Five years ago today, I brought this space on the internet to life. Happy Five-Year Blog-A-Versary to me! I had no idea when I bought this domain in 2016 where it would take me, or what it would mean to me. This blog is my baby. During the times when I felt like I had nothing, I had Away With Maja. The site turns 5 years old today, and wow! I can’t believe it.

I’ve written a lot over the years as both this blog and myself have changed. You can catch up on these older posts here: 6 months, 1 year, 18 months, 2 years, 3 years, and 4 years. In my last yearly blog review (4 years), I said, “This has been a monumental year—I can tell I’m on the cusp of something very, very exciting to come.”

Enter 2020. Oof.

This last year has been brutal. Everything got fucked up. The global pandemic brought the world to a halt. So many infections, so many deaths, so many UK lockdowns. All my trips were canceled. I couldn’t go home and see my family. My neighborhood in Minneapolis burned to the ground during protests. I got furloughed and then made redundant, losing my job in the travel industry. My marriage ended in the most painful way possible. I struggled living alone in lockdown and being far away from family and friends. I know that 2020 has been tough for pretty much everyone, but man. It really fucked me over.

I had made huge leaps and bounds in the last year with Away With Maja. I had a regular (paid) freelance writing gig, I was regularly getting invited to events and networking with more York bloggers, I had just had my first collaboration (where I essentially got paid to go to Manchester), my page views were on the up and up and I thought that I would meet the threshold to apply for Mediavine (an ad network) soon.

Well, things didn’t really go to plan. By March, as coronavirus was spreading around the world and more countries were shutting their borders every day, my blog traffic was dropping. By April it had completely tanked. My monthly page views in April 2020 were the lowest they had been for over a year, since March 2019. As no one was traveling, no one was reading travel blogs, mine included. I saw a peak in August 2020, as lots of people (in the UK at least) were starting to travel domestically and some rare international trips. The fact that I had switched to writing mainly about local (Yorkshire and UK) travel worked well for me. But the travel industry (including travel blogging) will take years to recover. 2020 was rough.

Like so many others, I didn’t travel much in the last year. This is the longest I’ve gone without leaving the UK (over 13 months), and the longest I’ve spent in one country since 2012 (!). I used to go stir-crazy if I was in the UK for more than 10 weeks at a time. Now, the last time I left the country was on my trip to Rome in December 2019. My perspective of travel has shifted, and I did have a lot of adventures—just much closer to home. It is a fundamentally different kind of travel. I loved the opportunity to explore both my beautiful city of York, and my beloved Yorkshire, more than ever this year. I visited so many places that I just never would have gone to if I was constantly flying off to another country! But I do miss the previous freedom I had on my trips abroad. I am happiest, and the most complete version of myself, when I’m on the road. God, I miss it so much. But I have found a peace with it in the last year that I never would have expected. If you told me this time last year that I wouldn’t have left the UK for a year—let alone not left the UK for a year and still been relatively happy—I wouldn’t have believed you. And in a sense, that inner peace and love for adventures close by is kind of freeing, too.

After watching all the travel bloggers I look up to and admire lose their entire incomes, livelihoods, and careers, it made me question whether I still want to take my blog full-time. Do I want to try to be a full-time travel blogger? That’s a question I honestly don’t have an answer to. For a few years, I toyed with the idea. In 2019, I was determined to start making that a reality. But after watching travel bloggers struggle to survive, their income and work decimated due to the pandemic, it made me think: do I really want that? Wouldn’t working my office job be so much more stable? (Until I got made redundant, LOL) Is becoming self-employed with my blog a risk I really want to take? I don’t know. Maybe 2020 was a sign that this isn’t what I’m meant to do, maybe 2020 was a sign that I should try for it anyway. Frankly, I just don’t know. There are far too many uncertainties in my life right now. But I know that I love blogging, I love writing, and I love sharing my adventures through this blog. So only time will tell.

