I started my blog back when I was 19 with my whole life ahead of me! Now I’m turning 35 this year you can imagine my writing style and the things I’ve focused on writing about have changed significantly!

Rewind back to those teenage years and I was travelling to the USA a lot on student visas to work random jobs and experience as much as I could. I was backpacking around the world more often than not and 95% of the time I was doing it solo.

Fast forward to now and I’m married with a dog and daughter! Life is so very different but the sense of adventure has never left me.

If you were to sieve through my past blog posts (something I’ve still never done although one day I hope to find the time to).. I’m sure you’d find endless ramblings of a 20 something year old. I wrote about where I was going, what I saw and quite honestly this blog was my little diary. A way of telling my stories to all my family whilst I was abroad. I genuinely think that as social media has developed we’ve come away from the diary style of writing and blogging has become much more of a way of making money. People write about things they know will bring them hits or whatever is popular at the time.

When I was speaking about my blog to a friend recently I mentioned that I don’t make a penny from my blog even if one of my posts is booming. He said- that’s great! Confused, since I’ve often felt like a bit of a disappointment that I’ve been blogging for over a decade and got nowhere with it… He reminded me of exactly why I write…. For me! I’m not making any money which is great – That means I’m writing for all the right reasons. Yes there are awesome writers and bloggers out there that do make money.. But for me, when I get hits I like to think that I’m helping people to discover places and that is the biggest gain of all. For example my posts about Where to eat in Bucharest, Walking the Coastal Broadwalk in Paphos and Hiking the Cami De Ronda are just a few that show up on Page 1 of Google – That’s an achievement for me and i’m proud of it! Some posts have people reading them daily and who knows it might actually be impacting (people I’ve never met) where they visit when they are on holiday! I love that.

I recently discovered that the British newspaper Express linked to my blog back in November when writing about the Dark Tourism site of Kupari. I know it’s been done many times since my post but back when I wrote about my explore it wasn’t very documented! You can read my original article here: Kupari Resort: The hotel graveyard

My writing style has altered over the years and sometimes I find I’m writing like I’m reviewing a place rather than the journal approach I used to take. Maybe it’s an age thing? Do you do the same?

As you can imagine, as I’ve got older my spontaneous trips abroad with nothing but a backpack have got less and less. Now I’m much more about local travel, family days out and treating myself by eating at restaurants and pubs I’ve never been around Yorkshire.

I enjoy writing about these places just as much as I do when I travel overseas. So Beau is now my lifestyle blog where I write about whatever I fancy; whenever I feel like it. Walks, books, restaurants, pubs, pig farms.. You name it and it probably has a space on my blog!

Express referred to me as a Travel blogger and I guess to an outsider, maybe I am? I have never described myself as that as I just don’t believe I am. I suppose I expect you have to be famous, popular or be making money to be worthy of that title. But perhaps I need to give myself some credit. I travel, I blog.. Therefore I am, and always will be just that – A travel blogger!

I have many exciting adventures planned for the rest of 2025 and I look forward to keeping up with the challenge of updating my blog along the way! After all, a blog is the best kind of outlet and keepsake to look back on…