I have traveled alone. I have traveled with company. I have stayed in hotels that had mints on their pillows. I have stayed in places I hope to never see again, like that hostel-trailer park outside of Rome. I have lived in a foreign country. I still have a home in Denver, Colorado. I have a real family and a few foreign host families in Florence and Sorrento. I haven’t been everywhere, nor do I always remember where I have been. I do know travel is not something that can be solely lumped into a category or niche. How I travel and how you travel align simply because we go.
Since I was three months old, I have been traveling, beginning with a flight to Orlando to experience the magical world of Disney from a newborn’s perspective. Don’t ask me if I remember every family car trip across the United States or every French village I have visited. Ask me if I remember the act of travel, the night before excitement, the wonder of seeing something I had only imagined. I remember travel.
From the minute I could make travel my lifestyle, beginning in college with frequent study abroad semesters in Italy, I fell for the country hard and fast. I spent over a year studying in some of Italy’s most idyllic locales of Florence, Sorrento and Sicily. I furthered my travel education by mastering Italian, a language so similar to the redheaded language, one of passion, exaggeration, rarity and great romance. I would return to Italy again and again and again, forever captivated by the lone boot in the Mediterranean.
SuzyGuese.com might not be a set niche, a set category of travel some people enjoy and others don’t. Rather, I aim to get back to the basics of travel, the conversations with strangers in the train station in Austria, my packing mishaps, and those saints of travel you meet along the way. The basics of travel must also focus on the practicalities when it comes to budgeting for three months in Europe or figuring how to prevent that Belfast thief who enjoyed the fruits of my wallet from doing the same to you on your travels.
I started this travel site not because I left some job I hated or because I needed an escape from some job I had. Since graduating from college in 2009, I have never worked in an office and I don’t intend to in the future. I made travel writing my focus from day one of what many call the beginning of life, when you are no longer confined by semester timelines. I’m not looking for a career break. My career is my break.
Join me as I travel with a redheaded temperament, where I can’t guarantee I won’t blow my top when an airline mistreats me or when I encounter those dreaded travel braggarts. More often than not, my travels are laced with hints of that redheaded temperament. Annoyance, temper, sarcasm or passion may weave their way into my words, enough proof that my hair color is indeed natural. Young, old, solo, popular, broke, rich, travel is all the same to me no matter how you go about it.
