on holiday with my family at around age five and having the most miserable week of my life. We were staying in a caravan on the British coast and it rained continuously, and all we did was argue. The night before we were due to head home, I burst into tears because I didn’t want to leave. I’d had one of the most miserable experiences of my life, but I still wanted to be away from home. 

That pretty much continued throughout my life. I’d spend all year counting down the days until I could go away, and then spend my holiday profoundly depressed that I’d have to head home in two weeks. I should have realised then that long-term travel was something I probably wouldn’t be able to avoid. 

How did you originally afford your travels? How do you continuously fund them now? -

putting my life at risk for this here blog (review of the month)

Once I had received this necklace in the post, I proceeded to open it, note its beauty, and then put on my hiking boots and walk up to the field near my house. After taking multiple photographs on the way up, I then noticed a small gap at the side of the field, hidden only by brambles and nettles. Naturally, I pushed those aside and crawled through the small hobbit hole. Avoiding spear-like bough after spear-like bough, I found myself to be in what could only be described as the centre of a reasonably deep forest. Due to my (possibly irrationally dangerous) wanderlust, I began to venture further into the forest, hopelessly trying to note which direction I had previously turned in. The trees, all around me, were placed in an almost symmetrical pattern, meaning that every. single. direction. looked exactly the same. 

Noticing a tree with branches just dying to be photographed, I began to stray towards it so I could get a good shot with the ever falling sunset in the background of the necklace. Suddenly, the same unformentioned dog from earlier (which had raced towards me, teeth baring, jumping about and terrifying me until an owner comforted me by stating that "she gets a bit excitable" to which I snapped "YES I GATHERED") paced towards me once again, before recognising me and running back only to terrorise some other stranger. However, in my panic of possible imminent death, I decided to follow the path which the dog was now on, due to the fact that people were obviously there and the footway would lead me out. Long story short, the necklace is still somewhere deep within the forest, lost, as once I was distracted by the dog and followed it I quickly came across ripped barbed wire, a fleshless bone and thus ran the hell out of there - straight into, can you imagine, a fox. Honestly, the drama was euphoric.

Thank you to Caleb for sending me a beautiful necklace to review on this here blog, although essentially because of said necklace I did, in fact, almost die. Kind of. If you count an almost dog-attack and almost fox-attack. Which I do. And I hope you do too because I tried to word that as dramatically as possible so that you would be intrigued and want to carry on reading. Let me know if it worked.