Since 2020, we’ve written an annual end-of-the-year recap to reflect on our experiences traveling around the world for the last year and the unpredictable roller coaster that is running a small content creation business in this day and age.
I hope that a few other humans might read these recaps, but, to be honest, I mostly write them for ourselves, as they force us to take stock of our wins and losses over the last 12 months and evaluate what we want to accomplish in the 365 days ahead. 2025 was an absolutely wild, rollercoaster of a year, where we got to pack in more insane adventures than I would’ve dreamed possible for an entire lifetime—and fell on our faces plenty, too. Let’s get into it!
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2025 Travel Summary
Countries traveled to: 12 (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Canada, United States, Mexico, Norway, Iceland, and Greenland)
Continents visited: 4 (North America, South America, Europe, and Antarctica)
The first five months of 2025 was spent exploring South America.
We started the year in Ushuaia, Argentina (i.e., the southernmost city on the planet!) and zig-zagged our way all across Chile and Argentina. Along the way, we hit a ton of these countries’ highlights, like Patagonia, Iguazu Falls (the largest waterfall complex in the world!), and the otherworldly Atacama Desert.
After that, we headed up to Ecuador and had all of the amazing wildlife adventures, from swimming with pink river dolphins in the Amazon Rainforest to walking with giant tortoises in the Galapagos Islands.
From there, we spent two months making our way down through Peru and Bolivia. These turned out to be our two favorite countries in South America (and, that’s saying a lot, as we truly loved them all!), with the perfect mix of an incredibly rich and colorful culture and some of the most epic natural beauty on the planet. We climbed past ancient ruins through the Andes Mountains to the breathtakingly beautiful Machu Picchu; trekked through tiny Quechua villages along the Colca Canyon Trail in Peru; and zipped all over the dusty, martian deserts of southern Bolivia (seriously, if that country isn’t on your list, you HAVE to add it!).
In June, we said a sad goodbye to South America, flew to Quebec, and picked up our camper in Quebec City to resume RV life.
During the latter half of the year, we did a somewhat chaotic shuffle of slowly making our way down the eastern coastline of Canada and the United States to our home state of Florida, while flying overseas to do several incredible once-in-a-lifetime expedition cruises—namely, to Svalbard, Northeastern Greenland, and Antarctica.
Before quitting our corporate jobs to run our business fulltime, I used to sit at my desk and daydream about what it might be like to travel full-time. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that, in terms of travel, 2025 was WAY beyond what I had ever dreamed of, which is something I will be forever grateful for.
U.S. states visited: We technically drove through 12 states, but we really only explored areas in six of them (Maine, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida)
U.S. National Parks visited: 4 (Acadia, New River Gorge, Shenandoah, and Dry Tortugas)
Beds slept in: 70
Days at sea: 44
Campsites stayed at in our RV: 48
Plus, a total of 10 nights camping outside, including:
- Five nights as we hiked along the W Trek in Chilean Patagonia;
- Three nights in a tent along the Inca Trail in the Sacred Valley of Peru;
- One night in our trusty tent in the shadow of Fort Jefferson (the largest brick structure in the Western Hemisphere!) in Dry Tortugas National Park, 70 miles off the coast of Key West, Florida; and
- One night out on the ice, right under the Midnight Sun, in Antarctica
Polar bear sightings: 34
Our Three Highs of 2025
Not to beat a dead horse, but this past year for us was an absolute fever dream for any adventure travel lover.
We watched polar bears fight over a sperm whale carcass close to the North Pole; slept in a glass capsule hotel hanging off the side of a cliff a thousand feet above the floor of the Sacred Valley of Peru; and cuddled with sled dogs puppies in Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland, which is believed to be the most remote town on the planet.
In many respects, it was truly the year of our dreams.
Needless to say, narrowing down the highlights is tough, but here goes nothing!
Falling in love with expedition cruising
Before a few years ago, I would have never seriously considered cruising as something that I would want to regularly integrate into our travels.
I had a pretty mediocre experience doing a Caribbean cruise with some girlfriends about a decade ago and kind of wrote off that style of travel forever. To be honest, I was a bit of a snob about it—I mean, where’s the adventure in being driven around on a big boat, drinking sickeningly sugary drinks by a pool, and occasionally being dumped off at some artificial port city?
