I always wanted to write an end-of-year post, but for some reason I just never got around to do it. Maybe because it can be quite personal and real, and it’s pretty overwhelming to boil down 365 days into one short blog post.
But I’ll try.
2023 was a big year for us because we bought our own apartment in Copenhagen, which is probably one of the most adult, stressful and anxious things we’ve ever done.
This decision also meant that our big passion, traveling, wasn’t prioritised in 2023. We still managed to visit 4 countries (Sri Lanka, Italy, Czechia, Belgium), but oh, it really wasn’t enough and we miss being on the road!
Our blog was also neglected in 2023, and that is something we’re going to change in the upcoming year.
Now, I think I’ve been yapping enough, and it’s time to dive deeper into 2023. So for the first time, here is our yearly review. I’ll go through all the personal stuff, all the travel and blogging stuff, and of course, I’ll give a little glimpse into what we think 2024 have in store for us.
What happened in travel and our personal lives in 2023?
January: Exploring incredible Sri Lanka
To be honest, the best thing that happened to us in 2023, was our trip to Sri Lanka.
We spent all of January traveling this incredible island, and it quickly turned into one of our favourite destinations of all time! The people, the nature, the culture, the ocean. We just love Sri Lanka, and I’m happy that we’ve managed to write a lot of travel guides about this beautiful country.
We feel like it’s really overlooked by many tourists, and that’s a shame because it has so much to offer.
You can find all of our travel guides about Sri Lanka below:
February-April: Should we just buy a place?
We came home from Sri Lanka, feeling better than ever, until reality hit us.
At this moment, we were living in a one bedroom apartment in Copenhagen that we had to be out of by April… For those of you who don’t know, it’s REALLY difficult to find a long-term rental place to live in Copenhagen. Unless you want to pay a ridiculous amount of money for it.
We began the search for a new rental but it was just so stressful that in the end, we looked into buying our own place.
After a couple of meetings with the bank and some apartment viewings around Copenhagen, we finally set our hearts on a two bedroom apartment in the outskirts of Copenhagen – just a 5 kilometre bike ride into the city center.
We signed the deal in April and could finally breathe again, knowing that we at least had a place to live in from July.
I know that I just made buying an apartment seem very easy, but in all honesty, it’s been some of the most stressful months of my entire life. The constant reading of official documents, getting to know all the bank terms, choosing the right loan under a crisis, finding a place to live in during May and June, and moving all our stuff into a depot… On top of that, I had several anxiety attacks along the way because I was constantly battling the idea of “settling down”.
But I’m super happy that we bought this place now, because it means that we always have a place to call home, and even if we want to travel long-term again, then we can just rent it out.
And I’ve erased “settling down” from my vocabulary. Makes me feel less anxious.
May-June: Summer blues in Copenhagen
Once May rolled around, we had a bit of a breathing room.
We had found a place to live in-between having to evacuate from our current apartment in April until moving into our own apartment in July. And apart from just dealing with official documents once in a while, we actually didn’t have that much to do besides working and relaxing. Glenn even found the time to go on a family holiday to Thailand.
May and June was like silence before the storm, because we also knew that once we moved into our own apartment, we would have so much work on our hands.
It was during these months that I found the energy to finally book another trip. Having that holiday in Bologna to look forward to was one of the things that got us through the next part of 2023.
July-August: 2 idiots 1 apartment
Sooo… Neither Glenn nor I are very handy people. And we honestly had no clue how much work it actually takes to renovate an apartment.
So on the day we got the keys to our apartment we felt completely overwhelmed about all the things that needed to be fixed. We handled it very differently. Glenn took a nap on the floor in the middle of the empty apartment, and I started to rip things apart.
We had absolutely no idea about what we were doing. But we managed to completely renovate the old walls while living with only a bed as furniture for almost 2 months.
It was an adventure and we learned a lot, but it’s not something that we want to do again in the near future.
During this time I was happy to have the help of my family and I have never appreciated YouTube this much before. Damn there is good content about renovating in there!
August-September: Bologna & Prague
In the end of August, we FINALLY left Copenhagen. We hadn’t been out of Denmark since our trip to Sri Lanka, we were both exhausted from the apartment-project, and we really missed traveling!
Even though we visited Bologna during a crazy heatwave, we were SO excited to travel, and we explored everything there was to do in the city. Looking back, we should have spent even longer on this trip, because we weren’t ready to go home just yet.
