Since 2020, we’ve written an annual end-of-the-year recap to take stock of the year’s adventures and the highs and lows of traveling whilst running our little corner of the internet.
I look forward to writing these recaps, as they force me to evaluate our successes and shortcomings over the past year and dream about what we want to accomplish in the year ahead. 2024 was a BIG year for us—our first complete 365 days as self-employed content creators and full-time travelers, with lots of incredible adventures and some really hard challenges along the way.
Let’s get into it!
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2024 Travel Summary
Countries visited: 6
Continents visited: 3
The first nine months of 2024 were spent driving our RV from Key West, Florida, the southernmost point in the United States, up to Tuktoyaktuk, Canada, the northernmost place you can drive in North America.
Along the way, we visited a country in one of the most unique ways we’ve ever experienced— literally wading across the Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park to Boquillas del Carmen, a teeny town in the Chihuahuan Desert of Mexico. While there isn’t a ton to do in Boquillas, it was still nice to have some authentic tacos and margaritas and meet some of the warm and friendly locals.

On the same journey, we wound up spending several weeks in Canada.
Given that we’d lived in the Pacific Northwest for four years, we’d previously spent a handful of weekends in the Vancouver area, but this time around, we got to explore some of the most remote parts of the country, from watching grizzly bears on an observation platform in Stewart, British Columbia and joining the Sourtoe Cocktail Club in the old mining town of Dawson City, Yukon to kayaking with pingoes, a unique type of Arctic land feature, in the Northwest Territories.

We’ve always had a fondness for our friendly neighbors to the North and our adoration for Canada and its endless adventures grew even more this year.
Once we had successfully dipped our toes (and actually, our whole bodies!) in the Arctic Ocean, we started our last adventure of the year—traveling through Central and South America before departing on a cruise to the remote sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia and Antarctica.
We shifted our perspective on how we think about death at Dia de Muertos in Oaxaca, Mexico; spent two weeks learning Spanish (and living as part of a Mayan family!) in Lake Atitlan, Guatemala; hiked with the tallest palm trees in the world in Colombia; and finally, made our way to Ushuaia, Argentina, otherwise known as the End of the World or the southernmost city on the planet.

From there, we sailed to the British-owned territory of South Georgia, whose wildlife-rich waters has earned it the nickname the “Galapagos of the Poles” and spent New Year’s Eve floating past Elephant Island, Antarctica.
U.S. States Visited: 14 (Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Alaska, Missouri, Illinois, Kansas)
U.S. National Parks Visited: 11 (Big Bend, Guadalupe Mountains, Carlsbad Caverns, White Sands, Saguaro, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Kenai Fjords, Denali, Katmai, Wrangell-St. Elias)

Beds slept in: 41
Campsites stayed in with our RV: 77
Plus five campsites in a tent, including:
- on top of a volcano in Guatemala, watching the neighboring Fuego Volcano erupt every 20 minutes along the Acatenango hike;
- on the rim of Mooney Falls during our Havasu Falls hike;
- inside an electrified fence surrounded by 2,200 brown bears in Katmai National Park; and
- next to Grizzly Lake in the Yukon’s Tombstone Territorial Park, one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful places we’ve ever been.

Our Three Highlights of 2024
In terms of exploring our big, beautiful world, 2024 was exactly how I had dreamed that full-time travel would be—getting to explore popular destinations, like U.S. National Parks, while also traveling to off the beaten track places and far-flung destinations.
We went ALL over the place (literally from the Arctic to Antartica!), with a fun mix of full-time RV living and international travel—and it turns out this is the perfect combination for us!
RVing around Alaska and Northern Canada
One of the big reasons that we quit Corporate America to run Uprooted Traveler full-time was so that we had more flexibility to take epic trips we had always dreamed of that would have demanded too much time off than our corporate jobs would allow. And one of those dreams was a road trip to Alaska.

This summer, we spent two magical months driving all over Alaska and several weeks driving through the Yukon and Northwest Territories of Canada. These remote corners of the planet are SO special—we woke up to a mama and baby moose right outside our window (multiple times!), kayaked next to icebergs, watched brown bears catch leaping salmon, and hiked on ancient glaciers.

Sometimes, RV life can be, admittedly, over glamorized on social media, but these months were just as incredible as we imagined. There’s seriously nothing cooler than getting to wake up in your home on wheels in some of the most remote and beautiful places on the planet, from a riverbed surrounded by glaciers to the shores of the Arctic Ocean.
Dia de Muertos in Oaxaca
Over the past few years, we’ve absolutely fallen in love with traveling through Mexico and Central America, which offers cultural richness, stunning landscapes, and, like, REALLY incredible food.
However, something that’s been kind of challenging is threading the needle between finding places or experiences that feel safe, while also being authentic—many of the popular destinations in this corner of the world kind of feel like sanitized and overly touristy versions of what that place once was.

