A Twenty-Something Traveler Turns 30

So that finally happened.

When I started writing Twenty-Something Travel I was 25 years old. I was living at home, dating random guys on OkCupid and planning, desperately hoping really, that I would get the chance to travel full-time for just one year. Just a year and then I would be ready to settle down (ha.) The idea that I would one day be thirty, and that I might still want to travel, much less blog, never crossed my mind.

Like most mid-twenty-somethings I never really thought about turning 30, at least not in any concrete way. But, time passed. I did get to travel, a lot actually. I got married. I pursued my dream career with both successes and failures. And now here I am, somehow, 30 years old.

Which means this blog is now over.

Kidding! I would never do that.

In truth, I’m mostly pretty excited about turning 30. My twenties were an amazing, wild decade that I managed to live on my own terms, and I expect to do the same in my thirties. I celebrated my birthday by pushing myself totally out of my comfort zone at a music festival in Austin, Texas, surrounded by my husband and friends (a husband and friends who I would never have met if I hadn’t started blogging, I might add).

In fact, I would go into the next decade completely unencumbered if it weren’t for one small, enormous issue. This website.

I have paid for naming my blog Twenty-Something Travel many, many times over. Every time I meet someone (and in my profession, I meet a lot of people) the first thing they ask me after hearing about my website is “What happens when you turn 30?”

God, I loathe that question. I have answered that question in many ways: seriously, flippantly, like a smart ass (“I’m already 43”), and the truth all along was I didn’t really have any idea. In fact, I asked you guys last year, on my 29^th birthday what you thought I should do. Change the websites name? Create a new site and leave this as a resource page?

I’ve had plenty of time to think about it and what I decided was this: I’ve worked too hard on creating this site to either rebrand it or abandon it. From a business perspective, it’s just not smart to mess with a name that is pretty well known and respected in the travel blogging industry. Furthermore, I believe in the message of Twenty-Something Travel and I don’t think it’s such a narrow message that it doesn’t apply once you hit a certain number of digits.

So Twenty-Something Travel will be staying the same, for now anyways. My amazing staff writers Kay and Jessica will continue to provide their very different twenty-something perspectives and I will continue writing as well.

As I’ve mentioned before, a lot of the writing I do on a daily basis isn’t even for this site. Twenty-Something Travel is my creative outlet and I cherish it. In time I might transition some of that writing, particularly stuff that is only tangentially related to travel to StephanieYoder.com (don’t click it, there is nothing there yet), but that assumes I ever find the time to build it out.

Until then, let us continue our 5 year conversation about traveling as a Millennial and all the joys, heartbreaks, trials and tribulations that go along with it.

But first let’s eat some leftover cake.