Welcome, I am Chelsea! I very appropriately started my career working for US Airways as a revenue analyst at headquarters. With my free flight benefits, I traveled nearly 300,000 miles in three years, just on weekends and vacation days, often going from DC to Europe for the weekend! This is where I learned the basics of how to travel, and started to realize the importance of having a why vs checking locations off a list. Since then, I have been a Realtor, owned an online retail store, and currently have a freelance accounting company.

I regularly ask myself, “Are you where you want to be in life?” Whenever the answer is no, I get curious, work to identify why and then take an action step. More often than not, taking the first step is the catalyst to change, and what first step could be more fun than going on an adventure!? I am passionate about living the highest quality of life possible and using travel as a tool to obtain it.

I have been to all 7 continents and countless countries, spent several years living abroad, and lived van life traveling throughout the United States. While my interests and style of travel have ebbed and flowed through the years, it has been my guide through countless challenges.

More specifically I have regularly taken month-long sabbaticals in between career shifts to gain clarity, sought meditation and more spiritually minded retreats when struggling to understand the meaning of life, challenged myself physically through trekking and long hikes when feeling unmotivated and lacking discipline, and regularly visit beautiful locations in nature to interrupt the loop of rumination and find new inspiration.

One example— I was curious to learn more about yoga, so I thought taking a yoga teacher training course would be fun. I found a place in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania that looked beautiful online and was only $2K for a month-long retreat, including room and board and my yoga teacher training certification. It was an easy yes. Luckily, the retreat center was as beautiful as the photos, the food was delicious, and the teachers and other trainees were awesome.

The combination of practicing yoga every day, being in community with a wonderful group from around the world, and having such beautiful surroundings shifted me internally. One afternoon during a break, I took a short hike and cried tears of joy for the first time. I didn’t know it was a real thing until that moment. I didn’t think feeling that joyful and at peace was possible. It opened up a new state of being for me and a doorway to knowing way more things are possible than I had imagined.

Interestingly, I had similar experiences on my guided mushroom trip in Amsterdam, walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain, on my juice fast in Palm Desert, and in a multitude of places in nature, reinforcing that there are many paths to the same place.