Experiencing Dia de Muertos in Oaxaca, though, did not leave us with that feeling at all.
First of all, Oaxaca is a STUNNING colonial city, with colorful buildings and eclectic architecture, all surrounded by impossibly tall mountains. But, in the four days that we were in Oaxaca when Dia de Muertos was celebrated, it felt like it was bigger than just a city—it came alive, with marching bands flooding the streets, street vendors crowding every corner, and delicious aromas filling the air.
Unlike most of our travels, we didn’t really plan out what we were going to do during the festival—we basically showed up, wandered around the city, and followed parades or marching bands that looked fun.

And it was great! We danced the night away with the warm and friendly locals, had mystery liquors poured into our mouths by strangers, and enjoyed a spontaneous late night concert in a cemetery. In addition to offering us a glimpse into a uniquely beautiful Mexican holiday, participating in Dia de Muertos made us think about death in a bit more of a positive, not-so-scary light—-the kind of perspective-shifting experience that travel is all about.
Seeing polar bears in Churchill
After our journey up to Tuktoyaktuk, we made our way up to another remote sub-Arctic community in Canada—Churchill, otherwise known as the polar bear capital of the world.
Churchill is the first place the Hudson Bay freezes over in the winter, so, every October and November, up to 1,000 polar bears congregate outside of the bay to await the ice so that they can return to the bay to hunt. Accordingly, it’s the best place on the planet to see polar bears in the wild.

Getting there is tricky and expensive—we spent two days on a train to Churchill, snaking its way through northern Manitoba to get there (sitting upright in economy seats!).
Before getting on the train, we were kind of dreading the experience and, while we definitely didn’t get the best sleep, we actually had a blast!
We spent our days chatting with interesting travelers from all over the world and our nights, up in the train’s 1950s Dome Car, complete with panoramic windows. On one of the nights, we stayed up until 4 AM, chatting with our fellow travelers and watching one of the most vibrant displays of the Northern Lights dance overhead.

And, of course, we saw polar bears in Churchill as well, from a goofy boy that kept rolling around that we fondly named “Bear-t Reynolds” to a mama bear with her two cubs. As an added bonus, we got to see all kinds of unique creatures, like an Arctic hare (which we just casually saw while we were walking to the town pub!) and caribou.
It seriously felt like being in some kind of National Geographic documentary—all while being in a remote and quirky community with colorful murals and Indigenous artwork.
Honorable mentions for 2024 Highlights
- Going to St. Louis and Kansas City to celebrate two of our sweet friends getting married. We love any excuse to go back to the Midwest and see our loved ones and a bumpin’ dance floor and open bar makes a trip home even more enticing!

- Meeting up with new friends, from New Orleans to Moab and Winnipeg, that we met through social media. We mentioned in last year’s recap that one of the hardest parts of traveling full-time is lacking a real sense of community. While I wouldn’t say we’ve nailed any semblance of a community this year, it’s still really nice to connect with like-minded friends and I definitely look forward to expanding our network this year.
- Going back to Chicago to see my parents in May and October.
I don’t share much about this publicly—because it’s really not my story to tell—but my dad has been battling a rare and aggressive form of leukemia for the past few years. For the first time since his diagnosis, his health has taken a few baby steps in the right direction and I got to spend about a week with my parents, watching lots of movies and going through some short walks through the autumn leaves. - Exploring Guatemala.
We haven’t really figured out the best way to work and explore places simultaneously (more on that later…), but, during our first visit to Guatemala in February of this year, we didn’t really try to—instead, we just spent two and a half weeks, packing in as many things as we could in this beautifully diverse country. We fell asleep while a volcano spewed lava less than a mile away, swam through turquoise rivers through the jungle, and climbed ancient Mayan pyramids. It was a good ol’ fashioned adventure and we absolutely LOVED it.

Our Three Lows of 2024
On the surface, I know that it looks like we had an exciting and adventure-filled 2024, complete with polar bears, exploding volcanoes, and Antarctic cruises.
And, while there were countless beautiful moments that I’ll remember for the rest of my life, there were some REALLY low and dark moments of 2024 as well.

Truth be told, 2024 was really tough for us, mostly due to…
Changes to Google’s search engine
We’ve been working on Uprooted Traveler for the past six years and have been able to turn it into a sustainable business, in large part, due to our success at search engine optimization.
If you’re not familiar with that concept, it’s essentially a set of strategies that you can use to ensure your blog articles appear at the top of Google search results. The higher your articles rank on Google, the more likely it is that people searching for a particular query will find their way to our site, which, in turn, drives our income in the form of advertisements and affiliate income.

