A New Story

Kelly McKenna
Mar 15, 2019
3 min read

In November 2016 we boarded a plane to JFK Airport in New York. It was the first stop of an adventure that would hopefully culminate in a new life for us. Roughly a week or so earlier, I had created the basics for a blog that would tell our story. I wanted a memento to be able to look back on and share our story with our friends and family. I’d always loved writing, but never felt like I had great tales to tell. This was my chance to do so.

In the back of my mind there was also a vague fantasy that I could become a successful travel blogger and that we would be able to supplement our work in Australia with revenue generated from this website. Over time, this idea grew and there was a part of me that really thought we could make it work.

In Times Square Fighting Jetlag On Our 17 Hour Stopover 🙂

Unfortunately, being a successful travel blogger is really bloody hard work. Initially at least, if you want to monetise it, you have to treat it like a full-time job. There were some things that I just hadn’t taken into consideration despite reading many other bloggers ‘5 Steps To Being A Successful Travel Blogger’ and similar posts.

After that initial set up, it took me 2 months to actually post anything. It took even longer for me to realise that we would need an active social media presence to promote the blog. Further than that, I eventually realised, we didn’t have a niche. There was nothing in our blog that set us apart from the thousands of other bloggers around the world who write exceptional, very useful travel posts.

In my desperation to be successful, every now and then I’d get a surge to post more content, despite the fact that we’d already long moved on from the places I was writing about. I was trying to figure out a way to sound ‘helpful and useful’ to other travellers in the hope that the WordPress and social media ‘likes’ would go up and we’d be the next blogging sensations.

Unfortunately, the story-telling, long-winded style of my writing does not match this ideal and it was making me miserable. I had fallen out of love with writing and I was not becoming a successful travel blogger.

It was time for a change.

In February this year, I spent time re-naming and re-designing this blog. The one thing we are both very passionate about other than travel, is eating. So rather than being the next big travel blogger, I am going to write in real time about all of the yummy food and drink that we have at both home and away.

Breakfast And Beers At Jamie’s, Gatwick Airport, On Our Way To Vancouver, August 2018

Right now, it is just gone 6pm and I am watching a beautiful Western Australian sunset with our family in Perth. We have just got back from a wonderful 4 night trip in Margaret River and I will be posting this weekend about that adventure.

Some posts will be short and succinct and written the way an online audience can read them. Others will end up as long as an undergraduate essay. That’s just the way I write and there’s no point being apologetic about it.

Real time, real foodies, real writing. That is what will make us happy in the long term.