This year, though, we had the opportunity to explore some of our planet’s most remote places on expedition cruises with Aurora Expeditions and National Geographic-Lindblad Expeditions. And we quickly discovered that 1/ not all cruising involves consuming copious amounts of Bahama Mamas and 2/ it’s one of our FAVORITE ways to explore the planet.
We’re fortunate to have traveled fairly extensively and find ourselves, over the past few years, being drawn to remote areas, where the landscape remains wild and raw and where its scale humbles us—places like Alaska and Northern Canada. And it turns out these locations often offer another aspect of travel that we’ve been drawn to more and more over the past few years—wildlife.
Expedition cruises allow us to explore places like this that are generally inaccessible, immerse ourselves in the landscape, and become passive observers to the epic nature around us. We’ve had so many mindblowing experiences on these cruises this year, but some of our favorites include:
- Watching a family of polar bears have their pick from a MASSIVE raft of thousands of harp seals, lazily snoozing on the pack ice, less than 500 nautical miles from the North Pole, on our Svalbard cruise with Aurora Expeditions
- Seeing a pod of narwhals off the coast and sleeping overnight in our own private igloo on our Greenland cruise with National Geographic-Lindblad Expeditions
- Having a humpback whale swim less than ten feet from our Zodiac boat (on multiple occasions!) in Antarctica
Expedition cruising can be an EXPENSIVE hobby to take up (10 day cruises to the polar regions typically start at a minimum of $13,000 per person—yikes!), so I sadly don’t think it’s going to be a super regular part of our rotation.
However, we’re definitely going to look for ways to integrate these more into our adventures around the world—I’d love to go on an expedition cruise in Baja, California to swim with orcas or during the mobula ray migration; Scotland to see remote islands and to snorkel with basking sharks; or even Alaska to have more encounters with grizzly bears.
Growing other areas of our business
As you might imagine, the world of online businesses has changed pretty rapidly since we quit our corporate jobs in 2023. Between the rise of AI, unpredictable Google algorithms, and our collective shortening attention span, making money from traditional travel blogging is getting harder and harder.
We’ve run Uprooted Traveler since 2018, originally just as a hobby that slowly turned into a business venture. And, for years, it was the singular piece of online real estate that we had and the only channel that we put our energy into.
But, a few years ago, we had the foresight to attempt to try to diversify our business, due to all of the aforementioned AI/algorithm doom and gloom. We started a YouTube channel and consistently posted more on Instagram, both to grow our community and in hopes that we’d one day be able to use these as additional streams of revenue. We even started a second website in September 2024, in case this website is randomly decimated by a Google update (which happens to fellow publishers ALL the time).
Growth on these different channels have been painfully slow, at times (okay… a lot of times). And, unlike blogging, if you spend hours or even weeks working on a piece of content for Instagram or YouTube, the whole world can see your number of views for themselves and just how successful it was. And we’ve unfortunately had a lot of not-so-successful pieces of content that we’ve worked REALLY hard on floating out in the ether, which can feel disheartening and downright embarrassing.
But 2025 felt like some of these channels finally started to gain a little traction.
- Our YouTube channel’s subscribers tripled in size and we were able to work with our first brand partnerships for videos (in case you didn’t know, YouTube AdSense pays absolute peanuts, so most of the big YouTube channels make the vast majority of their income from sponsorships).
- Our Instagram followers doubled, with seven of our Reels reaching over 500,000 views (and four over one million!), plus, towards the end of the year, a consistent stream of brand partnerships.
- Our second website’s traffic grew 11x and consistently started making income through affiliate marketing sales.
We still obviously wish that all of our channels were 100x bigger than they currently are, but this growth definitely seems like a good sign that we’re at least moving in the right direction. Plus, our income feels a LOT more sustainable than it did when we were wholly reliant on Google traffic on Uprooted Traveler.
Hiking the W Trek
One of the main reasons I had wanted to explore South America was to visit Patagonia and hike some of its most famous trails, including the W Trek. If you’re not familiar with it, the W Trek is a multi-day hike that snakes for 45 miles through Torres del Paine National Park, known for its iconically jagged mountain peaks, turquoise lakes, and hulking ancient glaciers.
