Get to know us
Welcome to Travel for Working People! We’re Bec and Michael, an Australian couple currently living in Ireland. We love our day jobs and don’t want to quit to travel the world. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want to see as much of it as we can!
We’re so happy that you’ve made it to our site! We really aim to provide good, realistic advice for normal working people who are passionate about travelling.
Who is Bec?
I’ve always felt an itch to discover new places. As soon as I was old enough to start funding my own travels, I prioritised it as best I could around my studies. Throughout university, I worked part time in hospitality. I sacrificed additional income to tax so that every year I would receive a tax return of a few thousand dollars (an easy way in Australia to save as you couldn’t touch this money for a year). This lump sum payment would always go straight to travel, and funded trips to India, Spain, Morocco and Finland.
It was while studying for my undergraduate degree that I made a huge decision. I started making plans to spend my final semester studying abroad, initially with no intention of returning to Australia. I was accepted to Uppsala University and it took months and months of preparation. As I was in my final year (which I took my time getting to in the first place) I was a bit older than most people who take their year abroad and I was nervous that I wouldn’t fit in.
This was the first time I was ever truly alone, and had to figure things out for myself. Which certainly didn’t go smoothly at first! I actually spent months sleeping on a bed base before I realised my student accommodation hadn’t actually provided a mattress (how??), and I only had one pair of boots for my entire trip, which I even wore to nightclubs (whyyy?). I still don’t know why I didn’t just buy another pair of shoes, but I can STRONGLY recommend Redback boots for anyone in the market for sturdy and comfortable shoes.
After living and studying in Sweden for six months, all of my worries about not fitting in had obviously been proved wrong, and I wasn’t ready to go home. Talking to people I’d met in Sweden, I had narrowed down my next destination to either Amsterdam or Berlin. When the semester finished, my Dad came to visit for a couple of weeks and we included both cities in our itinerary so that I could choose which one felt right for me. I’ve never been a fan of big cities, which is what Berlin felt like to me during my brief visit. However, I fell in love with Amsterdam the moment we arrived.
When Dad left to go back to Australia, I caught a train to the Netherlands and spent the next year living and working there. I volunteered with food waste kitchens, went on endless cycle tours, never tired of the beautiful canals, and met the most incredible, inspiring people. Having only made the decision to move to Amsterdam a week before I arrived, I think I got really lucky and it ended up being the best decision I could have made.
The following year, I moved back to Australia to do my masters in conservation and natural resource management. I had every intention of moving back to the Netherlands as soon as I completed the 1 and half year degree. BUT, not long after settling back home, I met my Michael.
Who is Michael?
As a young lad I grew up in rural Australia in a little town and had a pretty wholesome upbringing with a few paddocks, a couple of sheep, and endless dirt and trees to play in. I was pretty fortunate as a kid too as I did a little traveling with my family overseas, which I think wasn’t super common amongst my friends. We went on family holidays to the UK, Thailand, and New Zealand, but I was far too young to appreciate these different places. My dad spent years as a young adult traveling Africa and the Middle east and he told us several crazy stories about the world he saw, things that I couldn’t even seem to imagine other than in movies. I think it was these early influences that imprinted an idea that there was a big world out there, and you were free to explore it, provided of course you could somehow pay for it.
It wasn’t until I moved to Melbourne for university that I began to feel a strong desire to travel and discover as much of the world as I could. Like many uni students, I flip-flopped between degrees and couldn’t really settle on a course for my future—let alone pay for it—but I knew that at some stage in the near future, I wanted to live somewhere overseas despite not knowing where, or how I was actually going to get there. I think this seemed daunting to me, and I think in my mind I wanted to travel, but was scared to do it. I couldn’t commit to anything. I planned an exchange to Germany, only to bail out of it before I had to pay for it. A friend and I planned a trip to Costa Rica as part of some conservation effort, but we dropped the idea after a few months. In the meantime, I continued to flip-flop at uni and chase my tail rather than looking outwards to the rest of the world.
After several years, I eventually converged on a Physics degree and decided I was going to commit myself to my final year and pursue a PhD. For many students, a PhD is the perfect time to move overseas and study abroad. Even at this stage, I couldn’t take the leap and I kept making excuses why I couldn’t move overseas, despite desperately wanting to leave Australia. At this stage, I threw myself in the deep end and spontaneously booked a flight to Europe and decided to go backpacking for 2 months: I’d had enough and was finally going traveling! I had an amazing time, burnt through all my savings, and came home with a fresh perspective and a ton of memories. I still couldn’t convince myself to move overseas, but had got my fix and knew I had to move away from Melbourne for a new start.
