Travel Turtle travel | crafts | culture | life | fun | family

Travel Turtle has been around on and off since 2007.

In 2011, Travel Turtle was overhauled to what you see right now.

But before I get into that, I thought I would do a little thing known as “A List of 50 Things About Me”. (Oct 2011)

1. In an effort to turn my “About Travel Turtle” page into one of the longest “About” pages on the internet, I will randomly add things to this page.
2.  I really love brownies, rice crispy treats, corn on the cob and hamburgers.
3. I like to sleep, but don’t always get to.
4. Who knew babies meant a lack of sleep?
5. I love, love, love to travel and talk about it with anyone who will listen.
6. But, I find 99% of blog posts about travel dull and pretentious.
7. Mostly because I feel like those posts are either about how wonderful the traveler is, how eye-opening their experience was or some other stuff that makes me yawn.
8. I don’t know who said it, but I find it to be true “Travel is only fun in retrospect”
9. Still, I may sometimes talk about travel.
10. And when I do, I apologize if you fall asleep.
11. But know this, if I was talking to you in person you could still very well fall asleep.
12. People used to tell me I had a very soothing voice on the phone, one that could put them to sleep.
13. Maybe that’s true, but no one has ever fallen asleep to my voice.
14. When I was in college, nothing made me madder than students who fell asleep in class.
15. I thought it was so disrespectful to the professor.
16. However, since college and through various jobs I’ve had, I’ve had the “pleasure” of working with many professors.
17. And they tend to be disrespectful to everyone.
18. I like to think my professors deserved respect, but can’t help to hope for people to fall asleep in these professors class.
19. Or maybe, I should wish that the students who fall asleep in their class would stop.
20. Maybe the professors are disrespectful to everyone else because their own students don’t respect them.
21. I don’t know.
22. I’m up way past my bedtime writing this.
23. So, I don’t even know what I’m saying.
24. Or if my spelling and grammar are decent.
25. If I know me, and I do, my grammar is not decent.
26. I also know me well enough to know I won’t keep this up too long.
27. Because I want to change things up in here.
28. In the old version of this blog, instead of an about page, I made a collage in Flickr of pictures I was ok with using as a representation of me.
29. There were about 20 pictures.
30. Pictures say a thousand words, right?
31. So, I tried to interpret the 1k words someone could think of me by looking at each picture.
32. As long I was happy with 900 of the words, the picture stayed.
33. Overall, there were 20k words representing me.
34. So far, I haven’t even written 1k words.
35. And that includes the stuff at the bottom of the page (which is a lot)
36. In high school, I hated 1k word essays.
37. Now, as I type this and watch this word count I realize.
38. In 4 words I’ll be at
39. 1001!
40. Wow – Totally didn’t expect this list of 50 things to take this turn.
41. Keep in mind, My 1001 words is everything above “1001! and everything below the end of this list.
42. At least, that’s accurate as of October 2011.
43. It probably won’t hold true when I add new content at the top of this about page.
44. Because that’s how I’m going to do it, shove the old stuff to the bottom.
45. Only 5 more things about me to know.
46. I love cities and great landscapes.
47. I wish I took better photos, but I don’t have the time to go to class and the two classes that I’ve taken haven’t considerably improved my skills.
48. My favorite color combination of all time is a dark teal with red.
49. I surprise myself with how much I like red.
50. But, then again, I like most colors.

As happens my life has changed drastically since I started this blog. I have moved overseas (Germany) and I have a son (W). One thing that has remained consistent (and maybe even more important to me if that was possible) is my need for learning about other cultures. Not just for me, though, my son, too. We are at an advantage for traveling throughout Europe. It’s a lot easier when you can jump on a train instead of a plane. However, it’s not quite easy.

I decided that what Travel Turtle was originally about (travel and creating items), just didn’t quite apply the same way anymore. Thus, the revamp.

So, what’s it about now? Well, from the reinvention I realize I want to focus on all aspects of travel, culture and having a kid. This varies from the logistics of the very popular question “I’m going on a plane, what should I bring for my kid?” to the day-to-day realities of “I can’t afford to go someplace new all the time, how can I bring some of these travel, culture, language ideas into my daily life?”

I have these questions and concerns all the time. Even though I’ve already stayed at several hotels, I still want to see what people do/bring/suggest when staying at hotels. I constantly look for ideas for our daily life well. This is where I document it all. How I infuse it into my life. What works, what doesn’t work.

Please bear with me as I restart this website and publish more posts. Please send me any questions you may have that you want my perspective on. Please send me anything you’ve tried that’s worked for you.

About US

So, that’s the site. What about the people behind the site? Well, I already mentioned W. He is currently less than 1 years old. He has been to 4 countries and 4 US states. Though he doesn’t talk, I can tell he likes to looking at all the people when we are on trains, planes and subways. He’s not much into the scenery or art exhibits yet.

I’m A. I won’t give you my age. Ok, I’m in my 30s. I come from a travel and international relations background. One of my very few non-travel related jobs I’ve held was as a teaching assistant in a child development center. (The other was operations and event planning in the film industry… so much fun).

My husband rounds out our little family. I’ll refer to him as C. We moved here right after finding out I was pregnant. We will be in Germany indefinitely. There are things that we really love about living here, and things that we’re approaching with a very wide learning curve. It takes time adjusting to a new culture.

Thank you and enjoy!