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Published: 12/30/2025
My 2025 Travel Year in Review
What kind of year has it been?
My gut reaction is to say that 2025 was hard year, but when I look back at the year as a whole, I’m surprised at just how much goodness and fun it contained. Sure, like most years, 2025 had its tough stretches. But for as dramatic as the lows were, the sum total of 2025’s highs was much, much greater.
That’s the thing about taking a moment to look back at the last 12 months; sometimes you discover that the story you’re been telling yourself about it isn’t true . . . like at all. For example, it wasn’t until I put together my 2025 travel map that I realized I’d basically spent this entire year either in my home state of Minnesota . . . or abroad.
For years, my primary travel focus was to get to all 50 states which lead to some epic adventures in Alaska, Hawaii, New Mexico, and more. Now that I have all 50 states under my belt, I’m surprised at how unmotivated I am by domestic travel. I was shocked to discover that other than 3 nights in Miami, Florida, I spent the rest of the year in Minnesota. With my excellent access to direct flights out of MSP and Thunder Bay (so grateful!), I didn’t even connect in any other states this year.
It’s funny, as I skimmed through my previous year travel recaps (here’s 2022, 2023, and 2024) I realized one of my main points in last year’s recap was that I don’t do bucket lists. While I still stand by that statement, I started 2025 with the loss of a very close friend which weirdly inspired an extreme desire to book trips I’d long talked about but had never bothered to actually work out the logistics for. Desperately wanting to book an Antarctic cruise is a normal grief response, right?
While I didn’t make it to Antarctica this year, (Will 2026 be the year? I hope so! Please, feel free to read through all of my blog posts so I can earn the ad revenue necessary to make this very expensive dream a reality) I did see many long-standing travel desires through to fruition.
Let’s dive right in and unpack my 2025 travels!
2025 Travel by the Numbers
- Countries visited: 5 (6 if you count two 50-minute layovers in Amsterdam)
- Lifetime countries visited: 13 (14 if you count the Netherlands . . . I’m not.)
- States visited: 2
- Provinces visited: 2
- Lifetime states visited: 50
- Lifetime provinces visited: 3
- Rental cars: 1
- Train rides: 4
- Boat rides: 3
- Metro systems used: 2
- Same day flight cancellations: 1
- Unplanned drives to MSP: 1
- Trips down I-35: Way too many
- Skating trails skated: 3
2025 Travel Map
Travel map generated by Travellerspoint.
A Month by Month Summary of 2025 Travels
January
This wasn’t a banner month for me. My oldest childhood friend died of complications from metastatic breast cancer in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day (she was 38 and left a husband and two small children) and I wasn’t prepared for grief’s mental and physical toll. The cat and I spent a lot of time snuggled up listening to podcasts and doing puzzles.
Apparently I went to Duluth for a girls’ weekend over MLK weekend, but honestly I was too catatonic to notice. I did get out on the skating trail on Gunflint Lake, but managed to turn that into a pity party too. Anyway; onward and upward!
February
I accompanied my friend Donna to Ottawa to skate on the Rideau Canal Skateway. Happily the weather cooperated and the skateway was thoroughly frozen and open for business. (The winter of 2022-2023 the ice on the canal never reached a safe enough depth to open and the next year, the canal was only open for 10 days. F-you climate change!)
We skated on the canal multiple times, ate our fill of BeaverTails, toured the House of Commons on Parliament Hill, and even did a day trip in Quebec to go to another ice skating trail and also visit the largest spa in North America.
This is the sort of trip that threatens to turn you into a full blown winter enthusiast and even a blizzard that dropped a casual 15” of snow on Ottawa on our last full day in the city or a really dramatic 8-3 Minnesota Frost loss to the Ottawa Charge weren’t enough to dampen our spirits.
March
I remember this month as being really sunny and nice, which probably means my mental health made dramatic turn for the better. I turned 40 and got my first mammogram.
My parents came up for a weekend of watching the MN boys state high school hockey tournament on our big screen and Andy and I managed to ski 100 miles on the upper Gunflint cross-country ski system. (100 miles was never a goal, but we realized in late February how close we were and it became a race against snow melt.)
