Welcome to Travelling Through Life: A Podcast on the Go!

EPISODE SUMMARY:

Hi! I’m Tara, a Canadian traveller with a thirst for knowledge and connection. This is my first time hosting a podcast. I’m so incredibly excited to bring you conversations with fellow travellers whose paths I’ve had the pleasure of crossing with around the world. 

This week on Travelling Through Life: A Podcast on the Go, is a little introduction to me, my blog Travel with TMc, and why I started this show. It’s a short and sweet episode and a little preview of what’s to come in this space.

Travelling through Life: A Podcast on the Go is a fun and quirky show that delves into all things travel and adventures from the road, in the air, and in between here and there. Subscribe for weekly updates!

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CHAPTERS:

00:00 Welcome to Travelling Through Life: A Podcast on the Go
00:37 Meet Tara from Travel with TMc
05:05 The Podcast is Born
05:39 Hopes & Goals for this Podcast

Transcript

Tara (Travel With TMc) (00:00)

Welcome to Travelling Through Life: A Podcast on the Go. I'm your host, Tara McAndrew. This is a space where I'm so excited to introduce you to friends and colleagues from all over who love to experience our big, beautiful world. You'll hear from people who work in the travel industry like myself, from families travelling with young kids, from vanlifers to those travelling with pets, people who are digital nomads and remote workers, those who love weekend travel, and some very special young voices as well.

But perhaps I should begin by introducing myself if we haven't yet met. As I said, my name is Tara McAndrew, and I'm the woman behind Travel with TMc a blog that I started in 2015 when I moved abroad for the second time. Since I was a kid, I've been documenting life, whether by video, with my father's camcorder, or taking pictures with my mom's camera, or writing in numerous journals. Documenting life overseas and sharing it with friends and family just seemed like a natural progression. At the time, the blog was called La Tour à l'Étranger, also known as The Tower Abroad. Side note, I'm six feet tall and a French teacher by trade. But after tumultuous five months into what was supposed to be a year-long job, I broke my contract and escaped home. Since the blog was meant to document my life overseas, and I was back in Canada, it went dormant for nearly two years. Then, in 2017, my partner at the time and I packed life into backpacks and went on an around the world adventure for four months before moving to New Zealand for another eight. This is also the time I deep dove into learning about van life after car camping in little hatchbacks across four countries. That story will come later though. The blog was revived, this time with a new name, Travel with TMc, and a complete back-end renovation. The name Travel with TMc came from a nickname I had growing up. If you know me, you know that names have always been a sticky subject for me. Nobody pronounced my first name properly growing up, so I definitely was not going to have it in the name of the blog. Friends in high school called me TMc and I liked the alliteration with travel. Since the name change, however, I don't think a single person has read it as anything but T-M-C. So the name saga continues.

Over the course of the next few years, I continued to travel internationally and even branched into travelling by myself for the first time in 2019. I was honestly shocked at how much I enjoyed wandering and exploring on my own and continued to do it for much of the year. Then of course, the pandemic hit and it feels dramatic to say, but over the course of the first year, it felt like I was having a mild identity crisis. Travel was everything for me. It was what I did for fun. It was becoming what I did for work through the blog. And the first question people would always ask upon seeing me was always, where are you going next? What are you doing in Canada? I will never forget watching a movie with my partner during the pandemic. I don't remember which one it was, but it's something to do with action or a thriller. And the characters got onto a plane and out of nowhere, I burst into tears. I don't even think I let myself miss or think about travel up to that point.

Something had to shift and I needed to fill the gaping chasm in my life. Thankfully, I had a coffee table book that I'd purchased from Queen Books in Toronto called Ontario's 160 Most Unusual Sites. That was going to be my next project. I could safely travel by car to and from destinations on my own and many of them seemed to be outdoors or in relatively open spaces. I got out a map, circled each location and made a list of the closest ones to begin. That project saved my sanity and healed my heart a little too. Through the series, I dove into local history, which is something that I always appreciate learning about when abroad. And I met, at a distance, many fantastic people in the most serendipitous of ways. I started a second series during this time on Instagram, setting the goal to eat at every food truck in Waterloo Region in the span of two weeks. I love trying street food when I'm overseas, and I had no idea that there were 14 local trucks. It was a great way to connect with local business owners and to share with those of you on Instagram an affordable, safe, and unique activity to look forward to during tough times. Both of these series stretched over several years, gaining some local media attention in newspapers and on the radio. But more importantly, they sparked conversations with strangers and fulfilled my desire to learn, connect, and share. Post pandemic, I tentatively branched out into the world and I haven't stopped since.

In 2022, I also fulfilled a dream that began on that round the world trip and bought a camper van. I will leave that story for another day, but Betty White's doing well, even though she's still in renovation mode. Starting a podcast has been on my list of projects I want to do for several years. The conversations from season one that you're about to hear were recorded a year ago, but I hope that what's shared will be timeless. I knew creating a podcast would be a lot of work. I just didn't realize how much work was involved or that some of it would be within myself. Every second of putting this together for you has been so enjoyable and selfishly it's provided opportunities to reconnect with friends and colleagues in a very busy season of life that might otherwise pass. 

My hope and goals for this podcast is that our conversations about and ideas around travel expand to include the many ways and reasons that we experience travel through life. Be they for staying in touch with friends and family, for work, for relaxation and recharging, for safety, for starting over, for hope, for satiating our curiosity about the world and others, or for self-discovery. I've never been a big fan of the Instagram machine and the highly curated, often unattainable, and certainly unsustainable amount of content that's created and consumed. Travel isn't one thing. It's not flowery dresses and lay flat seats and country counts. Travel at its core, I believe, is about understanding. Understanding that our differences reveal our similarities, understanding others as a reflection of ourselves, and understanding that our connection is what makes the world go round. Stories, especially human-centric stories, have always captured my attention.

It's my hope that my guests' stories told in their own words will be both relatable and inspiring. I want you to see yourselves in them, to hear your own experiences represented, and to inspire you to experience even more travel, however that may be. Thank you for listening, and we'll catch you in the next episode, fellow travellers. Bye!