Somehow, I managed to increase my page views by 30% during a global pandemic. Stats-wise, 2020 ended up being an even better year than 2019. Despite my dramatic drop in pageviews when coronavirus hit, 2020 ended up being my best year yet! Part of this is due to a strong first few months (before lockdowns), part of it was due to my focus on UK content through the summer, part of it was due to luck with algorithms and Google smiling down upon me, part of it was Pinterest strategies, part of it was a very personal, very painful, blog post I shared at the end of the year. It’s also because I never gave up. There were a lot of times when I stopped posting or sharing because what I was going through was just too difficult to find the energy to blog. But I kept at it. I didn’t give up. Overall though, I was furloughed for 5 months before I was made redundant. While I’m not saying it was ideal, it gave me a lot of time to work on this blog. And I fucking worked on it while I was on furlough.

I finally got into Pinterest, which is now my top social media referrer. Although that in and of itself is a bit misleading—Pinterest isn’t social media, it’s a search engine. I spent SO many hours in lockdown and through October working on Pinterest: creating pins, learning Canva, pinning pins, scheduling pins—pins, pins, pins. With nothing to do and nowhere to go, I worked my ass off on Pinterest.

I had a spreadsheet that I updated every day for about 6 months (March-October), measuring my Pinterest stats and pageviews. Pinterest became part of my daily blog routine. I am still getting regular pageviews from Pinterest, even though I haven’t done literally anything with it in well over three months. That’s the beauty of Pinterest—some pins can live forever. I’m glad I had the time this year to really get my ass in gear and work on Pinterest.

I truly love writing about travel and sharing that with other people. In the most difficult period of my life, I ended up getting a temp contract to do basically my dream job. I worked on the copy desk/production team for Culture Trip, and absolutely thrived. It reminded me just how much I love writing, and just how much I love sharing it all with you. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to work with customers, and I was getting paid to do something that I loved! It was pretty monumental for me in a lot of ways. While my contract was only temporary, I still do freelance copyediting for them. And I just really, really love it. It is with a huge sense of pride that I can finally add these skills to my resume/CV from an official, paid position. It reinforced my confidence that I am a good writer, I am a good editor, and that I really, truly LOVE doing those things.

I don’t really know what the next year of Away With Maja will bring. There are so many unknowns and uncertainties. Losing my job and my marriage will change both this blog, and the way I share. Lockdown in the UK, the financial pressure of my current situation, and the harsh consequences of my marriage ending mean I probably won’t be doing much (if any) international travel outside the UK in the next year. If I can leave the house again, it’ll probably be to go on hikes around Yorkshire. If I go on any trips, it will almost certainly be local UK trips. I just don’t know what will happen.

I might not know what’s going to happen, but I know that Away With Maja will still be here next year. I am a traveler at heart. That will never change. I am happiest traveling and having adventures, and I will still find ways to make that happen. Sharing my life and adventures through this blog is what brings me the most joy in the world. So whatever happens, I still intend to be blogging next year. It will be just me, and only me, now—for most (almost all) of this blog’s life, I’ve been married. The adventures I have will be my adventures, and mine alone. So it will be different, but I will keep posting and sharing them.

I wouldn’t be doing this without your support. This year has really shown me the importance of the connections I’ve made from this blog. I have been overwhelmed by the love and support I’ve received in the last year. I simply cannot put into words how much it has meant to me. I have needed it more than ever this year—and you all, this community, showed up for me. When I shared about losing my job on Instagram, I had nearly 50 kind messages within a day—people I didn’t know sent me job vacancies they thought I might like, and put me in contact with people who knew people who might help me get a job. When I shared that my marriage had ended on Instagram, I had over 100 messages from people who cared. When I shared my blog post about the situation, I was inundated with people reaching out and offering me love and support. I wept over messages from people I’d never met before. I just can’t explain how much it meant, and how you all kept me going. In my darkest moments, when I felt like I had no one, I had you.

Whether you book travel through my affiliate links, read my blog just for fun, or have taken the time to comment or message me during my personal difficulties this last year—thank you for being part of this community. Thank you for supporting me, for supporting Away With Maja, and for being there. I say this every year, but this year it has taken on a heightened meaning—I wouldn’t be doing this without you. I literally would not be here without you. Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Here’s to the next year! 🙂

What would you like to see on Away With Maja in the future?

Thank you to all of you for following along on this journey! Happy (future) travels!