LadyTrvlr Nomadic Wanderlust

This is a reintroduction.
I started traveling in 2008, lived abroad for years at a time, and now I’m getting ready to board another plane—this time, bringing you with me.

It started in 2008. My son had just left for college, and for the first time in years—maybe ever—I had permission to want something just for me. I didn’t book a resort. I didn’t plan a group trip. I bought a one-way ticket and went. That was the beginning.

But if I’m being honest, the desire started long before 2008. It started at 18, when the United States Navy put me on a plane and sent me to the Philippines for six months. I was barely grown, standing in a world that looked nothing like the one I came from—and I fell in love. Not with a person. With the feeling. The feeling of being somewhere else. And that six months didn’t stay in one place. From the Philippines, I traveled with my fellow sailors to Iwakuni, Japan for a week — then we flew to Hong Kong for a day just to shop. One day in Hong Kong. Long enough to realize people actually live like this. The world was so much bigger than I’d been told, and I wanted all of it.

From 2008 to 2022, I traveled almost uninterrupted. No home base. No return date. Just movement. Then life shifted — as it does — and I found myself moving between the States and abroad, back and forth, but always choosing to stay as long as I possibly could. Months and years at a time. Two solid years once in Mexico. A stretch of beach life in Cabarete, Dominican Republic that still calls to me. I wasn’t visiting -I was living.

Then my son graduated from college and started stepping into his full adulthood, and the mom in me — the part that will always show up — needed to be present for that transition. So I came back. And I stayed. Longer than I planned. Longer than felt natural for a woman like me with strong wanderlust burning inside her. And somewhere in the middle of all that staying, I started to feel what I can only describe as a slow dimming – the particular ache of knowing exactly who you are, and living somewhere that isn’t it.

· · ·

Here’s the truth about that time away: the desire never left. That’s the thing nobody tells you about travel when it gets into your blood this deep. It doesn’t go away because you stopped. It doesn’t fade because life got complicated. It just waits. Patient. Certain. Like it knows you’re coming back.

And they’re right when they say it’s like riding a bike. The moment you buy the ticket—not when you land, not when you pack, but when you click purchase—your body remembers. The nerves and the excitement blur into one, and just like that, you’re yourself again.

Yes, things have changed since 2008. Entry requirements. Visa rules. The apps we use, the way we book, the platforms we navigate. But the core of it — the part that matters — that hasn’t changed at all. The world is still generous to the woman who shows up curious and open. The table is still set. The invitation is still open.

It was permission—to choose myself. To trust that the life I imagined wasn’t fantasy, but direction. And once I understood that, everything changed.

So here’s where I am right now: handling business stateside, wrapping up some personal chapters that need to close before I can open the next one. Come June — and it’s a BIG, special birthday — I’m on a plane heading back overseas. No resort. No group tour. No Instagram-optimized itinerary designed to impress you. Just me, my passport, my eyes wide open, sailing on the open seas, and a commitment to share everything I see through the only lens I know — mine.

Everywhere I go, I look for the same three things:
Culture. Community. Cuisine.

3Cs. Culture. Community. Cuisine. In every country I’ve ever visited — across 39 of them now — those three things have been the heartbeat. They’re what make a place real. They’re what make you feel like a guest, not a tourist. And they’re what I’ll be bringing you, up close, on the ground, from wherever I land next.

If you’re new here: welcome. I’m Tonii — and my travel friends call me LadyTrvlr. US Navy veteran, mother, nomad—and proof that you don’t need a budget that matches your dreams. Just the willingness to go. I’ve stayed in hostels and been hosted by strangers who became family. I’ve done language courses in foreign cities, volunteered in exchange for accommodations, and eaten the best meals of my life for under five dollars from a street cart in a country most people can’t point to on a map.

If I can do it, you can do it. That’s always been the point. That’s still the point.

The wait is almost over. June is coming. And I have a feeling — the same feeling I had in 2008 when I bought that first ticket — that everything is about to get very good.

— @ladytrvlr