Planning the W Trek is one of the most logistically challenging travel experiences of my life—for example, you need to make reservations at four different campgrounds on two different online permitting systems, all of which sell out almost the instant they go on sale, as well as coordinate the four different types of transportation you need to take to get to and from the trailhead (all of which are quite expensive). I literally had nightmares that I had somehow messed something up in my planning.
Right before our trip, we checked the weather forecast and it looked ABSOLUTELY miserable—basically constant rain in near freezing temperatures the entire five days of our hike. We seriously considered skipping the hike entirely, losing out on close to $2,000 of reservations and permit fees.
But we went anyway and Patagonia treated us to its infamously unpredictable weather—just in the best way possible! But for a few hours of our five days on the trail, we had pleasantly warm temperatures and clear skies that afforded us views of the dramatic peaks of the Cordillera Paine mountain range.
We had SO much fun on the trail—talking for hours and hours each day while climbing through some of the most gorgeous landscapes on the planet and ending each night with a pizza and beer at the refugios along the trail.
It was one of the best experiences of our lives and we’d love to go back someday to hike the O Trek, an extended 85 mile version of the W that circumnavigates all of Torres del Paine.
Honorable mention highlights of 2025
Seeing a lot more friends during our travels!
We met up with Justin’s cousin, Andrew, and his wife, Sam, in Cusco, Peru to hike along the Inca Trail together and had such a fun time—so much so that we decided to make it an annual tradition to do a big hike together every year (we’re doing Tour du Mont Blanc in 2026!).
We also got to see friends throughout the year in Maine, Rhode Island, Florida, Virginia, and Chicago (plus, I went on a trip with five of my girlfriends from St. Louis to Mexico)—it’s good for our souls and definitely helps us feel a bit more rooted to maintain our connections with people who have meant so much to us over the years.
Christmastime in Chicago
Speaking of the Windy City, we visited my family together in my hometown of Chicago for the first time in SEVEN years (to be clear, we’ve seen them since 2019, just not there. I’m not a negligent child)!
It was special for a few reasons.
Justin and I used to go to Chicago every Christmas together since we started dating in 2012 and formed a lot of different holiday traditions there over the years, like getting dinner in Chinatown and seeing White Christmas at this old movie theater, The Music Box. So, it was really fun to go revisit a ton of the places where we made memories in the formative years of our relationship—alllll the nostalgic vibes.
Plus, we got to spend time with my parents, which is really, really special to me.
If you’re new around here, my dad was diagnosed a few years ago with an aggressive and rare form of leukemia that can only be treated with stem cell transplant. After waiting on a donor match for almost a year and FINALLY getting his transplant, it unfortunately seemed like the transplant didn’t work, with my dad getting sicker and sicker by the day. But, in late 2025, almost an entire year after his transplant, it just mysteriously started working exactly as it was intended, with his strength and energy slowly returning.
The last time I saw my parents was when my dad just started recovering late last year and he’s doing even better! It was so wonderful to see my parents both feeling lighter, healthier, and in a MUCH better headspace—the best Christmas present I could ever ask for.
Having our first proper fall in a while!
We both grew up in the Midwestern United States, where jumping into a pile of autumnal leaves was an annual rite of passage. But, since moving to the Pacific Northwest in 2019, we haven’t had an autumn with fall foliage—we’ve pretty much always been surrounded by conifers.
But we specifically planned our September and October around doing fall road trips in Quebec and the Northeastern United States.
Not everything went perfectly to plan (we somehow were too early to see fall foliage in Maine but arrived long past peak in New Hampshire and Vermont), but we still made the best of it. We hit some of the best fall hikes in Quebec, which is SUCH an underrated part of Canada, and pivoted what was supposed to be a Northeastern road trip to cruise down the entire 469 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway, one of the most spectacularly beautiful scenic drives in the country.
Our Three Lows of 2025
Starting the year with Uprooted Traveler circling the drain
Our 2025 wound up being one of the best years of our lives, but it honestly started REALLY crappy.
