I got bitten by the "travel bug" when I was 16. I was representing our school in a small town in southern Italy for a week. My host family's daughter spoke English well, but it seemed like the whole rest of the town didn't. I didn't speak a word Italian. Still I was like Alice in Wonderland. The language, the scents, the food, old architecture - it was all very exciting for a girl who was raised in a tiny village in northern Finland. Even flirting and romance was different there and I got my first ever kiss on my hand. How thrilling!
Fast forward I became a bachelor of nursing in 2016 and around that time we started traveling together with my best friend. First it was just a week in Barcelona, but soon we did a month long Interrail trip around western Europe by trains. We also did Mykonos, Athens and Berlin before the big adventure.
Around spring time 2018 we decided with my best friend that we would make a longer trip in Australia in 2019. We saved money, got the plane tickets and visas, quit our jobs and took off to Melbourne through Singapore in January 2019. The heat in Singapore where we stayed the first week was unlike anything I've ever experienced. But the food was amazing, wherever and whatever we tasted. We enjoyed our freedom in summery Melbourne for a month, did the Great Ocean road with the car we bought and ended up to a dairy farm near Warrnambool to do our farm work for 88 days. Just in case one of us would want to extend our visas for another year. Which turned out to be a good decision. We saved heaps of money on the farm and made some unforgettable memories. After that we did the basic East Coast road trip. But I was feeling like I was a bit lost. I needed to find a direction for my life. I sat down in Sydney in a cafe, and started seriously thinking. What am I interested in? Do I have passions? What skills do I have? Where I see myself in five years? By that point I had never been on a boat. I had been watching sailing videos from YouTube and painted pictures in my head. But for some reason I became really confident that I needed to learn how to sail. When booking tours along our East Coast trip we also booked our first sailing tour at the Whitsundays. Those three days on the water were amazing! We finished our trip to Cairns, but I knew I needed more. My friend went to do a bit more farm work and traveled back to Melbourne which she loved, but I moved to Airlie Beach - and got myself a job on the same sailboats we did our holiday trip on!
Now I'm writing this in the middle of corona pandemic in Gold Coast. I got the idea of how to sail and live aboard during those five months of working, but still have a long way to go to be confident enough to sail a boat myself. I met my boyfriend, fell in love and now we chase the same dream together - we want our own boat and travel the world. That's why I moved to Gold Coast, to be closer to him and find another type of work. But then this pandemic came along and because of my asthma I have to be very careful not to get the virus myself. That's why everything is on hold, but hey - day by day, step by step!