However, starting at the end of 2023, Google started to make some pretty big changes to its algorithm and how it ranked its search results. Certain websites, like Reddit or Quora, were boosted in rankings and small publishers, like us, were beginning to see steep declines in traffic.
Many of our travel blogger peers’ sites were absolutely decimated in these earlier updates. Luckily for us, even though we saw a slight dip in traffic, it wasn’t at the same catastrophic level as some of the rest of our community. And, to be honest, we ended 2023 with our business absolutely CRUSHING it.
Unfortunately, in 2024, there were a series of additional Google updates that decimated blogs even further—and this time, we really felt it. Our traffic—and, therefore, our income—decreased by a significant margin.

Even worse, it was like, for some unknown reason, we had been given a kind of scarlet letter by Google. Even though we were churning out new articles as fast as we could to make up for the lost traffic, it was like these articles didn’t even exist—like Google had just decided that our site was invisible to them and never served these new articles in search results to users.
Unfortunately, Google algorithm updates are just one piece of a larger, even more challenging puzzle. There’s also simply less people using Google, due to AI tools, like Gemini or ChatGPT, and people’s preferences shifting to consuming information via video content, like YouTube or TikTok.
So, in this rapidly shifting landscape, it’s hard to know where we fit or how to sustainably stake our claim to our little corner of the internet. To be honest, we’re still definitely trying to figure that part out.

On the bright side, we ended 2024 on a higher note—yet another Google update brought a decent amount of our traffic back and, better yet, it seems that some of our newer articles are finally being indexed and served to users.
But it’s clear that Google is volatile and cannot be relied upon for our sole source of income.
Which leads me to…
Slow growth on social media
If you’ve read any of our previous end-of-the-year recaps, like in 2022 and 2023, you’ll know that we’ve been anticipating and trying to plan for some of these changes to search traffic by diversifying our business beyond just this website for quite a while.
For the past couple of years, we’ve been working on growing our YouTube channel, as well as Instagram and, to a (MUCH) lesser extent, TikTok. And we have seen some growth on these platforms—for example, our YouTube subscribers grew over 150% this year, to over eleven thousand subscribers.

However, the growth feels painfully slow most of the time and we wonder—and worry about—how long it will take to grow these channels until they can be treated as reliable streams of revenue.
In retrospect, it felt the exact same way with Uprooted Traveler—we worked on this site, tirelessly, for years and years without making any kind of significant income from it until, one day, it just kind of exploded into what it is today.

So here’s hoping that we’re making baby steps towards that inflection point that we just can’t see quite yet on the horizon.
Difficulties balancing adventuring with working
Even though we’ve been self-employed for over a year and a half now, it doesn’t really feel like we’ve gotten any better at figuring out any semblance of a work-life balance.
We never really have a day off—we’re either working behind our laptops or off having adventures, whilst trying to capture them with photos and vertical and horizontal videos that we can eventually make content with. The closest thing we ever have to a “weekend” are days when we’re transiting from place to place, which still usually comes with its own stresses and limitations.

And, even though it feels like we’re constantly working, it still never feels like we’re producing enough stuff. Because we’re trying to grow so many platforms simultaneously, it feels like we always have a limited capacity to commit just a small amount of time and energy towards any given channel at a time.
We absolutely love what we do and feel SO privileged to get to call this a job, but, when you’re a self-employed content creator that travels full-time, it’s almost impossible to distinguish “work” from “life”. Even small moments feel like perhaps they should be captured and turned into Instagram Stories. Every spare second feels like it should be used to be productive, whether it’s responding to an email or writing a blog post or editing a video. It can just all feel like a pretty tiring hamster wheel that you can’t ever get off.

To be self-critical, I think a significant amount of our struggle is self-inflicted. Part of our issue is that we just physically move WAY too much—we’re still pretty new to being fully nomadic and are excited to see and do as much stuff as possible.
However, moving from place to place is incredibly time-consuming and expensive. So it’s one of our goals in 2025 to slow down a bit in order to have a bit more time and energy to spend behind our computers and maybe actually giving ourselves a day off every once in a while.
Our word for 2024
If you’ve read our previous end-of-the-year recaps, you know that we pick a “word of the year”, a kind of North Star of how we want our year to go.
In our recap last year, we picked the word “expansion” for 2024—to focus on expanding our business beyond just this website, to YouTube and Instagram and even beyond, with digital products, like courses or eBooks.

