In 1990 we sold the family home in the UK and moved to live in Malta. I attended a local convent school, I made new friends, I grew a little more tanned – and the travel bug took a huge bite.
Over the next four years I saved hard, plotted and planned until eventually I was free to take a year out between school and university and see the world. I spent two months living on Kibbutz Kissufim in Israel, then used a round-the-world plane ticket to visit North America, New Zealand, Australia, The Philippines and Malaysia. A couple of weeks back home and off I went again, this time to Sweden, Denmark and then Bulgaria.
The year over and I dutifully headed off to university, just managing to sneak in an African safari one summer. By the end of my course I had developed a phobia of winding up in a rubbish office job that I hated, and so while my friends applied for graduate schemes with large respectable companies, or scoured the job pages of the local paper, I flicked through the ‘overseas opportunities’ folder in the university careers library … and found my way to Sudan, teaching English.
I went for two months but loved it so much that I stayed for a year before returning to the UK to figure out what was next.
My love of words took me through a succession of roles working in journalism, PR and communications before my passion for travel became a driving force in my decision to turn freelance, and then to create a business that I could run from anywhere.
Now, I plan my work around my travel and have deliberately set my business up to be fully location independent so that I never again have to choose between business and travel. So far I’ve put the theory into practice in both exotic and everyday locations including London, Exeter and The Wirral in the UK, and Bali, Colombia, Italy, Morocco, the Netherlands, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.