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Published 12/31/2024
Where I Went and What I Saw in 2024
With 2025 all but knocking at the front door, it’s time for my annual travel year in review post. Honestly, this is my favorite post I write all year and that’s not just because I’m a millennial who enjoys navel gazing . . . although I do think that is a little bit of it.
If you’re curious, you can also read about my 2022 travel year and 2023 travel year.
When I plot out the past 365 (actually, lucky 366 this year!) days, I’m always amazed by how many places I saw and how many people I got to share time and experiences with. It also reminds me of how quickly time passes and how easy it is to faff away our best intentions if we aren’t very careful and diligent.
At the start of 2024, I didn’t have a clear picture of what travels this year would hold. I had a couple trips already planned, but after rewarding, but intense trips to Milan and Key West at the end of 2023, I actually kicked off this year with a bit of travel burnout.
That makes me extra grateful for how this year turned out.
On New Year’s Eve 2023, I never would have guessed that I’d spend 2024 conversing in a second language, flying to Paris twice, or even that there would be a Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) for me to become an immediate avid fan of and plan travels around.
In so many ways, 2024 was a really lovely and easy year for me. While there were some definite travel lowlights, a flight delay here and there and the inability to park our rental car in Etretat, France seem like pretty laughable in the big scheme of things. This year was incredibly difficult for some loved ones and that really brought into perspective how fleeting and beautiful life is.
I’ve never been a fan of bucket lists and certainly don’t have a “YOLO” mindset. My takeaway hasn’t actually been to modify my annual travel plans. In fact, as I reflect back on everything I saw in 2024, I’m reminded of the world’s vastness. No matter how we chart out everything we want to see, do and be, we’ll never have it all. And that’s okay. It just makes the trips we do take, the memories we do make even more poignant.
2024 Travel by the Numbers
Countries visited: 4
Lifetime countries visited: 11
States visited: Just 2! (3 if you count two layovers in Atlanta)
U.S. Territories visited: 1
Lifetime states visited: 50
Rental cars: 2
Train rides: More than I can count
Ferry rides: 4
Languages spoken effectively: 2
Languages spoken fluently: 1
Gluhwein mugs acquired: 6
Times I flew to Paris: 2
My 2024 Travel Map
(Map courtesy of Travellers Point.)
A Month by Month Summary of 2024 Travels
January
You know it’s going to be great year when you kick it off with a trip that finally made it out of the group chat.
A group of girlfriends and I have been trying to get to the Caribbean since 2019. We actually made it to the point of booking two different times in Puerto Rico. For innumerable reasons, we canceled both trips. Fool me once . . . we decided to see if we could trick the Puerto Rico curse by heading to the U.S. Virgin Islands instead. It worked!
We had a beautiful, restful week on St. John. While I’m not much of a beach bum, I really enjoyed hiking through the national park, paddleboarding in turquoise waters, spotting sea turtles, and of course, becoming a “painkiller” connoisseur.
However, this trip meant I spent 50% of the time between late November and the end of January on the road. I often refer to myself as a nomadic homebody and this was too much running around for me, especially since home isn’t particularly easy to get to. I’d also done an overnight in Two Harbors, MN in early January before the USVI trip which just exacerbated the sense of pounding pavement.
February
I didn’t travel much beyond the couch this month. After an intense period of travel, I needed time to recharge and had a lot of blogging to catch up on. Our almost entirely snowless winter made it easy to justify a lot of “indoorsy.” With no skiing or even hiking to be had, the cat and I spent a lot of quality time together in the craft room.
I got a ton of Italy blogging done and made it a point to work every PWHL Minnesota game into my schedule.
March
Speaking of the PWHL, I planned to head down to St. Paul, MN to watch a Minnesota vs. Montreal game in person at the Xcel Energy Center at the end of the month. However, that game coincided with winter finally arriving. Rather than brave icy, snowy roads, I instead embarked on a “glow up” project in one of our rental cabins.