I made one very social overnight trip to the Twin Cities where I caught up with a wide-range of college friends. In less than 24 hours, I had a mini-reunion with my college newspaper buddies, had the best waffles of my life at A-Side Public House, attended my final Frost game at the Xcel Energy Center (it’s been renamed Grand Casino Arena), and made a very brief appearance at a celebration of life for the sister of a college roomie/bestie (because the hits just came coming) all while racing a blizzard home.
April
My mammogram required additional imaging due to suspected calcifications and that imaging needed to be done in Duluth. Luckily, I dovetailed that appointment into the front end of a trip to Miami. Less luckily, the additional imaging also proved inconclusive so I got booked for a biopsy 10 days later.
In the meantime, my friend Angie and I headed down to Miami for a long weekend. We went on an excellent food tour in Little Havana and did our best to enjoy some quality R&R poolside and on the beach. Hilariously we got stuck on hop-on, hop-off bus (Miami traffic is no joke!); the second time I’ve been stuck on a hop-on, hop-off bus in my life!
While I didn’t fall madly in love with Miami, I do think the quip that Miami’s the best place to head if you want to feel like you’ve left the country without actually leaving the contiguous states very true.
Since I had an early morning biopsy, we ended up spending a night at Fitger’s Inn, which was a lovely change of pace. On the drive down, we caught an ore ship docking in Two Harbors which was the first time I’d ever seen that!
It was a kind of rough 12 days in between the additional imaging and the biopsy results, but I’m happy to report that I got an almost immediate all-clear from the lab. I now sport a teeny tiny titanium marker and hopefully will have much less dramatic breast health now that my baseline mammogram is set.
I’m not sure there’s a lesson from my whole mammogram saga, but I guess I share it to remind myself and others that it’s okay if this procedure feels really scary. However, not knowing what you’re working with is far scarier. If you need an accountability partner to get that first squish booked, hit me up! I’m ready to cheer you on, even if it turns into “a big, scary deal.” Good health is an incredible gift that allows us to see the world, so please make sure you’re taking care of yourself.
May – September
Nothing to see here. This is the time of year when my seasonal canoe outfitting business is going balls to walls and I’m working 12+ hour days, 7 days a week. My travels in the summer high season are pretty much limited to driving to Cross Bay to pick up or drop off canoes. Occasionally I venture as far as Seagull Lake. One time in July I got to go to Lutsen to pick up a fridge . . . . Most memorable, I bought a badminton set and got some high spirited rounds in after work and on a busy August morning, we made breakfast for 15 people in the dark thanks to a very localized power outage.
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October
October was a really lovely month. I got out for lots of long hikes, including finally doing the famous Bean and Bear Superior Hiking Trail loop near Silver Bay, MN. An extra bonus of this adventure is its proximity to Timber Coffee Co.
Andy and I headed down to a Vikings/Eagles game in Minneapolis one weekend which included some nice dinners at The Butcher’s Tale and Spoon and Stable. Since I’m bad at planning, I accidentally booked November travels that conflicted with my annual girls weekend. Happily we were able to make a save and had a great catchup at Big Sandy Resort outside of McGregor, MN. I even did my first ever corn maze!
November
Andy and I’s big annual trip this year took us across the pond for two weeks to beautiful London. If you’ve been around here for a while, you already know, but I spent one winter right after college doing temp work in the City of London and I actually hadn’t returned since that adventure concluded in April 2008. Suffice it to say, this trip was very overdue and I was so happy to be back. It truly felt like a homecoming.
There were so many highlights from this trip, but off the top of my head, the ones that really stick out are the entire Notting Hill neighborhood, our five days up north in York, a full-day tour of the Yorkshire Dales with a special emphasis on sites related to James Herriot, going to Hamilton, and all of the amazing dining around London.
I definitely unlocked a deep love for sticky toffee pudding on this trip! It was really a joy to be able to share a place I love with Andy and watch England win him over too.
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December
I started this month well before sunrise to drive down to Duluth to fly to Chicago to meet up with my sister-in-law and fly to Copenhagen. United canceled that flight which I was driving (without cell service) so December started off with a surprise commute to the Twin Cities, a connection in Amsterdam, and not meeting up with Ashley until the Copenhagen airport.