I ended up moving to Brisbane for my PhD where I was able to work with some of the most incredible people I have ever met. It’s tempting to think fate had a hand to play, but after all the twists and turns, the excuses and the circles, I’d just moved to the other side of Australia and within 3 months, I met Bec.
Our story
When we met, we bonded over our shared goal of wanting to move abroad and experience as much of the world as we could. At the time, Michael was on a PhD stipend (read: below minimum wage) and Bec was working in hospitality alongside a Masters degree. We didn’t have much money, and with Bec’s work we didn’t have many free weekends, but we took every opportunity we could to travel locally. Luckily, on the east coast of Australia this was easy and we spent most of our free time camping and hiking in beautiful national parks and on pristine beaches. We saved up all our pennies and took a trip to Tasmania, where Michael proposed. This is when our desire to travel together really started to grow and we started planning trips to Thailand, Vietnam and countless other south-east Asian countries. Three months after our trip to Tasmania, the world shut down with Covid.
However, we stayed focused on our goals and continued to plan for when we could travel again. Both of us love what we do and didn’t want to have to give it up in the pursuit of experiencing the world. Michael is a researcher, which frequently makes visas easier to obtain, and so we started looking for positions open in his field, in countries where I would also be able to find work that I loved.
Fast forward a couple of years and we received an opportunity to move to Dublin. We had postponed our wedding due to lockdowns in Australia, and we ended up getting married a month before we were due to leave the country. Australia still had its borders closed when we left so we needed Federal permission to exit the country, which included signing an affidavit declaring we wouldn’t expect the government to help us if we got stranded overseas. We were constantly worried about snap lockdowns in the last couple of months, and Michael never got to say goodbye to his family and friends as they lived in a different state and no travel was allowed. It was probably the most stressed either of us had ever been, but our plan was finally coming to fruition!
Once we arrived in Dublin we made it a priority to travel as much as possible. In less than a year, we have taken trips to Malta, the Dolomites, Venice, Turin, Puglia and Matera (we love Italy, can you tell?), Northern Ireland and the UK, southern France, Athens and multiple islands in the Cyclades group, and have taken endless weekend trips around Ireland.
We have done all of this around full time jobs. We don’t work in tech, we live in an incredibly expensive city, and we only use our paid time off for travelling.
Why we started travel for working people
This is when we decided to start Travel for Working People. We took inspiration for the name from the blog and podcast Wine for Normal People (if you’re a wine novice, get into it!).
We know there are people out there like us that don’t want to quit their day jobs to travel. However, it felt like so many blogs we read were by full time travelers who had ‘made it’ and were living on the road. Posts that were written as though having a 9-5 is a bad thing, something that you need to escape from, just never resonated with us. We have both found careers that we find immensely satisfying. Michael is a scientist, and is most happy when doing physics for fun. Bec is a sustainability specialist, a dream job she has landed since getting to Europe where environmental policy is taken much more seriously than back in Australia. These are both jobs we have decided to do because of passion. But we’re young and have the means, so we want to utilise our time outside of work as best we can to experience as much as we can.
With this blog, we want to provide realistic, easy to follow guides for you that are chock full of tips, budgets and timelines that work with a full time job. Bec LOVES planning. She always has multiple spreadsheets on the go, with itineraries and budgets planned for our travels for the next year (and then some). With the amount of hours that we put into researching, planning and organising our trips, we hope that through this blog we can offer you detailed and relevant information to make it easy and quick for your own travel plans.
In the lead up to launching this blog, and having just relocated to Ireland, we have done a lot of European travel. We’ve kept ourselves busy creating itineraries and content to inspire you over the coming months. As they say, there’s nothing like summer in Europe, but after traveling across western and central Europe so much this year, next year we’re planning to broaden our destinations a bit. For Christmas we’ll head to Alsace in France for the markets and gluhwein. Early in the new year, we’re planning a quick road trip through the Scottish highlands where we’ll hike to our hearts content and visit every quaint pub along the way.
In summer we’ll first head to Iceland, our number 1 dream bucket list destination. Bec’s had this trip planned for over a year already, but if you have been to Iceland, let us know what your must-sees are in the comments! Next up is Namibia, splitting our time between dreamy photography destinations and safaris. Every little kid desperately wants to see the big 5 right? Bec’s favourite animal growing up was the tiger, she did every possible assignment that she could on the tiger. So we can’t wait to make our inner child happy with this one. Lastly we’re hoping to get to Jordan to explore the canyons, desserts and ancient ruins.
As we’re brand new to blogging, we would love to hear any and all feedback from you so we can truly understand what value we can add and how we can help you with planning your next trip. We look forward to getting to know you all and hope to hear from you either here or on one of our social media pages.
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