There was a bunch of horrible stuff going on through the first couple months of the year that I won’t get into that was draining a LOT of our energy, while, simultaneously, our traffic on Uprooted Traveler (and, thus, our income) was at an all time low, due to changes in Google’s algorithm and the rise of AI-based results at the top of search queries.
It was getting to the point where we weren’t totally sure, if things stayed as they were, that we’d be able to continue being fully self-employed or if we’d need to start looking for other streams of income (I know we probably seem like wild, wanderlusty dreamers, but we also take financial responsibility REALLY seriously).
It was really frustrating to have dumped so much time and energy into this website, just for the whims of the Google overlords to make all of our hard work irrelevant.
In June, though, there was yet another Google update that restored our traffic (and even made it a smidge higher than it was before), plus, as mentioned above, we started to finally make progress on our other streams of income that make our business more stable and sustainable.
So it turned out fine (for now, anyway!), but we had something of a major storm cloud over our head for the first half of the year.
Driving the Ring Road in Iceland
When we found out our cruise to Northeastern Greenland was departing from Reykjavik, Iceland, we were SO stoked.
Iceland was one of the first countries that we had visited together in 2018, on a quick four day holiday, and we always dreamed of returning together to explore the country’s otherworldly scenery more in depth. We even have this goofy Will Ferrell movie, called Fire Saga, that we’ve watched dozens of times together whenever we’re feeling down. The movie takes place in Iceland and we love it, in part, due to its depiction of the country’s surreal beauty and the charm of living in a small Icelandic village.
So, we decided to do a two week campervan trip around the Ring Road, which circumnavigates this island country, after our Greenlandic cruise. We dreamed of hiking across craggy mountain peaks, soaking in pristine hot springs, and stumbling upon cozy pubs in tiny farm towns.
Don’t get us wrong, we enjoyed our Iceland road trip, but it DEFINITELY did not live up to the lore that we had concocted in our minds over the years. To be completely honest, in our opinion, the country has changed for the worse since we visited in 2018.
Iceland is famously considered the most expensive place to travel as a tourist, but, when we visited in 2018, it actually wasn’t too hard on the wallet, because the vast majority of attractions, like hikes, beaches, waterfalls, and natural hot springs, were totally free. If you planned it right, you really only needed to worry about the price of your rental car, gas, food, and your accommodations.
Not so in 2025—EVERYTHING has a price associated with it. Pretty much every viewpoint, waterfall, hike, you name it, has a parking fee, somewhere between $7-12 USD, per stop. So, on a road trip, where you’re stopping at five or more sites per day over the course of a week or two, these costs can quickly add up.
Even small things had prices associated with them. On a particularly blustery day, we stopped in a cafe, spending $8 USD on a single cup of coffee, and asked the shop if we could use its bathroom. They said their bathroom wasn’t for public use and instead, directed us to a nearby town hall that charged $3 USD per person to use the bathroom.
I TOTALLY understand that tourism has run rampant in Iceland for several years now, so the demand clearly exists. But, at times, the commodification of pretty much everything felt a bit over-the-top, honestly bordering on predatory.
And, while we had idealized exploring small Icelandic villages, that really doesn’t exist there (at least, not that we could find!). Over half of Icelanders live in Reykjavik, with the rest of the country consisting of sprawling farmland with extremely sparse human populations. When we did find a cafe or bar in a small town somewhere, it was exclusively catering to tourists—I just don’t think cozy pubs or restaurants are a part of Icelandic culture the way it is in other parts of the world.
It also didn’t help that all that gnarly weather we were supposed to get during our W Trek seemed to follow us for the majority of our two weeks in Iceland—cold and windy days with a near constant downpour and heavy clouds that obscured much of the landscape.
I could honestly rant about this trip for a long time, but it’s worth pointing out that Iceland is still one of the most beautiful places we’ve ever visited, so don’t let our experience dissuade you from visiting.
This was mostly an us problem, having an idealized and unrealistic expectation of what we wanted Iceland to be. Plus, the shit weather surely didn’t help.
