Hey! We are Harry & Lydia, 27-year-old, travel bloggers, content creators & photographers from the United Kingdom. We live & breathe travel & are here to prove to you that you don’t need to break the bank, to be able to live out your wildest travel dreams.
What can you expect from us?
At our core we are budget travellers, with adventurous souls. Meaning, you won’t find us travelling in ‘style’. Our policy is to do it as cheap as possible, which sometimes doesn’t always work out, but is certainly all part of the adventure. We much prefer to seek out the authentic experiences around the world, rather than your typical ‘Instagram worthy’ places.
Which brings us to our next point, we get a thrill from travelling off the beaten track. Sure, Paris, Rome & London are great. But what excites us the most, is travelling to those places that not everyone thinks to visit. The underrated corners of the world that are yet to be flooded by mass tourism.
If we sound like your cup of tea. In our blogs you will find bucket list travel guides from across the globe, filled to the brim with actionable budget travel tips to help you on your way. As well as tips for kickstarting your full-time travel lifestyle. Maybe start reading here…How To Start Travelling Full-Time With As Little As £3,000.
Our Story – Where it all began
Our story started back in 2016, when we met at University in Leeds, England. We were friends long before we became partners in 2017 & we’d say that we fell in love over our shared passion for travel. We both grew up with travelling parents, who had passed the bug onto each of us. By the time we met, we were already both well travelled, but had an itch for more.
2017 – In the summer of 2017 (just before we officially started dating), we both enrolled into the Camp America programme, without knowledge of each other enrolling. For anyone reading this, who isn’t familiar with the programme, it is where you sign up to live & work on a summer camp in the United States for 2 months. With the opportunity to travel the country afterwards. We both had the most incredible summer in the States, working on camp & travelling with friends made afterwards. We had been working on separate camps, but kept in regular contact. This is where the travel itch became a whole lot stronger.
2018 – The following year, we booked tickets to backpack South East Asia for 3 months. This was the first adventure we embarked on together & we fell in love with everything about travelling the world together. After coming home from that trip, with one year left at University we knew that we wanted to find a way to make these travel dreams a reality one day.
2019 – When we graduated from University in July 2019, we already knew that we wouldn’t be stepping into the corporate world. As we had already booked one-way flights to Australia, leaving in the October. We spent 4 months working three jobs between us, trying to save every single penny we had to start our new life in Australia. We had originally planned to stay in Australia for 1.5 years on the Working Holiday Visa. But when Coronavirus broke out in early 2020, we were forced to make the decision to stay & see it out. This turned out to be the single best decision we have ever made, as it altered the course of our life.
2019-2021 – We consequently spent 2 incredible years living, working & travelling in Australia. We moved into our first apartment together in Brisbane & then again in Perth, where we settled for a year during Coronavirus. Once life had seemingly returned to somewhat normality, we bought a 2004 Subaru Forester for $4,500, with a bed in the back & a tent. We also purchased our first drone (DJI Mini 2) & our Instagram page ‘The Nomads You Know’ was born, as we hit the road around Australia! We spent 6 months completing a lap of Australia, documenting it all across Instagram along the way, but we knew that we didn’t want the adventure to end there.
2021-2022 – In mid 2021 we sold our Subaru Forester as we were waiting for the border to open between Australia & New Zealand. We finally managed to hop over to New Zealand in a brief window of the border being open, before closing again for another year. We arrived into Queenstown in mid winter on another Working Holiday Visa, barely any money & no warm clothes, but a burning desire to start all over again, in this beautiful country.
We lived & worked in Queenstown during the ski season, which had always been a dream of ours. We both had extensive hospitality experience, so it wasn’t a struggle to find a job quick. During a month long lockdown, we started to consider the possibility of being able to monetise on our Instagram page & turn it into a proper business. We were introduced to ‘The Wander Workshops’, an amazing creator course, designed specifically for travel creators looking to make it full time as a travel creator. We decided to invest some of our last pennies into this course, which turned out to be another pivotal moment in our decision making (in a good way)!
When the ski season came to an end, we had made just about enough money to buy another vehicle. This time we purchased a 2003 Toyota Estima for $3,200 to call our home, as we waved goodbye to Queenstown & hit the road across New Zealand. We quickly ran out of money & began working as housekeepers on a campground in Hanmer Springs.
It was here, armed with the knowledge from The Wander Workshops, that we started to land some of our first paid jobs with tourism boards. We quit our campground job & hit the road again, we spent another 6 months travelling around New Zealand in our van & working with tourism boards along the way. These jobs kept us going & we could finally see the potential.
2022-present day – In mid 2022, we made the decision to return to the United Kingdom after 3 years away from our families & friends. We spent another 3 months in Indonesia & Thailand, before heading back to England. Touching down at Gatwick Airport after 3 years away from home, was one of the most emotional experiences of our lives & a moment we will never forget.
It was a feeling of starting all over again & especially for our business as travel content creators. We struggled for a few months, with a feeling of displacement & loss of identity. No one talks about the mixed emotions that you will feel after coming home from living abroad for so long. But then we finally started to feel better about our decision to come home & our business began to thrive!
Since returning to the UK in July 2022, we have discovered more of our home country than we ever have before & have found a new appreciation for the United Kingdom. We have also not stopped travelling, we’ve interrailed across Europe, twice. & visited the Middle East on multiple occasions. All whilst continuing to build on our business & improve our skills as travel content creators. We are now in a place, where this has been our full time jobs for over 2 years.
So what does 2024 hold for us? The truth is, as we are writing this we aren’t too sure. But as with everything in life, we will go with the flow. We currently have plans to spend the next 4 months in Asia, starting with Sri Lanka. After that, who knows, but we do know it’ll be one hell of an adventure.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading more about us. Our hope is that by sharing our story, we will inspire others to chase their wildest dreams too. If you can believe it, you can do it!
Happy exploring, with love
Harry & Lydia
