Welcome to my blog.
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I started awaywithmedway in 2017, when I was 36 and took six months out from work and London to travel round South America, single, with a rucksack and a habit of asking “but why not?” whenever someone told me a trip was a bad idea. Almost a decade on, I’m 46, and a fair amount has changed since that first post, though apparently not the habit of arguing with people who think a trip is a bad idea.
Back then this blog was, if I’m honest, half travelogue and half therapy. Solo travel as a gay man in your thirties is its own particular adventure, the freedom of it, the small acts of bravery that come with simply existing as yourself somewhere new, the way you develop a sixth sense for the beach nobody else has found yet. I was never one for ticking off landmarks; give me a secret stretch of sand over a cathedral any day. I wrote a lot of those trips for me first and you second, and somehow you kept reading anyway.
A few years and a few hundred boarding passes later, I got married. My husband is now the person I’m elbowing for the window seat, the one I’m dragging along in search of yet another “secret” beach that turned out to be on the front cover of every guidebook, and much to his bemusement, frequently the unwilling co-star of this blog.
I’m not interested in pretending the old posts didn’t happen or quietly editing my own history to make the timeline neater. The bloke who took the opportunity to go while he could, and made the most of it solo, is still the one writing this. He just gets to spend it differently now. So, this is still awaywithmedway: same opinions about overrated tourist traps, same refusal to pretend a place is “magical” when it’s actually just expensive, same soft spot for islands nobody’s heard of. There’s just a “we” in the mix now, alongside the “I” because the best thing about that decade isn’t that I went it alone, it’s that I now get to share it with the man I love and get to spend my life with.
If you’ve been here since the early solo days, thank you for sticking around for the plot twist. And if you’re new here: welcome to a blog that’s been quietly proving, one trip at a time, that you can travel as exactly who you are alone, coupled up, or anything in between and it’s still a bloody good story.