Hiya!  I’m Whitney and a big Thanks for checking out my site.  With some help, I launched it back in 2011 when I began racing as a pro triathlete and wanted to have a platform to comment on my training and racing experiences- to share with family, friends, and the few sponsors I had at the time.  It was a thrilling, educational season of my life and I’m proud of the effort and results I achieved.  I’ll forever smile at the memories of so many stories, lessons learned and painful training sessions etched into my brain; regarding the latter memories the smile comes from the relief that I don’t have to do that anymore!  I raced in a total of 13 Ironman-distance races and countless shorter distances.  My most notable accomplishments (or maybe just the ones I liked the best) are listed under Results.

In 2015 I walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain (the Camino Frances route) for about 800 kilometers, solo.  The experience blew open my small world where I had been staying in one spot to be able to maintain triathlon training and racing.  After the Camino I became very aware that exploring other parts of the world, as well as the deeper parts of myself through travel experiences, was something I was being called to do.  So it meant hanging up the training mentality (some of that was hard, some was easy), and start to branch out of my routines.

This website morphed into a travel blog on September 29, 2015; my Day 1 of the Camino, where I wrote about each day on that trail until Day 30.  It was a time of great reflection and strengthening for me, and a renewal of my love of writing.  From then on I wrote each time I traveled, with intent to share with family and friends but I began to realize I just freaking love writing.

Skip ahead 3 years- I had been contemplating a move to South America, and slowly putting one piece in place after another I realized this dream on March 10, 2018 when I flew to Bogotá, Colombia, trained up with a certification to teach English as a foreign language, having left my job of 13+ years as the Wellness Director at a lovely retirement community in Boulder, Colorado.  The next 20 blogs or so would be about the ups and downs and experiences and lessons that living in Colombia taught me, along with a couple additional months of travel on the end before I returned to the US.

As I have morphed as an adult, so this blog has.  It’s a good window into my life since 2011; there are probably some embarrassing chapters of the story but I’ve loved sharing online about all the good, the bad, and the silly.  There are no silly learnings, really, just silly details.  And those make for good stories.

One of my favorite quotes is from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr:  “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions”.   Please join me in a good regular stretching routine, as I continue to explore life with words in this blog- sometimes through travel, sometimes just navigating life as it presents itself to me.

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Written December 2018 while living in Colombia:

Hola!  Soy Whitney Garcia, y vivo en Colombia.  Me mudé acá en Marzo 2018 para trabajar como profesora de inglés, y para aprender español.  Aprendí español en el colegio pero no lo usaba regularmente en mi vida en los Estados Unidos.  En 2017, decidí hacer un cambio grande en mi vida y trasladarme a otro país en donde se hable español para sumergirme en la cultura y el idioma.

Soy empleada de una empresa que se llama Raisbeck, la cual está ubicada en Bogotá, Colombia.  Mis estudiantes son personas de negocios, y usualmente voy a sus oficinas para dictarles las clases.

También viajo por Colombia para experimentar lugares diferentes.  Colombia tiene un paisaje increíble:  hermoso y diverso.  Es el segundo país más biodiverso del mundo (después  de Brazil).

Colombia tiene sus problemas, claro, y una historia difícil.  Pero en este momento, la gente está trabajando fuertemente para crear más oportunidades con el ecoturísmo y empresas internacionales.  Al mismo tiempo, se apega a su cultura y tradiciones con mucho orgullo.

En parte, vivo en Colombia para obtener experiencias en una cultura latinoamericana y mejorar mis habilidades al hablar otra lengua.  Además, como estoy conociendo más y más las personas y los estilos de vida, quiero compartir mis conocimientos y mis inquietudes con ustedes, con mis lectores.

Si está leyendo, gracias por su interés y curiosidad.  Para bien o para mal, el mundo se está haciendo más pequeño con los avances en la tecnología, la facilidad de viajar, así como las crisis que obligan a las personas a ser desplazadas.  Para vivir y compartir este mundo uno con el otro, es necesario acercarse a nuestras diferencias con la mente abierta.

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