This blog started about a decade ago. Picture the writer… in her early 30s, recently divorced, starting over in life in all senses of the word – a new career, a new relationship, and a new home. She’s a bouncy little cotton tail excited for Spring! She named the blog Redefined Timeline, which was a very fitting title at the time. The original About Me went something like this…
“So one of the purposes of this blog is identified by the name – Redefined Timeline, and also as a personal chronicle of my travels. A little background…
I’m Whitney… I started my 20s studying abroad for 3 months at Oxford University in England. Upon returning, I swore to continue traveling as much as possible. However, life got in the way. I always felt as though I wasted my 20s, not accomplishing as much as I would have liked, nor traveling hardly anywhere. In my mid 20s, I moved to the Washington, DC area, bounced through unrewarding government contracting jobs, and got married (just like society said I should). A year into the marriage, I found a job I love. Everything is great now, right? I should start popping out mini-me’s, buy a big house in the ‘burbs, and life is complete. Except… I’m atypical (that’s a nice word for weird). Anyway, I never wanted children or the stereotypical “American Dream” to be my life. I want to see and experience everything I possibly can. Be it a “bar” in the Andes Mountains to drink a communal cup of “beer” (aka. unknown foamy, yellow liquid that is allegedly consumable) to blindly walking through a rainforest while the guide screams at us “don’t touch anything!!!” for fear of death. I want to camp, hike, train, fly, bike and explore anywhere my desires take me. All while not being a slave to my job.
Thus my Redefined Timeline… I vow to take full advantage of what the world has to offer, and do as many off-the-wall things as I can manage.
I broke away from my former life. So I restarted life in my 30s… Proof anyone with a challenging, full-time job can travel on a budget (or budget-esk). I’m not cool enough to drop everything and travel the world for a couple years. Though, the idea definitely crossed my mind.
I have managed to best sum up my new life in Redefining Life: The Last 3 Years.
A little update since I originally wrote this… I officially got remarried in 2018! I managed to find another person on this planet as crazy as me (okay fine, not AS crazy, but close enough). Just a couple of DINKs (Dual Income No Kids… for those that don’t know that one) and two dogs. Our whirlwind wedding in Bled, Slovenia… Hitched!!! “
That human is now over forty, nursing many work-related injuries both physical and mental, sometimes moves like The Humpback of Notre Dame because of a bad back. She’s now jaded… cynical… experienced… thanks to years in a difficult career, but she still clings to the happiness she knows it out there. She and the hubs have purchased a lot in Roatan, Honduras planning to build a new home on the piece of waterfront perfection.
Life comes in phases, and she has entered her next phase. Redefined Timeline, while still part of her journey and still somewhat applicable to her world now, it just doesn’t quite fit like the glove she wants it to. She still vows to take full advantage of what the world has to offer. She’s just no longer trying to redefine what she was.
Redefined Timeline will slowly morph into The Permanent Tourist. I’m not lost. I just have a very flexible itinerary. Somewhere in my thirties I opted out of the script I’d been handed — documented the whole messy, beautiful process in my little blog called Redefined Timeline. Turns out redefining your timeline is addictive. I couldn’t stop.
Now I’m in my forties, arguably more unhinged than before, and instead of settling down I’m plotting a move to a tiny Caribbean island called Roatan, Honduras. My retirement plan involves sunshine, warm water, and a dog who doesn’t yet know he’s moving to the tropics. My own little piece of paradise.
Here’s the thing about me — I’ve never really settled. Not mentally, anyway. Even at home, I move through the world with a traveler’s curiosity, half planning the next adventure. Always scanning the horizon for the next departure gate, the next map, the next place that makes me feel alive in a way the ordinary Tuesday just doesn’t. It’s not restlessness exactly. It’s more like a permanent state of what’s next.
That’s the whole idea behind this blog. One day — soon — I’ll stop being a tourist in the places I love and actually stay. A place where I was once just a visitor will become home. Permanence and movement, somehow existing in the same life. That tension is exactly who I am.
In between now and then, I travel every chance I get — solo, with people I like, and occasionally with people I thought I liked until hour six of a delayed connection. I eat the things I can’t pronounce, dive into water I probably shouldn’t, stay long enough to feel like a local and leave just before I become one. I work a full time job, train like the gym is my second religion, and spend an embarrassing amount of time researching places I haven’t been yet.
The Permanent Tourist isn’t about being a nomad, I’m anything but. It’s about never being fully satisfied with staying put. It’s about dying with memories, not dreams — a philosophy I’ve fully committed to, for better or worse, but usually better. Pull up a chair. Kick off your shoes. Let’s go somewhere.
Now I have to figure out how to change my domain name! Anyone have any clue how?