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My travel blog is one year old this week!  Thanks so much to everybody who has been following along on my adventures!

My very first post was published on Thanksgiving of 2011.  At that time, I had NO CLUE about what I was getting myself into!  I now devote every moment of my free time to this blog (and to A Midwestern Travel Companion, my newest blog creation) and I couldn’t imagine my life any other way (well, ok, maybe sometimes I could imagine actually having a social life again, but that is a small detail…)

In the past year, I have shared with you the joys of spending Bastille Day in Carcassonne France.  You tagged along as I tried new and spicier foods in Thailand and shared my incredible, insatiable longing for fish and chips.  You saw the dark side of my travel addiction – the heartbreak of leaving a place that you love.  You even saw fairies roll my car up a hill in Ireland!

Travel blogging itself has been quite the roller coaster ride!  I have experienced the highs of getting those first few comments and followers and the lows and heartbreak of an unfortunate but perhaps inevitable blogging experience – being hacked.

I have big goals for the next year, so I decided that I needed some bigger tools to achieve them.  I joined Travel Blog Success a few months ago to help me grow traffic to my blog and so far I am loving what I am seeing!

The information is spot on and really helpful, but the best part of Travel Blog Success is the one on one support via private Facebook group (available to Premium members 🙂  It gives me access to almost immediate advice from successful bloggers who are further down the path of their travel blogging journey.

So, what will the next year bring?  While I don’t have any trips set in stone for the next year, I can only sit still for so long (itchy travel feet kick in after about a month and it is only so long before I will need to scratch).

Meanwhile, I have plenty more adventures up my sleeve tell you about.  I have only just gotten started telling you about my incredible 19 day cruise all over Northern Europe, and the 5 days that we spent in South Korea a couple weeks later hasn’t even begun to hit these pages yet.

To all of my new travel blogging friends out there, I am hoping to meet more of you in the next year by attending TBEX in Toronto and TBEX in Ireland!

My goals for this blog in its second year are to focus on gaining readers by building a community around the blog.  Any experienced bloggers out there who can give me any tips?

What would you like to see me write more about in the next year? What have you really enjoyed on my blog? Any special requests for destinations?