As mentioned above, I wish that we could report back with two million YouTube subscribers and a bevy of lucrative sponsorship deals lined up with our dream brands—but that didn’t exactly happen.
Still, I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished—we’ve hit over 10,000 followers on both Instagram and YouTube; grew our Facebook followers by over 400%; and launched a second website, 90 Summers.
Slow progress is still, at the end of the day, progress!
Our word for 2025
Our word for 2025 is “patience”—something I’m not particularly good at.
There’s unfortunately no standard operating procedure for being a self-employed travel content creator, so we’re trying to figure this all out as we go—how to make engaging videos; how to make competitive blog articles in today’s shifting landscape; and how to juggle and nurture several streams of income at once.

It can be extremely disappointing, frustrating, and even embarassing to invest your time into creating something that you’re really proud of that winds up not getting a lot of traction once you put it out into the ether.
However, we’re going to work on exercising patience this year, knowing that we’re learning something every time we show up, getting a little bit better every time, and taking baby steps closer to something great.
How’d we do on our 2024 bucketlist?
In each of our annual recaps, we always put together a list of travel or business-related goals that we hope to accomplish in the upcoming year.

When I wrote down our bucket list for 2024 in last year’s recap, I feel like I cheated a tiny bit, given that many of our adventures were already planned out. Still, I’m pretty sure this is the only year in Uprooted Traveler history that we accomplished literally everything on our bucket list.
Backpacking Havasu Falls
Check!
We spent four magical days on the floor of the Grand Canyon, camping and hiking around the famed turquoise waters of Havasu Falls, Mooney Falls, and Beaver Falls.

It was one of the most expensive camping trips we’ll probably ever do, but it was worth every penny, with our days spent swimming under turquoise cascades, running into bighorn sheep, and eating some of the best fry bread on the planet.
Hit a new continent
Double check!

I’m writing this recap on the couch of our Airbnb in Ushuaia, Argentina (from our fourth continent of South America), after returning from a cruise to Antarctica (our fifth continent!).
See the Northern Lights
Check, check, check!
Before writing down our bucketlist last year, I had read that the Northern Lights were supposed to be at their peak in 2024. And, boy, were they ever!

We saw them multiple times—as far south as southern Utah(!!!) and amongst the bright city lights of Regina, Saskatchewan. But, best of all, we saw them in some of the most remote and special places in the Americas—in Inuvik in the Northwest Territories of Canada as we drove up the Dempster Highway on the final leg of our epic journey to the Arctic Ocean and on our last night in Churchill, Manitoba.
The Northern Lights displays that we saw on our way to and in Churchill were nothing short of spectacular—green ribbons of light streaking across the sky and dancing right overhead. It was incredibly special and something I’ll remember for the rest of my life.
Our 2025 Bucket List
Like last year, I feel like this is cheating a bit—most of our 2025 travel plans are already booked and planned, but, if you’ve made it this far, you definitely deserve a sneak peek into what’s coming up for us this year!
RVing in Newfoundland
We’re going to be spending the first six months of this year in South America, but, come June, we’ll be heading back to North America and heading to our favorite northerly neighbor, Canada!

We plan on spending about two months in Newfoundland, hopefully, seeing icebergs, whales, and puffins; hiking on some of its epic-looking trails (including one of the only places on the planet where you can walk directly on the Earth’s mantle!); and camping on the edge of rugged cliffs and under picturesque lighthouses.
We’ve heard WONDERFUL things about this part of Canada, so our expectations are high!
Road trip through the Northeast in the fall
We’ve been lucky enough to explore most of the United States, but the Northeast is one corner of the country we haven’t really gotten to visit yet.

So we’re hoping to do a road trip there to enjoy its famed fall foliage—we’re dreaming of apple cider donuts, hikes to enjoy the autumnal colors, and lots of maple syrup.
Kayaking with whales
I’m not sure where we’ll accomplish this one—Newfoundland is said to be one of the best whale-watching places on the planet and we’re also planning to go to the Saguenay Fjord in Quebec, which is known as being an excellent place to see beluga whales.

So here’s hoping that Canada decides to send some 3,000+ pound creatures our way!
Seeing Miley Cyrus, Billie Eilish, or Jacob Collier
I asked Justin what he wanted to add to our travel bucket list and this was his request. So, I guess there will be some concerts in our future!
There you have it—our 2024, from the lowest lows to the highest highs and from the Arctic to Antarctica, and all of our dreams for 2025. If you’re curious how 2024 stacks up against years in the past, you can check out our recaps for:
I hope you get some time to reflect on the past year and how you want the upcoming year to look. What are some of your highs and lows of 2024? What are you most excited about in 2025? Let us know in the comments below!
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