My name is Staci, but since that autocorrects to Stacks in the iPhone, my best friends have been calling me that since college. I'm from the Mitten State in the US, but currently living in Seattle. My best friends live in New York, San Fran, Nashville, and Chicago, but we make it a point to see each other and the rest of the world as often as we possibly can.

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Two years ago, my friends from college and I decided it was finally time to go on The Yacht Week. It had been a dream of ours since we were 18 and now that we were old enough and had full time jobs, it seemed like the right time. It was the trip of a lifetime and only inspired us to continue traveling. Luckily for three of us on that trip, Lainie, Chrissy, and myself (Staci/Stacks), we found kindred souls in each other and decided it was just the beginning of our adventures. Six months later, we were headed to London for New Year’s Eve. At this point I think I spend more time away from my apartment than I do at home and  my work group has given me awards for the “most likely to be on travel.” Because of this, I’ve had a lot of requests for our itineraries, our favorite restaurants, what we would have done the same or what we would have changed, and so on - hence the creation of this blog.
 

Let’s just preface everything with this - we all work full-time jobs and are blessed to have salaries that allow us to do this. We are by no means backpackers and we like to treat ourselves to incredible opportunities and amazing food. I’ve had a lot of people ask me how I found people to travel with, how I can afford it all, and how I get enough time off to make this happen. I can’t answer those things for someone else. For me, I know that I got extremely lucky to have great friends that equal my travel sisters. As far as financials and vacation time, I keep an eye on my bank account and I plan out my vacation time down to the last hour I have left. In addition, most of our companies have great discount programs and reward programs that we thoroughly take advantage of. We’ve paid for plenty of hotels with gift cards we received from doing well at the office. I can’t tell you how many people use their work rewards for things like tents or vases and when they find out I used it for a hotels.com gift card have said “oh wow that was such a good idea!” That being said, it’s different for everyone and every company.
 

On our travels abroad, we noticed that there is a lot of advice out there, but most of it is geared towards either families, people who love museums, or travel bloggers that spend all of their time looking for the perfect photo op. In addition, they're either on a vacation to one major place or backpacking across Europe. As a working millennial, you want to optimize your vacation time and see as much as you can while only paying for one international flight. 

 

One other thing we noticed – none of those sources have itineraries. They’re generally a list of things to see with maybe an estimate on the time you’ll spend there. What they don’t have is how long it takes to get from one place to another, whether Uber exists in a city, how nice the hotels are vs. an Air BnB option, and so on. So, our plan is to outline our itineraries including flights and hotels, and then tell you what we would change and what we’d keep the exact same.
 

Keep in mind that I'm writing this blog from the perspective of a (usually) single millennial female young professional. Sometimes the blog posts will be about trips we took together, some will be trips I’ve been on for business by myself. Some will be trips that we did barely any of our own planning, such as The Yacht Week or Contiki. Others will be trips we planned down to the hour months in advance. Regardless of the setting, we’ve made a lot of incredible memories in the last two and a half years and are planning on continuing to do so. Hopefully this blog will inspire some of you to do the same