I’m really grateful that despite the last minute logistical gymnastics, we still managed to arrive in Denmark in a timely fashion. We didn’t even miss a single one of our scheduled event. Ashley’s flight did get delayed out of Chicago, but we still made it to our Christmas hygge tour with three minutes to spare!
Honestly, this might be the last year of these back-to-back European trips, (famous last words – ha!) but it’s hard to not absolutely maximize the slowest time of my year. I’d been wanting to go to Copenhagen for decades and it was so fun to finally see this beautiful city in person with its beautiful canals, palaces, and cozy cafes.
However, I think the highlight for me was taking the train 40 minutes to quiet Malmo, Sweden where we spent three nights. Despite being the third largest city in Sweden, Malmo is quite small and I kind of loved that you have to live like the locals during your visit. The highlight of the whole trip was probably going to the Malmo open-air baths for a sauna and plunge in the Oresund Strait, which connects the North and Baltic Seas.
As a Minnesotan raised in a very Scandinavian Lutheran heritage community, I was shocked at my familiarity with Scandinavian culture and cuisine, especially in Sweden. I’m not sure I’d fly 4000 miles again to end up somewhere that felt so very familiar!
The “Best” of my 2025 Travel Year
- Drive: Yorkshire Dales National Park with our guide, Howard
- Travel surprise: Tapping our way through London’s transportation network
- Travel perk: Global Entry
- Wildlife viewing: Deer at Studley Royal Park
- Best known world landmark visited: Westminster Abbey and Tower Bridge
- Dessert: Sticky Toffee Pudding at The Cow in Notting Hill
- View: Our seats at U.S. Bank Stadium
- Ice skating trail: Rideau Canal Skateway and Patinage en foret
- Magic: Warner Brothers Studio Tour London
- “Out of comfort zone” experience: Plunging into the Oresund Strait at the Ribersborg Baths in Malmo, Sweden
- Hike: Bear and Bean Loop on the Superior Hiking Trail
- Christmas market: Malmo, Sweden and York, England
- Coffee: Brown sugar and cinnamon latte from Timber Coffee Company in Silver Bay, MN
- Saunas: Nordik Spa Village in Chelsea, Quebec
2025 Blog Highlights
2025 was a banner year for Beyond the Yellow Brick Blog. I didn’t publish quite as many posts as I have in recent years, but it was gratifying to see some of those posts, especially my European Christmas market posts take off very quickly
After years of grinding, I got approved for an ad network in October 2024 and almost immediately made more money from this enterprise than I had in the last five years. Then in November of this year, I got approved by Mediavine, the ad network that I’ve been working towards when I started this blog in 2019.
Because this is the way that things always go, I was also got approved for another ad network this fall and had to choose between the two desirable networks. I opted to go with Mediavine because it had been on my radar for so long. I don’t have enough data to know if I made the right choice yet, but between the ads and affiliate income, the blog now supplements my income and helps pay for my travels.
Of course, my blog’s success remains at the mercy of Google. I’m always one Google update away from losing a significant amount of my traffic. Google’s capricious ways didn’t have too much impact on Beyond the Yellow Brick Road in 2025 and I’m hopeful that I’ve structured the blog in the way that it can weather most algorithm shifts, but the truth is that that’s magical thinking.
This year I’ll probably devote a little more energy to growing my mailing list and social media followings, but there’s always plenty of housekeeping that needs to be done on the actual blog, as well as posts to write! I’m already bracing for a large site audit in January to keep the site as helpful and up to date as possible.
The Most Popular “Beyond the Yellow Brick Road” Posts
Lifetime post: Famous Foods Boston Is Known For
2025 post: What To Buy At European Christmas Markets
What’s up in 2026
Other than a weekend in Denver, Colorado, I don’t have any official travels on the books for 2026. Interestingly, with my recent trip to Copenhagen, I don’t have any “must see” destinations hanging out on my travel list. I’m dreaming of Antarctica, French Polynesia, and maybe completing the first half of the Thames Path, but who knows what the year will actually hold.
Wherever you went in 2025 and wherever you’re planning to go in 2026, thank you for being here. I so appreciate every single link click and page view. Thank you for sharing this beautiful world with me!
