(Please note, that all of this travel was happening we were being very careful with social distancing were possible and wearing masks as well. Everyone I traveled with this year was also fully vaccinated at the time of every trip!)
2021 was the year of new beginnings.
After the dumpster fire that 2020 was, I was feeling stuck in a lot of ways, but as life slowly kept working on its return to normal it was time for me to get out on the road again.
Ironically most of the trips I went on this year happened within the same three-month time span of September- November, making it a very busy few months.
And I learned a lot about traveling, it was the most time I spent away from home, with each trip allowing only one or two days to rest at my own house before hitting the road again.
Arkansas
This was the first trip I went on, and it happened in March. We ironically left the day after I became fully vaccinated so we felt safe enough to go on an adventure.
It was the first vacation I had gone on since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and my dad sister, and I drove to Mt. Ida with our dog!
And then I got super sick on the car ride there.
It wasn't covid (I got tested) and it only took 24 hours before I was completely fine, but it made for a very interesting car ride there and back!
Although we only went for a few days, it was a wonderful place, and felt very cozy everywhere we went, all of the people we met there were also extremely nice!
Arkansas was the first trip where I really went ham on blogging about it, I have a total of four posts revolving around this trip, and while four may not seem like a very big number.
Considering I only have at the time I am writing this, a total of 12 posts on my blog in total... It is a very large chunk.
Disney
This trip in particular was the most spontaneous out of all of them.
The weekend we ended up driving down to Orlando, we were actually supposed to be driving up to Manchester TN for Bonnaroo, which is a multi-day camping music festival, but ironically, it was canceled.
And it was canceled about 12 hours before my friends and I planned on leaving to drive up.
No, it was not canceled because of covid.
But because a hurricane went through and flooded the whole farm the festival is held on, which made it completely unusable.
To our dismay, we still wanted to do something that weekend, all of us had the time off already approved and the camping gear already packed. But the weather was supposed to be very bad, meaning we wouldn't be able to stay in Georgia to camp.
So we booked a last-minute trip to Disney World and left the very next morning.
We stayed at a KOA campground in Orlando and drove to the parks for a total of two days at Magic Kingdom and Epcot.
The last time I went to Disney was when I was around eleven years old, so it was a very different experience going at 22 with three friends.
It was super fun, and we stayed an extra day at a hotel to recover so it helped the ride back not be as tiresome because we got to rest and recover for a day before leaving!
NYC
I am not shy and will never be shy when talking about New York on this blog as well as on my Instagram.
It is probably my favorite city that I have gone to and is exactly what you would expect it to be based on how the media portrays it, which I like.
This year was my third time visiting, and probably my favorite visit I have had. September is one of the best times to go to New York because the weather is perfect!
On this trip, we stayed in Jersey like we typically do when visiting the city, and we attended Global Citizen Festival for the second time.
GCF is a fundraising concert that has paid ticketing options, as well as free ones, and we all know how much I love both concerts and free things!
This year's NYC lineup included so many big names in music, ironically most of them I had already seen before this show. But it did add Coldplay and J-Lo as well as a few others onto the lists of artists I've seen.
A day or two before leaving I got an advertisement on Instagram for another festival happening the same weekend, so in addition to this GCF, we also bought a single-day ticket to attend Gov Ball.
Post Malone has been on my list of artists I want to see live for several years, and he was performing there on the same day we had no plans and my friends and I got tickets the day before the show, so I got to mark him off the list as well!
Baltimore/Washington DC
This was yet another semi-spontaneous one.
My sister and I both wanted to go on a trip to Washington DC and had been talking about it off and on for a few months.
I have family that lives in Baltimore, and we asked if we could stay at their house for a few days and they said yes!
So we stayed at his place in the city, and when he would leave for work in the morning he would take us and drop us off at the train station where we would ride to DC for the day!
I had been on many subways before, but never a train meant to go long distances. So this was my first time!
We took both Amtrak and the MARC train while there, MARC was the cheaper of the two options, but Amtrak was worth the few extra bucks in my opinion :)
Most of our time was spent either walking around DC or in Smithsonian museums!
(The museum of natural history took us a whole day to get through, and we didn't even get to see it all!)
The coolest thing we saw was the national arboretum. It is perfect to walk or to drive around and view all the sights they have to see.
When we visited my sister and I also brought leftovers with us, so we had lunch while viewing the landscape there.
San Diego
This was my first ever trip to California and the west coast!
Before this, the farthest in the US I had ever gone was Arkansas, which I mentioned earlier was also this year haha!
It was a trip with many firsts, my Aunt lives out there, and so my sister and I went together to visit for a whole week!
We did so much while we were there, including a day trip to LA, and also an adventure in the Valle de Guadalupe which is the wine valley of Mexico. But my two favorite things had to be the hike we went on and our first trip to the beach at sunset.
On beaches on the east coast, you can mainly see the sunrise over the ocean, whereas on the west you can see the sunset over the waves.
The hike we went on was super cool, in the southeast, most of our mountains look like big green lumps, which are still beautiful in their own way. But the mountains we saw there were just so dramatic and different it was cool.
Posts about this trip!
LA
Los Angeles Pt.2 is my most recent and final trip of the year.
I went with my two best friends that I always travel with, we left thanksgiving night and took a late-night flight into LAX.
We stayed in the area between Inglewood and Ladera Heights, and it was because we went to see the first two shows BTS had done since 2019!
My group of friends had tickets to see them at four different shows for what was supposed to be the Map Of The Soul Tour, but due to you know what, they ended up having to cancel.
It was sad but expected due to the scale of the tour, but much to our surprise, they announced a set of four shows only a few weeks later. And tickets went on sale while I was in Baltimore!
So of course we had to get them and go!
We went on the first and second days of the show, and they did Amazing!
Most of the time when we go on our BTS trips we don't get to see much else that the city has to offer because we spend so much time at the stadium/arena, but since we went a day early and left two days after the shows we got to see some of LA!
I had visited LA previously in the year with family, but neither Ashley nor Olivia had been to Los Angeles or California before, so we visited the main tourist spots and saw some of the city!
Here's to 2021, and welcome 2022!
I hope to have many more adventures coming soon!
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