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What Do You Sea

  • home
  • About
    • Meet Aaren
      • My Travel Bucket List
    • About What Do You Sea
    • FAQ’s
  • Blog
  • DESTINATIONS
    • Asia
      • Japan
      • Indonesia
      • The Philippines
    • Europe
      • Iceland
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      • Scotland
    • United States
      • Utah
  • Travel Tips
    • Solo Female Travel
    • Travel Packing
    • Travel Photography
  • RESOURCES
  • Work With Me
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aarenprody
one of my favorite places in the world that is tra one of my favorite places in the world that is tragically outshined by zion.. y’all MUST go to this cute lil park one of my favorite parts about this park is that it’s extremely condensed and a lot of the trails are connected so you can begin the day at one side of the park and take a series of connecting trails and end up at the other! 🗺 it’s a solid park if you have a day to explore or a week because you can see so much 🥾 what’s even BETTER is that its elevation is around 9000+ feet so you can visit in the dead of summer like I did and get perfect, 70 degree weather 😏
once you wake up and realize that you’re the cap once you wake up and realize that you’re the captain of your own ship, you’ll be unstoppable. never take for granted that you can choose or work towards living your dream life every single day. we don’t all have infinite money to move across the country and restart, but we do have access to maybe cruddy jobs that can propel us into those lives. everything we want we must ask and actively work for. ask and it is given, but you also have to put in that hustle and give thanks for where you are in order to receive those things. the new year will be work, work, work for all the play in the future. cant wait to share, i just change my mind too often to put a tack in it it just yet. what will you do now and in the new year to move towards your dream world?
off somewhere in a world of my own by the looks o off somewhere in a world of my own by the looks of it, next year will include a lot of backyard travel. which is fine by me - last year the american southwest, this year the inland northwest... where to next, @leadawnhart ?😊🥾
it was all the ways i told myself i wasn’t quali it was all the ways i told myself i wasn’t qualified to do this. it was all the times I smiled to myself walking between mountains thinking to myself, hey this isn’t as difficult as I thought it would be (and then being proven wrong after I rounded another corner and walked up another switchback). it was the excruciatingly subpar coffee over “hey i don’t know if I’m going to have enough toilet paper to make it through the rest of this hike” conversations and laughs in the morning. it was meeting other hikers that just said “we up and decided to do this and here we are.” it was walking down an insanely sketchy divide and doing a double fist to the air at the bottom, both thankful that we didn’t get life-flighted back to Jackson Hole. it was losing three toenails. it was getting called a flat-lander. it was all the messiness of life crammed into fifty miles, pit stains, and my spoon that never stopped tasting like cuban black beans. not that that’s a bad thing, anyway.
the views are pretty sick for a place called “de the views are pretty sick for a place called “death canyon”
mornings over canyonlands national park one of my mornings over canyonlands national park one of my favorite things about being away from home is the fact that i get to hit the brakes on my life. life back home is constant gas (fast and the furious: tokyo drift style). i go to work at four in the morning, leave work, eat lunch, work on my blog, spend time with loved ones and try and squeeze in japanese, guitar, and a halfway decent workout amongst and between all that. but after being on the constant move, and going home to see my dad and shake hands with those slower mornings over coffee like we used to do, i realized that i have, in a way, allowed my life to slip past while i struggle to keep up with everything that i am passionate about. in a not good way. and all that to say that i am started to become a slower human and im becoming more okay with not getting absolutely everything squeezed into a span of twenty-four hours. i do believe that i get my “workaholic”/“worker bee” tendencies from my dad since we both struggle with relaxing. ive always felt like i was wasting time if I wasn’t being productive with my time and I couldn’t actually enjoy relaxing because I was too busy beating myself up over not getting anything done. and this year has led me to be flat out tired in every way. which has pushed me into this state of starting to be okay with less than productive days and more welcome with “hey it sounds like you needed that sleep and that time off from learning japanese since there are LITERALLY six different ways to say “that”. i love being a student and working on my life, but striving for a sense of balance has drastically improved my mental and emotional health over these last two weeks or so. i am very grateful for that. is there a part of your life that you’re hard on yourself for where you could give yourself more grace? more time?
messy; (of a situation) confused and difficult to messy; (of a situation) confused and difficult to deal with. welcome to the highlight reel that has been this ‘messy’ trip to wyoming. from the beginning, everything had seemed to be tailored perfectly for all of our boxes to be ticked once we got here, but before we even got started, it all went south *whomp whomp*. but i think that this was the mess that i needed. after spending six days in the wilderness, peeing on my foot too many times, becoming a part of the food chain (mentally not literally thank goodness), and climbing over mountains, I can’t help but come from a place of gratitude. problem solving in the middle of nowhere isn’t the same as everyday life because there isn’t always a bail plan that allows you to avoid all the things you don’t want to deal with. when you’re halfway up a mountain, you can’t just decide, “nah, I don’t want to do this”, and leave. or when you’ve made a wrong turn or get lost, you have to correct it then even if it means backtracking and adding miles to your day. the only way out of the woods, sometimes, is through it, like life and in the middle of it all, i learned that i have drastically undermined and underestimated myself for pretty much my whole life. it may have taken me almost 22 years to realize it but hey everyone starts somewhere. i’ve never thought of myself to be doing anything special, despite what a lot of strangers, friends, and family tell me along the way. average. that’s what it has always been for me, despite having perfectionist tendencies. and i came to this conclusion about 3/4 of the way into the last, most intense day of our six day hike. and there i was, crying halfway up Paintbrush Divide (google it I think y’all would be crying anyway lol scary shit) telling myself all the things i never believed about myself, but meaning it this time. while lugging like twenty-five pounds on my back. i am resilient. i am strong. i am capable. i can do hard things. obviously there is a little more to it than just that but it’s hard to express it in the right way. anyway- late afternoon ramblings coming to you from a girl that survived the last week off bad instant coffee, dehydrated food, and lots of grit.
I’ve been taking massive leaps down memory lane I’ve been taking massive leaps down memory lane to write my new Utah Travel Series (with y’alls recommendations for budget travel posts coming soon after!) and I still cannot believe that people have Z E R O C L U E about the beauty of the United States. It has the most (or one of the most) diverse climates and geology on the planet, which causes for a lot of really cool places like this one ^^^. What’s the best part about this? Most of the really incredible places are cheap to travel to if you’re already in the US and National Parks are amazing for traveling with friends! I know lots of y’all are leaning more towards the buddy system rather than solo, so if you’re looking for a place to experience the magic of the earth with, cook up some s’mores, and go stargazing, go to any National Park and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about! And honestly, with this pandemic our options are really limited anyways 🤣 domestic travel is POPPIN right now and it’s never too late to organize a BOMB trip! Especially when you have all the best resources 😉 head to my bio to read about 10 amazing hikes in Bryce Canyon National Park that are worth a spot on your summer road trip! 😋

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