April
I headed to Washington State in early April with my mom and sister-in-law to take a class at the Skagit Valley King Arthur Baking School and catch the annual tulip festival. The tulips very obligingly timed their bloom with our visit. We also had a wonderful day in nearby La Conner and took the ferry to the San Juan Islands.
At the end of the month I was lucky enough to have a “do-over” of my PWHL plans from the month before. This turned into quite the Minnesota road trip with stops at Banning State Park and a “bestie day” in charming St. Joseph before heading into downtown St. Paul.
I met up with a friend and her young daughter in St. Paul to watch Boston vs. Minnesota at the final home game of the PWHL season. We’ve been friends for so long that I think we both forgot that it all started as teammates on our college’s club hockey team when we were freshmen!
I also started studying French on Duolingo this month. I’d taken French in high school and college and was annoyed that I couldn’t read the Instagram captions for the PWHL Montreal team! This actually ended up being one of the most impactful decisions I made all year.
May – September
From ice out until the last day of September each year, I’m in my “you better work” season at my seasonal canoe outfitting business.
It was another busy season, especially on the Boundary Waters outfitting side of things. Thankfully, other than a bad storm in the middle of June, it was a pretty uneventful summer. We also had an excellent crew of summer staff and that makes everything so much easier and fun.
October
Back in June, Andy and I bought tickets to the Vikings/Lions game in Minneapolis. At the time we chose the game mostly because of its date; we had no idea what a match up this was destined to be.
Since it was a Sunday noon game, we spent two nights in Minneapolis on both sides of the game. That gave us an opportunity to check out Owamni, the indigenous restaurant run by Chef Sean Sherman, “The Sioux Chef.” The restaurant serves a rotating seasonal menu and only uses ingredients found in the Americas prior to European colonization. It was a tasty and very filling experience!
Even though we witnessed one of the Vikings’ very few loses this season, it was so fun to be part of the U.S. Bank Stadium crowd. I actually don’t think I’d ever attended a football game before and this experience set the standard that I’ll hold any subsequent games to very high!
I notoriously avoid spending time in the Twin Cities outside of layovers at MSP, so it was significant that I made the trip down I-35 twice this year! On the home front, the Vikings game was great motivation for Andy and I to wrap up the end of season chores around the resort quickly and efficiently.
In addition to the Vikings game, we got out on one Boundary Waters day trip this month and I had some delicious bakery dates with my parents at the new Crosby Bakery in downtown Grand Marais.
November
I might not have done much exploring around the United States this year, but I sure saw a lot of Minnesota!
I kicked off November by driving across the North Country to Cohasset, MN. Located just outside Grand Rapids, MN, this was the somewhat unexpected destination of our annual girls weekend. We spent most of our time catching up in our rental house, but we also enjoyed some of the area restaurants and had a nice walk next to the Mississippi.
I was back home just long enough to get all packed up for my biggest adventure in a long time: two weeks in northern France! This was Andy’s first ever trip to Europe and despite years of taking French, only my second trip to France.
We flew into Paris and took the train to Rouen, the capital of the Normandy region. After we’d ditched the jetlag, we picked up a rental car and crisscrossed northern France, visiting sites like the Somme battlefields, the Bay of Somme, Etretat, Honfleur, the Normandy Beaches, Mount St. Michel, and the Brittany American Cemetery. I think the highlight was four days in beautiful Bayeux.
We also had three days in Paris at the end of the trip. We definitely didn’t hit up the City of Lights’ top 10 sites. Instead, we visited some sites I’d missed on my first visit to Paris like Saint-Chapelle, the Pantheon, and the Catacombs. We ducked into the St. Germain location of Le Relais de l’Entrecote one rainy afternoon and had a delicious introduction to Parisian steak-frites.
December
With almost 20 years separating my first two trips to Paris, you’d think I’d spend a little time marinating in my latest trip before heading back. But no . . . just 11 days after getting home, I drove to the airport and hopped on another plane to Paris!
