Hi all!
This might be my last time writing on this blog for a while, so I just wanted to post a quick update about what's going on with me at the moment and my future plans for Charlotte's Travel Adventures.
Life in general
I would describe my life as having been in a somewhat transitional phase for the last year or so, but the good news is that things are finally moving in the right direction. After a lot of paperwork, money, stress and patience, Claudio's visa to live in the UK has finally been approved, and he's planning to come back next month! We did use legal assistance with our application, which helped a lot, but it was still a hugely challenging task, and we're so relieved it's finally done and our hard work has paid off.
Our next step, once he's here, is to look for our own place in the London area, but that may not happen as soon as we originally hoped. At the moment, my parents are both having some health issues, so I need to help out more in the house and possibly stay here a bit longer than planned. On top of that, the visa application and our upcoming wedding and honeymoon are all making a big dent in our finances, so it doesn't really make sense for us to move until Claudio has a job here and starts earning too.
Maybe it won't happen until 2025, but we're moving in the right direction now, and we're both really happy to be on the pathway to setting up a more permanent life together.
Our wedding!
Our wedding is coming up now in only a few months, which is hard to believe but very exciting! We can't wait to be properly married - though we're grateful that our civil union allowed us to get our visa to be able to live together, it's left us in the strange situation of kind of being "married" without actually being married. We always said that the civil union was basically just a legal process, and that our wedding and marriage would be the real event, but most people we know viewed the civil union as us getting married, and maybe that's meant there's been a bit less excitement among people we know surrounding our engagement and wedding than there would have been otherwise. (Of course, if governments didn't make it so difficult for couples from different countries to live together, we wouldn't have had to have a civil union in the first place!)
But I think that once the big day comes, it's going to feel very special for us, and hopefully for all our family and friends too. Our venue is exactly the kind of beach wedding setting I've dreamed of since childhood, and now the planning of the event is really coming together. We've got our date set, the photographer booked, my hair and makeup stylist booked, and I've bought my dress and had it altered. There are still more tasks to do, but we're feeling much more on top of things than we were, especially now that we don't have to think about the visa application anymore.
Another big task we've ticked off is booking our flights out to Chile and also reserving a gorgeous Airbnb in Santiago, where we'll stay in the days leading up to the wedding and for a couple of weeks afterwards, including over Christmas. I'm really looking forward to being back in one of my favourite cities and going back to something like the old lifestyle we had while we were in our little apartment in Ñuñoa, which I still miss. It's also going to be great to have a proper summer together, as Claudio went back to Chile on the 1st June and won't be back here again until late September, so he's basically missing the entire northern hemisphere summer. As for me, I haven't really done any fun summer activities since he left - I haven't had a holiday, set foot on a beach, or even been to a swimming pool. So our time in Chile is going to be a great opportunity to do all of those things we love, and I'm very excited about it!
Travel
Aside from visiting Westonbirt Arboretum in July, the only other day trip I've had in the last few months was when I went to London with my mum for a theatre day.
After a delicious lunch at Côte, we saw Frozen at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, which was fantastic. Although there were quite a lot of noisy kids in the audience, we really enjoyed the show (the quick change in Let It Go was a real highlight!) and the theatre was beautiful to look around.
Afterwards, we walked through Covent Garden, where there was an event going on with Nissan electric cars. One of the things I love about London is that there's always something happening!
Our day in London made me really excited to hopefully move there soon - it is one of my favourite cities in the world and both Claudio and I can imagine having a great life there.
Blogging
The final thing I want to write about today is this blog itself.
I have a confession to make: I have lost a lot of motivation and interest in blogging and making travel content on social media recently. This loss of interest has been a gradual process that I've noticed particularly over the last 18 months or so, though I have had sporadic bursts of inspiration.
I fell in love with travel blogging during
my Year Abroad, which led me to create Charlotte's Travel Adventures, a project that has been a huge passion of mine. During the pandemic years in particular, this blog was such an important outlet for me and I loved every minute working on it. Then life got more exciting and busier for me, and the blog took a bit of a back seat, but I always thought that the old passion would come back once life got quieter. However, since finishing the visa application, life
has got quieter, and yet blogging kind of feels like work these days. I started writing a post last week that I thought would be really interesting to write, but the inspiration just didn't take me, and after having written just a couple of short paragraphs, I ended up deleting the draft - the first time I've ever done so. In addition, Google has been steadily de-indexing my posts and refusing to index any new ones since around September last year, which is quite demoralising.
My passion for travel is still as strong as ever, but while it used to go hand in hand with an equally strong passion for travel blogging, that's not really the case anymore. My other great passion in life, musical theatre, has come back into my life in a big way since January 2023, and maybe that's partly responsible for the lack of interest in blogging I'm now experiencing. Furthermore, after work and at the weekend, there are lots of other things I want to do more than I want to blog, such as watching musicals, movies, series and documentaries, reading books, singing, and working out. Stepping back from the blog will free up more time for me to do those things.
From now on, I won't be publishing anywhere near as many posts here as I do currently, and perhaps I might go months at a time without blogging. But there's no way I'll be closing this blog altogether - I absolutely want to post about our wedding and honeymoon and any other exciting trips we take in the future. And if inspiration takes me, perhaps I'll post about other travel-related topics occasionally. But I'll definitely be taking a break for the time being.
Thanks to everyone who's been reading here over the last several years. I hope to see you back here in the not too distant future! 😃
