After a roaring summer, the autumn slump has begun. This is a pretty common thing for travel bloggers to experience at this time of year, but it's still hard to see your business contract and have no control over it. The reality is that people just travel less during this time of year – myself included – so the volume of people searching drops for almost every business in the travel industry...

Well, here we are: the 18-month mark of the pandemic. It's hard to believe that it's been a year and a half, and I'm still here, reporting on my little travel site which has undergone the most dramatic rollercoaster of its 8-year career – and there's no end in sight...

After a few months of limited travel as we adjust to life here in Ohio, July finally saw my return to the open skies and open roads – just in the nick of time! Not being able to travel has been hard for my mental health and my business, and sneaking in a few trips before the Delta Variant began sweeping across the country helped soothe that discomfort some...

Once is an outlier, twice is a coincidence, three times – that’s a pattern. That’s how I’m feeling this month as I look at my traffic and income, and am awed at how far this site has come in the past few years. The beginning of July marks the anniversary of when I left my last full-time role to strike out as a full-time blogger/freelance writer – and I have so much more freedom (both personal and financial) than I ever did when working for other companies...

Each time I sit down to write these monthly recaps, I replace the one from a year previous. That means that for the next few months, I'm reliving the stress and uncertainty of the pandemic's impact on my business – and reporting on my recovery (and growth). This month, like April, is one that gives me a lot of faith that my persistence has and will continue to pay off.

Sitting down to write this recap, I looked back on last year's numbers and my thoughts surrounding them. This time last year, we were in the first few months of what would become a years-long pandemic. It was incredibly stressful to watch the business I'd built over the past seven years evaporate overnight...

Well, after last March, anything has to be better, right? You may or may not recall that my March 2020 recap was very dour – I was angry and depressed that my business was decimated by the impending pandemic... and little did we know what was still to come from that!...

It's hard to believe it, but here we are: the 12th installment of my monthly recaps from the pandemic. Last March feels like a hazy dream now, a whole year ago when I was shell-shocked and angry that my career and life were totally uprooted...

January, oh January. Normally, a month of celebration, with roaring traffic that makes up for typical income drops at the beginning of a new year. Two years ago, I wrote "I’m delighted to share that January was an all-time great month for the blog. So many of you are new readers, I received heart-warming comments and questions, and all the hard work in the past few months is starting to pay off. 2019 is lookin’ real good right now..."

Here we are: the end of 2020. I can't say the end of the year because 2020 definitely felt like many years to me, including the Normal Time (January & February), the Quarantine Years (March, April, May), That Time I Planned a Pandemic Wedding (June & July), the One Month That Felt Like A Year (August), A Semblance of Normal (September & October), and The Precipice of A Dark Winter (November). Oh yeah, and this month...