Originally my sister-in-law and I had planned to fly into Zurich for a self-guided tour through the Christmas markets of France, Germany, and Switzerland. But as the airline modified our flights to include more and more layovers, we decided to scrap our original tickets and hop on that direct flight from MSP to Paris instead. From there we hopped on a train and headed to Basel, Switzerland.
The European Christmas markets are indeed just as magical as they sound, if not quite crowded. Over the course of a week, we visited markets in Colmar, France; Germany’s Black Forest, and Zurich, Switzerland. We used Basel as our home base and I actually really liked this no-nonsense culturally German city, which tends to be a bit of a sleeper on most Americans’ Switzerland itineraries.
At the end of our trip, we spent a whirlwind 36 hours in Paris before our flight home. We loved the Musee D’Orsay and Shakespeare and Company bookstore. If you’re ever in Paris during the holidays, you definitely need to check out the Galeries Lafayette. Their window displays and in-store decorations made New York’s 5th Avenue look tame!
The “Best” of my 2024 Travel Year
Drive: Exploring the Bay of Somme area of France
Travel surprise: La Conner, WA
Floating taco bar: Lime Out in Coral Harbor on St. John, USVI
Wildlife viewing: Taking daily “morning light” walks in October and November near my home and running into a bull moose, swans, and countless grouse.
Best known world landmark visited: Seeing Mona Lisa at the Louvre in Paris
Croissant: Hot take considering how much time I spent in France this year, but the raspberry almond croissant from Flour and Flower in St. Joseph, MN takes it!
View: American Hill looking towards Maho Bay on St. John in the USVI.
Plane Read: Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing and Iron Flame
Travel experience: Walking through acres of tulips in Washington State’s Skagit Valley.
Hike: Lime Kiln Point State Park on San Juan Island
Coffee: The dark roast at Timber Coffee Company after two weeks of cafes and Nespresso machines in France.
Souvenir: Way too many gluhwein mugs from the Christmas markets
Blogging soundtrack: Tchaikovsky’s Onegin.
Travel Accomplishment: Driving outside of North America for the first time
2024 Blog Highlights
2024 was a year of high highs and low lows for Beyond the Yellow Brick Road! I mentioned in my year-end post last year that a Google update in September 2023 absolutely gutted my traffic. There’s not much you can do when you’re out of favor with the Google gods, but I slogged along, doing my best to update posts and churn out new content. I switched hosting companies and seriously considered moving to a faster blog theme; basically anything to make Google happier!
But nothing I did seemed to move the needle and despite having way more posts than ever, my traffic had fallen to early 2022 numbers. By the summer I started to wonder if it was time to throw in the towel. However, I remembered that most people give up right before they’re on the cusp of a breakthrough and I decided to stay the course.
And then, low and behold, Google flipped some switch at headquarters in mid-August. Suddenly people were reading my posts again and I was starting to make a decent amount of affiliate income. Since I’d opted to take the summer off from blogging and hadn’t posted anything since April, it felt especially surreal.
By the end of October, I was approved for an ad network. (Thank you for enduring the new ads – I really appreciate it.) Long story short, in the last two months of 2024, the blog made enough money to completely cover my European Christmas markets trip!
Since the goal of this blog has always been to make money to subsidize my travels, I couldn’t be more chuffed. However, the most exciting part of this “job” is when travelers take the time to reach out with questions or let me know that a post helped them create the trip of their dreams. Those emails warm the cockles of my travel blogger heart!
Of course, there’s hard to find a more volatile field than blogging. I’m always one Google update away from losing almost all of my blog traffic. Since much of my content is seasonal in nature, my traffic can vary wildly from month to month too.
The only thing I can say with any certainty now that this blog is five years old is that there’s absolutely no way to know what’s going to happen next. I’m excited to hold onto my hat and see what 2025 has in store for Beyond the Yellow Brick Road!
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Lifetime post: New York at Christmas: A Complete Guide
2024 post: One Day in Como City, Italy: A Lake Como Itinerary
Thanks so much for sharing my 2024 adventures with me! I can’t tell you how much it means to have you here reading and supporting the blog. Here’s to whatever 2025 may hold for us all. Happy New Year!
