Once upon a time, behind nine mountains and nine waters, there lived a girl. This is how we start every folk story in Slovenia and this post is going to be a story about how this blog came to be.

It’s been several years, if not a decade, in the making and it has existed and thrived inside my head, but, like most of us, I just never could find the time to sit down and get it done. So, in the dark, cold Swedish winter of 2019 I finally sat down with a tub of ice cream and went for it.

THE YOUNGER YEARS

I’ve been travelling since I could remember, as all of my family loved to travel as well, whether just across the border to Italy for skiing, to Croatia for the summer, or further away. One of my earliest travel memories is of a blue mosaic-tiled toilet in a hotel in Rhodes, Greece, when I accidentally ate an olive with the pit as well, and I was worried if it would come out again or not. I do not remember much else, but I guess I was not even in primary school at that point.

As I got older we continued to travel and particularly my mother did her best to inoculate me with the travel bug, while my father’s love of sailing and Croatian seaside is probably to blame for my love of languages. Even though Croatian and Slovenian are quite similar, those differences need to be learned and for a small child that was just enough of a challenge to be interesting. I always wanted to talk to the local kids in their language, so I learned to speak passable Croatian and I’ve been collecting languages ever since (I aim to get fluent in at least 10 languages before I die, currently working on Swedish).

Even though I was always relatively good at writing in school tests, it was our family trip to Iceland that inspired the whole idea of setting up a travel blog. My mother kept journals of her travels and she convinced me to write my own, which I did, religiously and in coloured pens.

Later on when the Internet became something that did not come with a dial-up tune, travel blogs started popping up and I almost started my own after my first independent trip to Spain in 2013, but I decided to try out flamenco dancing instead.

THE BEGINNING

I started doing daily updates on Facebook while travelling after that and people kept recommending me to start an Instagram travel account, but I hated the idea of #hashtags (I still sometimes feel physically in pain, when I slap on the 10th #hashtag, but that is the only way to get out there). I am not entirely sure what changed, but I started an Instagram in February 2019 and somehow it picked up a bit – random people thought my photos were nice and well, the motivation for an actual blog crept in. So, here it is!

I always assumed it would be called Things altogether unexpected, after a chapter in Tolkien’s the Hobbit, since I am a huge Tolkien fan, but life had other plans. My first Instagram username was altogether.unexpected and it just did not sit well with me, so I ended up with erratic.engineeress, probably because I like fancy words like alliteration, am in fact quite erratic sometimes, and read way too much. 🙂 If you’re wondering what the name means, I wrote an explanation here.

P.S.: You’ll find every one of my photo travel guide destinations features a quote from a writer hailing from that part of the world, provided I could find an English translation of one. I’m doing it to motivate myself (and hopefully you as well), to broaden my literary horizons and discover some more unknowns.