inspired
I wanted to share with you pictures from my day in an area of San Francisco many of you may not know of. Mission District is a part of San Francisco that even I rarely find myself in. I am a major foodie, so the …
I said in a previous post that I was going to start writing more travel posts about places that are near me in California. This is me finally delivering on that promise. As you probably guessed, I am avoiding any long distance travel due to …
A year later and the struggle is still real for many of us.
We don’t have an exact date for when Covid will release us from her grasp for good, (if we did, I would be marking my calendar and setting Google Flights alerts), but we can still plan ahead for when it will be safe to travel again. No reservations booked, but still planned and ready to be made when it is safe.
If you use Instagram solely to engage and promote, you’re surely missing out. Instagram is an amazing app for planning and daydreaming. Similar to Pinterest, which we’ll discuss next, you can save posts into different collections. I have collections for every country I want to visit. Within each of those collections, I have other peoples posts from places I want to visit in that country. It’s an awesome way for travelers to not only decide where they should go on their next trip, but also see what places they’ve decided they’d want to visit based on someone else’s pictures.
The way you find posts to save to your collections is very easy as well. You could just save posts from people you follow, however, we’ll say you want to visit Moscow, Russia. Start a collection by either going to the “places” search or search tags such as #moscowtravel. You can get as specific or obscure as you want with your searches. Once you find a place you want to save, click the bookmark icon on the bottom right of the image. Click save to collection and there you can either make a new collection or add it to one you already have. If you want to access your collections, go to your profile and it should show “Saved” under your bio. If you don’t see it there, go where you would check your settings and a few lines below it you should see “Saved.”
Pinterest has been used mainly to save recipes and plan home renovations. But why not use it to daydream about all your future trips and get inspired? Pinterest actually has a big travel community making it super easy to discover new places. A few things I love about Pinterest:
If you’re reading this, you’re already on the right track 😉 Reading travel blogs of another persons point of view is a wonderful way to fantasize and start planning your own trip. Sometimes reading a trip someone else was on will help you daydream about what your trip will be like and all the things you’ll do when you finally get to go.
Personal travel blogs are filled with unique perspectives, stories, and advice which makes researching the same place more interesting. Another benefit to reading blogs is you can contact the writer directly to ask them any question you may have on a place or even just general travel question. A lot of us are more than happy to help and talk to fellow travelers.
If you find that the travel blogs you are reading have useful information for you that you want to save, there are way to save the url links so you can access them later. Lifewire.com has a post on 7 popular ways to save links for later. Or you could go really simple and make a word document with a bunch of pasted URL links. I would do that with recipes in middle school before I discovered Pinterest. As we discussed before, you could also pin any image from that post to a Pinterest board and save the link that way. Just click the image from your board and you’ll be redirected to the blog post. 🙂
This one’s kinda old school but I’ve actually been doing it during lockdowns. You know those free one year magazine subscriptions you get from your frequent flyer miles? Well, I had piles of magazines thanks to that which I never had the chance to read before. It’s actually really relaxing to sit down and skim through a magazine when you are sitting at home most of the week.
If you still pay to get a newspaper delivered to your house like we do, go to the travel section and clip out trips, tours, guides, or coupons you are interested in. It’s so old school but it’s fun to make a little scrapbook or dream board of the places you want to visit from newspapers and magazines. It’s the perfect daydreaming activity!
I would love to know what you all have been up to since the travel bans? Are you guys daydreaming and planning already? Are you doing other things such as starting Youtube playlists? Let me know in the comments.
-Ayla ♥
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A short guide to the best and commonly visited attractions in San Francisco for tourists and locals.
Which one should you choose and why? This post is to help those who are planning a trip to Europe and are not sure which would be the best option for them. Perhaps you are traveling with young children and don’t know what would be …
There are amazing, incredible, beautiful cities all over the world but no city has as many songs written about it, films based in it or novels written about it. Half of which are practically a love letter to New York City itself. Hello? Sex and the City? It’s more than the city that never sleeps. It’s the Big Apple. It’s the city of everything. And with so much to do, why would you sleep?
My time in New York City was short. Humorously short. 3 hours?? But it was an exciting three hours I will cherish until my next visit. Hopefully longer than 3 hours.
New York City was our last stop on the cruise and something I had been looking forward to. As soon as we were ready the morning of our arrival, we went out on the deck to watch our final docking. I highly recommend sitting out to take some photos of NYC if you are ever leaving or coming to New York by ship. You get some great views of the city and don’t have to go to the top of a skyscraper or ride in a ferry like everyone else.
Since we had an afternoon flight to SFO that same day (my moms decision, not mind), we decided to do a bus tour of the city that would drop us off at the airport after 3 hours. We thought this was the most time effective and easiest way to see the highlights. If we didn’t go with a bus tour, we would have to find a place to store our luggage, figure out transportation to all the places, plus return to our luggage before going to JFK. It was too risky.
We saw some great things in New York City, but unfortunately we couldn’t see everything. This was due to, of course, time constraints as well as part of the city (where central park is) being closed off due to some international union conference or something. I guess that’s something to keep in mind when traveling to New York. It’s a major city and roads get closed off all the time. I’ll remember to stay longer and use the subway next time. 😉
Have you been to NYC? Did you love it or hate it? I’d love to read your thoughts in the comments.
-Ayla ♥
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As soon as summer begins, my family drives to our summer mansion settled right on the cliffs of Newport…Alright, that’s not true. But that’s how it was (and still is) for the wealthiest families in America.