Lucky for us, we had another trip to look forward to after Bologna.
We were visiting Prague on a long weekend trip in September. We absolutely fell in love with Prague, and we can’t wait to share all the fresh information and great pictures from our time in Czechia’s beautiful capital.
September-November: Motivation activated!
After coming home from Bologna and Prague, I FINALLY started to feel motivated to write again.
During the fall, we shared blog posts about Bologna and Sri Lanka. But the biggest milestone was that I managed to get all of our blog posts fully updated within the fall. It’s incredible how much motivation I get from traveling. I woke up every morning and worked on the blog from 6 AM until I had to be at my day job at 10 AM.
Unfortunately, it stopped mid-November after visiting Glenn’s family in Belgium. Don’t get me wrong, the trip itself was nice, and we had such a good time! But arriving home after sleeping in, I just found it impossible to get myself up again at 6 AM sharp every morning.
With the sun rising after 8 AM in Copenhagen during this time of year, it was really hard to get anything done in the darkness besides just going to work. We have a term for it here: “Winter depression”. It’s a thing here in Scandinavia – look it up.
Below is a picture of me during our long layover in Doha in January. It’s a picture perfect of how I’ve felt during these last couple of weeks…
December: Christmas saves the day!
December was hard at first, but it turned out to be great as always.
I started the 1st of December with having my wisdom tooth surgically removed. The operation went well… Until it didn’t.
The wound got infected and it spread fast down into my throat. This resulted in me getting heavy antibiotics and looking like I’d been in a street fight.
So the first part of December was really a nightmare, but luckily everything turned out great in the end, and once Christmas rolled around, I had the best time!
Christmas is really big here in Denmark. We’re all a very traditional bunch, and Danes adore this time of year. We enjoyed the holidays with my family and are getting ready to celebrate New Years Eve with some friends tonight.
Overall, it’s been a really good year, yet it was also stressful, mundane, and boring at times. But I get the feeling that we’ll see a lot of travel in 2024, and I can’t wait to begin this new year!
How did it go with Worldwide Walkers in 2023?
Now that we’ve talked about what happened in our personal lives and where we traveled to, it’s time to look at what happened with this blog.
I feel like we really neglected Worldwide Walkers Travel Blog this year, which is just so sad… But our personal lives just got prioritised – maybe even too much?
So we didn’t push out as much content as we wanted to, and we never implemented all the great ideas we have for this blog. Luckily, there is another year ahead of us, and we can’t wait to start working!
Even though the blog didn’t get the attention it deserved, we still managed to write 14 new travel guides, create 2 new categories, and update all of our old blog posts.
Now let’s see how many visitors Worldwide Walkers had in 2023:
239000 people visited Worldwide Walkers in 2023, which is an average of around 20.000 people reading our travel guides every single month! So even though we kinda neglected the blog this year, it’s still been our best year in terms of new readers.
It’s also funny to see our curve of traffic. We obviously have the most readers during the summer months in Europe (we have a lot of Europe content), then it drops off at the end of the year before picking up again next Spring.
We’re honestly so proud, happy, and thankful for our readers. So if you’re reading this, and you’re one of our loyal readers – THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!
We also had a lot of great questions in our comment section this year, and being able to engage with our readers and read their personal stories of places we’ve been to has just been incredible. It honestly motivates us even more to keep working at it.
What are our plans for 2024?
2024 is the year of Worldwide Walkers.
We will WORK HARD to make this piece of the internet even more helpful to you. I think that’s the most important goal of the upcoming year.
Next in line is TRAVEL. We live and breathe for travel, and this passion of ours have been on the back-burner due to putting all of our energy (and money) into buying an apartment.
We don’t have any tickets booked yet, but we’re looking into new destinations for 2024. We’re currently looking at Morocco, South Korea, and Hong Kong. All great places, but we just can’t decide. The minute we book our next destination, you will see it in the sidebar of our blog posts under “Destinations in 2024”
One thing is for sure, Worldwide Walkers is a big priority this year, and since this blog is built on travel, you can expect a lot of travel from us in 2024! We’re honestly so excited to get started.
A big thanks to all of our dear readers who motivates us and makes it possible for us to travel and keep Worldwide Walkers alive.
We wish a happy New Year for you and your loved ones, and we can’t wait to create more content for you in the upcoming year.
Thanks for reading and happy travels!
