On Three Years of Blogging...

I can’t believe that my blog is turning three this week. On the one hand, it feels like just yesterday I hit publish while sitting on the bed in our home away from home in Invercargill, New Zealand. On the other hand, we have done so much since then. Since my blog’s “birth” in November 2016, Emmett and I finished our Working Holiday in New Zealand; visited Vanuatu; did another Working Holiday in Australia; visited Singapore, Malaysia, and Nepal; moved back to the United States; settled into Richmond, Virginia for a while; and bought a school bus. Seeing it all typed out like that makes me realize that’s honestly a whole lot of life lived in just three years!

Life Lately

Our latest travel scheme: convert this baby to a tiny home on wheels and take her all over North America.

I am not going to pretend that I have been enjoying “settling in” to one place for a while. Don’t get me wrong - Richmond is a very cool city. Probably the coolest in all of Virginia. I’ve just got insanely itchy feet (to say the least) and I can’t help but feel stuck here sometimes. Emmett feels much the same - it’s what motivated us to buy the bus. We were both starting to feel completely done with spending all of our time in one place. We were both daydreaming about future travels and reminiscing a lot about our past trips. At least with the bus, now we have a vision that we’re working towards. It is going to be an expensive vision for sure - building a quality tiny home is going to take more money than we’d like to spend. (Not only that, but actually getting that money is hard. Truth be told, neither of our jobs pay particularly well). But the end result will hopefully be worth it. Honestly, avoiding rent payments is one of the most exciting aspects of owning our own little home on wheels.

Working towards making the bus a home has been a somewhat difficult journey already. Inability to find enough free time to work on it aside, there is a steep learning curve. Even with experience as professional painters and time spent working construction, Emmett and I are learning virtually everything else about home building as we go. YouTube channels dedicated solely to bus conversions have been incredibly helpful, but not always exact enough. A lot of the builds that have been documented on YouTube are done on buses that are either much older than ours or a different manufacturer… or both. Usually both. With each project, we find ourselves with a general framework but wishing that we had more specifics at hand.

On What It Means to Be a Blogger in 2019

Low quality cell phone pic of our cat, Bailey, getting all up in my computer business.

The travel blogging industry is probably more saturated than ever. Over the past year, navigating it has felt like a huge chore. To be able to be a “successful” travel blogger, you have to post constantly, promote all of your posts on multiple social media channels, and closely follow industry trends in what to write about and where to promote yourself. More than anything, I get really creeped out by all the self promotion - it’s just not my favorite at all. For those of you who happily exist outside of trying to run a blog on the internet in 2019… I’m envious of you. Not only is it hard to find the motivation to keep posting when only a few thousand people a year visit your website BUT the types of things you need to do in order for your site to stay relevant and/or competitive are frustrating. It truly feels fake a lot of the time. I don’t want you to feel like I’m trying to sell you me as a brand. I just want to help you plan an amazing trip and hopefully save you a little money in the meantime. Or if you don’t end up going anywhere, at least you can feel entertained by traveling vicariously. (Right, readers? Are you inspired? Crickets)

Generally - as much as I hate to admit it - I’m an emotional person. Which means that I will always be more inclined to tell you stories about what did or saw on my travels rather than write a factual itinerary or guide for a specific place. I do think that at least sometimes I will throw Google an occasional bone by writing posts that are very informative. For instance, one of my most-visited posts of the last two years is my incredibly info-dense guide on the Perhentian Islands in Malaysia. I made a specific effort to optimize this post for search engines. These are the types of things people are searching for - anyone who visits that post has likely Googled “how to get to Perhentian Islands.” I’m one of the only people who has figured out how to visit out of their own accord and then written about it. I did find that post pretty boring to put together BUT maybe if I force myself to write two or three posts like that a year, I’ll get more people to visit this blog.

Which brings me to the next point: I hate feeling like I need to try so hard just to get an audience for this blog. It makes me cringe. But, thanks to the aforementioned over-saturation of this so-called industry, the only way I can reach the type of people that I make these posts for is to try and focus on getting more readers. And getting more clicks from searches. Some of my content feels like it’s hidden from it’s target audience. For instance, I know I have a lot of very informative content on New Zealand and Australian Working Holiday visas. But I can’t reach your average person who Googles either country’s visa unless my posts are formatted in a way that Google recognizes. Or unless I promote myself on social media to all the people searching hashtags related to those specific topics. Isn’t that… a lot to think about? It’s truly wild. Here’s to making the most of that this next year without driving myself nuts.

The Future of Savvy Dispatches

Skyline Drive, Shenandoah National Park

I’m just going to keep doing me.

I’m going to continue doing my own thing and write about whatever I feel like sharing. I’m not going to worry about hustling to try and make this profitable. (Just gotta ignore all those articles and well-meaning loved ones pressuring me). Profit has never been and hopefully never will be the point of this blog.

Get ready for a lot more posts about our bus.

As we continue to work on converting our bus into a tiny home, I’ll be posting a lot more on the ups and downs of that process. I plan to make an entire section of this site about bus conversion and other ‘skoolie’ resources.

Even more of a pivot towards North American content.

Though I’ve added a few more posts about the USA since returning stateside last year, I think the majority of the travel posts from here on out will have a North American focus. There’s so much to see here on the home continent and we’re excited to explore a lot more of it once our bus is mobile.

Until next year, thanks for reading!

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