General uncertainty about our path
The past few years have been the most incredible of our lives, packed with adventures beyond our wildest dreams. The fact that we get to travel around the world together, have adventures with our best friend, and somehow make money from it will NEVER stop being amazing to us.
That being said, we don’t really know what’s on the road ahead.
Sometimes, we worry about the financial viability of what we’re doing on a long-term basis.
When we quit our corporate careers in 2023, our website was absolutely crushing it. We actually were on track to surpass our annual income, as compared to what we made as an attorney for Amazon and a systems analyst for UPS, in the following year. But, since then, between all the changes from AI and Google and how people consume information online, that DEFINITELY isn’t the case anymore—not anywhere close to it.
For now, our business allows us to be financially responsible, covering our expenses and staying on track for retirement. But we still have to be quite budget-conscious and spend more time than I’d care to, figuring out how to save money where we can. And, as we’re both nearing our late 30s, we’re not totally sure how long we want to expend our energy in that way—to feel that our income and financial success is tied, in many respects, to algorithms and things outside of our control.
And, beyond that, we’re not totally sure where we see ourselves, even in a couple of years. Do we want a house? If so, should it be in the U.S. or abroad? Should we try out living in a campervan? Will we want to keep putting ourselves out on the Internet into our 40s? And beyond that?
In most respects, the flexibility that running an online business has afforded us has been one of the greatest blessings. But, in some ways, the flexibility is also a bit paralyzing—we almost have limitless options, which constantly has us questioning pretty much every decision we make.
We don’t need to have all of the answers right now, and I’m trying to be better about living more in the present and not getting lost in the “what ifs” of the future. But I’d be lying to say that the nebulousness of our tomorrow didn’t keep me up at night sometimes.
Our word for 2025
In each annual recap we pick a “word of the year” to act as our North Star for the year ahead and to guide our intentions.
Our word for 2025 was patience, something I’m usually not so good (i.e., very bad) at.
I still wouldn’t say either of us really excelled at being patient this year, but we definitely did better at it. We reminded ourselves that growing a second website to a sustainable second income source might take years, that growing a loyal and dedicated YouTube audience can take hundreds of videos.
We’d both LOVE it if things happened faster, but, if running this kind of online business was easy, I assume most people would be traveling to Antarctica as their full-time jobs.
And, as mentioned above, our patience has slowly started to pay off, with real, tangible growth in a number of our different channels that make us feel like we’re making baby steps to something great.
Our word for 2026
For 2026, I’m picking balance as our word of the year.
It’s something that we’ve struggled with for a while now.
We pretty much never have days that are truly off (and haven’t since we started to treat Uprooted Traveler as a real business in 2021). And, in 2025, it was honestly something we struggled with even MORE than we had in the past—we feel so fortunate to have had so many once-in-a-lifetime adventures in the past year, but each of them was also a HUGE commitment of our time and energy, which made staying on top of our work feel impossible. And the fact that we’re trying to maintain and grow so many different channels just exacerbates the problem even further.
In 2026, we’d love to get into more of a routine, figure out how much of our energy should be invested in which of our channels, and find a bit more space for ourselves in there, too.
How’d we do on our 2025 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.
In the past few years, I’ve mentioned that it feels a bit like cheating. We plan out our travel plans for the year in advance, so I theoretically know exactly what we’re doing as I’m writing these posts. But, somehow, in 2025, we only managed to complete one of the items on our 2025 bucket list, which was the only one that wasn’t travel-related—so, I guess you never know!
RVing in Newfoundland
Negative!
We were supposed to spend the summer RVing around Newfoundland, seeing puffins and humpback whales and going on bucketlist hikes. However, that was promptly put on the backburner when we were presented with the opportunity to take expedition cruises around Svalbard and Greenland.
But we just purchased our ferry tickets to spend over two months there this summer, having our dream Newfoundland road trip. So fingers crossed we’ll be there in a few short months!
Road trip through the Northeast in the fall
Maybe half a checkmark?
As mentioned above, we did an incredible road trip through Quebec in fall and, from there, we had planned to road trip our way through Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. We had never explored this part of the country before and had dreamed of downing maple Creemees and apple cider donuts and hiking amongst technicolor fall foliage.
