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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
    • United Kingdom
      • Scotland
    • United States
      • Utah
  • Travel Tips
    • Solo Female Travel
    • Travel Packing
    • Travel Photography
  • RESOURCES
  • Work With Me
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    50 Iceland Travel Tips For An Incredible Trip

    02/01/202026/05/2020

    Iceland, the mysterious, extraterrestrial land that travelers are FLOCKING to and possibly even selling a quarter of their left kidney JUST to afford to make it out there… Okay, so maybe not THAT extreme, but Iceland’s growing popularity has caused millions of people to start booking trips out here! As we all know, I’m here

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  • Hello there! My name is Aaren, a nature-loving photographer that craves adventure across all terrains: especially the sandy and mountainous ones. I am here to inspire you to explore the great outdoors, capture stunning landscapes, and take care of the planet along the way! Let’s go!

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    aarenprody

    howdy, hello, hi, + welcome! there are many new howdy, hello, hi, + welcome! 

there are many new faces that have found my account recently and i wanted to ~properly~ introduce myself to everyone that might be curious as to who i am, what i do, and what you can expect from my little corner of the internet.

first things first, let’s get the basics out of ze way:
- i am 22 years old
- i grew up in the midwest, but i am now based outside of dallas 
- instead of going to college after i graduated in 2017, i sold everything i owned and booked a one way flight to bali. since then, i started my travel blog, What Do You Sea, to pursue a fulfilling life through adventurous travel both in the US and around the world.
- i have visited: Japan, Scotland, Iceland, The Philippines, Bali, + (maybe?) 1/4 of the states in the US. (Utah and Wyoming being the coolest so far)
- the next places i want to visit are Vietnam,  Morocco, Italy, and pay another visit to any of the places I’ve already been!
- On my website (link in bio) I write in-depth guides to all the places I’ve visited, along with helpful tips to get you exploring whether you’re ballin on a budget or have a little extra to spend. 

My hobbies include:
- guitar 
- learning Japanese (yes it’s so hard lol)
- skateboarding
- cooking
- drinking coffee 
- backpacking (the Southeast Asia/Europe kind and the outdoorsy kind)
- hiking/camping
- reading (my favorite book is Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins)
- (+ most importantly) photography

Cool FAX (if you read this far)
- when I was a kid I ate a whole jar of habanero peppers without batting an eye, and to this day it’s one of my favorite flavors 
- back in 2018, I competed in the Taekwon-Do British World Championships that took place in Edinburgh, Scotland 
- also when I was a kid, I picked a glass Christmas ornament off the family Christmas tree and ate it like an apple (not sure how I lived but hey)

If you want to read the entirety of my story, head over to my website under the “about” section titled “meet aaren”

What’s the weirdest thing about yourself? Let’s get to know each other in the comments 🤘🏼
    this was another one of those times where everyone this was another one of those times where everyone and their mom raves about a location and so I said to myself, “okay let’s see what all the hubbub is about..” only to be BLOWN OUT OF THE WATER over how cool this is! i am passionate about a lot of things, rocks not really being one of them, but both the journey and the arrival to this spot was ✨magical✨what looks like this dinky, boring arch in a photo is a MAGNIFICENT rock structure that stands over fifty feet tall and looks out over both the side of a massive cliff and space bowl type of formation. its truly incredible. there was even around twenty other people here with us that morning and it felt more like a gathering to witness something beautiful (sunrise over delicate arch) rather than elbowing around people to see something cool. it’s definitely not the experience i expected, but one that i was glad I walked a few miles for! GO TO ARCHES PEOPLE! ROCKS ARE COOL!
    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?

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