2021 was a tough year for travel. Here's what we have done.
TL;DR
Looking back on one year of bucketlist2life. A review, some resolutions and a lot of thankfulness.
Disclaimer: This post started out as a newsletter (subscribe if you don't have already 😉) but it turned out much too long.
We started this blog in December 2020 to compensate for our cancelled world travel that was supposed to start in summer 2020. Also, we wanted to be prepared for travelling when the world opens back up in 2021 – little did we know... Still, we managed to visit quite a lot of places.
All the places we visited in 2021
Our 2021 travels
We planned to have 4 kinds of adventures in 2021:
- Microadventures in and around our home town
- Travels in our home country
- Longer journeys within Europe
- Travel the world
And we managed to do 1. to 3.
Microadventures in and around our home town
We explored our hometown Berlin like never before. This helped us massively to not go crazy during seemingly endless months of lockdowns. It gave us the feeling of travelling even when we couldn't because we saw rivers and lakes, forests, cityscapes and even a few (very small) mountains.
Travels in our home country
When Germany started to reopen, we started exploring our home country. First, we explored our home state Lower Saxony in depth. We enjoyed the half-timbered houses and the castles in the area.
Afterwards, we ventured further south to explore Mainz and Wiesbaden on a weekend getaway.
Longer journeys within Europe
Finally, our dream of going on a long journey came true. We started in Greece in July and made our way through the Balkan countries Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Albania, and Slovenia. We finished our trip in Cyprus in November.
And what can we say? We want more of that (semi) nomadic lifestyle!
We even ticked off some items from our Europe bucketlist
We rescheduled our cancelled trip to Slovenia and visited several bucketlist places in the Balkans like the beaches of Albania and Lake Ohrid in North Macedonia.
Bucket2life project
It was great to put our bucketlist2life app to a first test. At first, we only used it as a graphic tool to enhance our blogposts (like we did in this one).
What you haven’t seen yet is that we included a GPS function so we could navigate to all of our bucketlist spots on our travels.
After trying the app ourselves on our recent journeys, we’ve got lots of new ideas for improvements and the big picture continues to be shaped. So stay tuned for some news from us in 2022!
We met some incredible people on our journey.
Lannie Travels and CarpeDiemEire introduced us to their awesome #travelblogtuesday community where we met Twitter friends like Chalk & Cheese Travels, Berkeley Square Barbarian, Perthtravelers, FollowingtheRivera, Small Town Plus Size, Out of the Office 4 Good, RJonTourUK, Jen Nilsson and way too many others to mention.
We are immensely happy to have participated in some awesome hashtags like #ThankfulThursdayEveryday by Travel Bugs World, #travchat, or #top4theme by Charles McCool, Mia's Touch of Success & Excellence, and Giselleinmotion.
We participated in our first collab and initiated our first collab 16 things to do outdoors and socially distant in all regions of Germany with newplace.newstory, Erlebe Schleswig-Holstein, 1000km Reisen, Zeitreisen.Home, walkaboutdream, Goldrauschenblog, Jekuslife, Travellerin, Frank's Fotografieblog, Wild East Blog, HundeReisenMehr, Reiseblog Saarland, Travel Day, Julinas Travellife, and Guide your Travel.
Thank you!
What's in the future?
We always use the holidays as a period for reflection. We'll start into the new year with a lot of new energy and new ideas, so be curious and stay tuned!
We still hope that we will be able to do 4. – Travel the world – in 2022.
By the way: This is our 42nd blogpost. As massive Douglas Adams fans that must mean something, right? 😉