But our timing just didn’t work out. In early October, we visited Acadia National Park in Maine, but the leaves hadn’t really started to change yet. While we were there, we caught wind that the leaves in New Hampshire and Vermont had supposedly peaked several weeks earlier than expected this year. We hightailed it over there, but, still, when we got there, the trees had nothing left on them, other than sad brown crisps.
On the bright side, we just opted to totally change our plans and drive south to hit the Blue Ridge Parkway, which winds through Virginia and North Carolina instead. And it still very much scratched our fall road trip itch!
Kayaking with whales
Again, a quarter check mark for this one.
We had hoped to maybe kayak with whales in Newfoundland or Churchill, Canada, but we didn’t end up going to either of those places this year.
We did, however, have several experiences in Antarctica, where humpback whales were less than a dozen feet from our Zodiac—and even dove directly under us!
So, not quite kayaking with them, but close enough in our books.
Seeing Miley Cyrus, Billie Eilish, or Jacob Collier
Finally, one we get to actually check off!
If you can’t tell from the narrative of this article, I do the vast majority of travel planning, while Justin is just happily along for the ride. He’s such a good sport and is always excited for everything we wind up doing, but I also want to incorporate things that are solely what he wants to do. So, last year, as I was writing this article, I asked him what was one thing he wanted to experience in 2025 and he named seeing one of these artists in concert.
Miley Cyrus and Billie Eilish weren’t touring in the U.S. last year, but Jacob Collier was—so, I surprised Justin with tickets to see him at the Jazz Fest in Newport, Rhode Island. It was a lovely day, enjoying the cool ocean breeze from the Atlantic; drinking beers in the sunshine; and listening to some incredible musicians.
Our 2026 Bucket List
Getting our second website onto an ad network
The majority of our income right now comes from ads on this website, which is managed by a company called Mediavine.
To qualify for Mediavine, your website has to hit a pretty high traffic threshold—it used to be 50,000 user sessions a month. Due to AI and all of the other stuff that I’ve been complaining about in this post, Mediavine and other premium ad networks have lowered their traffic threshold requirements a bit, but we still basically need to double our traffic on our second website, 90 Summers, to have it qualify.
While that sounds kind of insane, it grew 11x in 2025, so I’m going to keep my fingers crossed (and keep hitting “publish” as many times as I possibly can) to get it on Mediavine in the first half of 2026.
Multiple streams of income, baby.
RVing in Newfoundland
This is our year!!
Completing the Tour du Mont Blanc
As mentioned above, we’re hiking the Tour du Mont Blanc with our friends, Sam and Andrew, at the beginning of September 2026.
The trek circumnavigates Mont Blanc, which is the highest mountain in Western Europe. The hike crosses into Switzerland, Italy, and France, covering over 100 miles and gaining over 34,000 feet in elevation (which is higher than Mount Everest!).
This will easily be the most physically challenging thing either of us have ever done BY FAR and I’m sure aspects of the trail will be straight up Type 2 kinda fun. Still, it should also be full of absolutely stunning views, long talks with our friends, those cute Swiss cows with bells around their necks, and lots of fondue.
There you have it—the full truth and nothing but the truth of our 2025. If you’re curious to read past years’ recaps, you can check them out here:
I hope you had some time to reflect on your 2025 and all of the things you hope to accomplish in the year ahead. I’d love to hear about your highs and lows of 2025 and any goals you might have for 2026—let me know in the comments below!
Thank you for reading our post! Check out our latest stories here and follow us on Instagram (@UprootedTraveler), YouTube, or on Facebook to see what we’re up to next!
I love to travel so I love reading your posts. I don’t remember how I even go started reach these but I do enjoy it. Thank you for posting all this. Have a Happy 2026!
Thanks, Nancy! We’re so glad to have you along for the journey. Hope 2026 is full of lots of travels and adventures for you!
All the best,
Jess
Justin and Jess, Great recap, met you in Katmai in 2024. I’m enjoying your adventures since then. I don’t do any social media, so depend on these email posts to see what you’re up to. Good luck with all your ventures in 2026.
It was nice to meet you Nancy and glad to have you following along, in whatever capacity! Thanks for the kind words and hope you have a great 2026 as well.