Adios Australia

In less than 4 hours I’ll be leaving Australia with no idea when I’ll return.

Wow, that felt so surreal to type. I’ve been waiting for this day to come for almost a year and the fact that it’s finally happening is kinda mind-blowing. So where exactly am I going and why don’t I have a return date?

Well, it all started with this message from my friend Steph last year:

London > NYC any day

At the time I had just started a new job which was killing my soul, so Steph’s message couldn’t have been more perfectly timed. Of course, I knew that we couldn’t just fly off to London then and there, but after a few days discussing it we decided to move together in mid-2019.

After sharing our plan with my parents, Dad mentioned that he would be travelling to Ukraine in June to celebrate my Grandpa’s 80th birthday. Given I haven’t seen both of my grandparents since I was 8 years old, I immediately decided to build my travel plans around our visit to the motherland.

Fast forward 11 months and I’ve planned out two months of travel before settling into London for a few years in July. I’ll be travelling all of May solo using Busabout (a hop-on hop-off bus network). I’m actually surprised that not many people have heard of them  because their offering is so good. For just over $900 I nabbed a 12-stop flexi pass which gives me access to all of these stops on their loops:

I’ll be flying into Amsterdam (in less than 24 hours, holy shit) and spending a week there before travelling to:

• Berlin (7 days)
• Prague (6 days)
• Munich (5 days)
• Lake Bled, Slovenia (2 days)
• Venice (4 days)
• Ellmau (2 days)

Then I’ll be meeting up with Dad and Grandma (who lives in Aus with us) in Paris and exploring the city for a few days with them before we all head off to Ukraine. I’m kinda glad that after a month of non-stop backpacking I’ll be able to unwind in whoop whoop Ukraine and spend some quality time with my family.

After a week of relaxation I’m back on the road with Dad to visit Kharkov in Ukraine (my hometown) and Moscow + St Petersburg in Russia. Then I’ll ditch him to spend the last few weeks of June in Krakow and Budapest before finally flying to London. From there, anything goes. Seriously, I don’t have a job lined up or a place to live but I figure I’ll sort it out when I get there. I’m a serial over-planner (my travel itinerary alone is 10 pages long…) so leaving London up in the air kinda excites me.

So yeah, that’ll be my life as of 9:45pm tonight.

The most common question people have asked me is whether I’m worried about travelling on my own. Honestly, I’ve been dreaming of doing a solo trip for years. There’s something about the freedom of travelling alone that excites me, I love that I don’t have to worry about anyone by myself and can change my plans on the go. I’m sure I’ll make friends on the road too, so it’s not like I’ll be a total loner in May… hopefully.

I’m actually not nervous to go at all. Maybe it’s because I’ve been planning this for almost a year and I’m just raring to go, or maybe because I’m more excited for the flight than anything. *I have a weird love of anything to do with planes/airports which I’ve written about before here.* Whatever the reason, I know that adventure awaits and all of y’all will be kept in the loop with all of my adventures.

Since I won’t have my laptop until I meet up with Dad, I can’t promise daily blog posts but I’ll definitely be flooding your instagram feeds with #travelspam in the meantime. Check it out here if you’re a newbie and enjoy!

Adios Amigos *insert airplane emoji*