Adrianna’s 2024 Travel Recap

As 2024 comes to a close, I’m taking some time to reflect on yet another fantastic year! I traveled to 13 countries and was away from home for about 40% of the year. I had the joy of traveling with family, friends, and with Hayden. The style of travel ranged from budget backpacking to extreme luxury and everything in between. Getting a little bit of everything, all over the world, to help Más Travelled be better prepared to book incredible trips for our clients no matter what type of vacation they’re dreaming up. Here’s a quick recap of all the destinations we visited this year:

India + Sri Lanka

This slice of the world has long been on my radar. I actually had a flight booked back in 2020 and was getting ready to spend three months backpacking through India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal before COVID came and derailed that plan. It’s also a trip that Hayden and I have been talking about since the day we met almost 7 years ago!

While I’ve been lucky enough to experience many different cultures throughout the world, India’s bustling streets, radiant colors, and gorgeous architecture has been luring me in for years. It was so amazing to visit and see sights in person that I had been dreaming about for so long. The icing on the cake for this trip was we were lucky enough to see a tiger in the wild and walked the grounds of the Taj Mahal with hardly any other visitors. Being there during a massive heat wave definitely made some aspects of the trip less than ideal, but we loved it all the same.

We escaped the heat and popped down to Sri Lanka and it was a breath of fresh air. Sri Lanka felt like a mini-India in a way and brought back waves of memories from our times backpacking through South East Asia. We met more tourists and found restaurants that offered Western food, which was a nice change after eating Indian food non-stop—which we both loved but we missed having variety! Riding the Kandy—Ella train was our highlight in Sri Lanka but we absolutely fell in love with the sleepy surf town of Arugam Bay. If Sri Lanka wasn’t inconveniently located on the opposite side of the world, I think we’d find ourselves there often.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

While there are other destinations in Brazil that are farther up my list, Rio popped in and presented itself on a flash sale from American Airlines. It was the perfect destination for a mother-daughter working vacation. We chose a hotel right on the beach in Copacabana, with a rooftop pool and bar, and we splurged on a suite with a balcony. We spent the week soaking in the beautiful views, walking along the never ending boardwalks on the beach, and sipping caipirinhas in between work calls.

Highlights included a trip to see the Christ the Redeemer statue (one of the 7 wonders of the world!), taking the cable car up Sugar Loaf Mountain, enjoying beautiful sunsets in Ipanema, and buying too many dresses at Farm Rio. After tearing a tendon in my ankle and awaiting the verdict on whether or not I needed surgery, Rio was a great destination to sit back and relax while not going stir-crazy stuck at a resort. While there are many other fun active activities in Rio and endless other destinations within the country of Brazil, it was a fun change of pace to stay in one place for the week while walking the line of relaxing and having fun while still managing to work.

Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

Mexico wasn’t supposed to happen. My parents traded in their Homestead timeshare for a week in Puerto Vallarta and wanted a full family vacation. I told my mom I couldn’t swing the trip because I had too much travel squeezed into my spring and I was exhausted. Eventually the guilt for being the only child to not join the family vacation chewed me up and Hayden and I decided to surprise my mom and booked a ticket. After some sneaking through the airport, we pulled off the surprise and had a great week relaxing at the resort, working remotely from the pool, and exploring little beach towns. The highlight of the week was chartering a boat for an afternoon on the water and having a pack of raccoons scurry past our house one night.

Caye Caulker, Belize

Belize was a very spur of the moment Spring Break trip. I went back in 2022, right after 3 weeks of backpacking through Central America with Hayden. After visiting Caye Caulker I came back raving about how much I thought Hayden would enjoy it. This year, when his Spring Break rolled around and his knee was holding him back from an active vacation it was the perfect time to head back.

While I had to work on this trip we had a great time exploring different beaches, riding bikes across the island, and eating lots of fresh seafood. We made friends with a group of zookeepers that shared a ferry over which made the island feel even smaller and much more fun!

Peru + Bolivia

Exploring more of South America was a big goal of mine for 2024 (one that I’m bringing into 2025 as well!) This trip was a girls trip and we squeezed a lot into a fairly short period of time. We decided to add on Bolivia because I have been wanting to see Salar de Uyuni during the rainy season for years—it was absolutely worth the detour!

Peru of course was absolutely beautiful. While there were many other destinations and activities within Peru that we didn’t have time for, such as trekking and the Amazon, but we made the most of the time we had. We set ourselves up for success with the altitude by spending the first week of the trip in Bolivia at about 12,000-13,000ft which helped us acclimatize before going to Cusco. We filled our time in Peru with lots of day hikes out of Cusco, hopping through Lake Titicaca, heading up to Aguas Calientes to see Machu Picchu, and generally falling in love with the Peruvian landscape.

The Maldives

It was the perfect storm to be able to visit The Maldives. A notoriously expensive destination, as well as one that is very difficult to get to from Virginia, The Maldives were not on our radar in the slightest. But while planning our trip to India and Sri Lanka I was looking at a map and was ecstatic to learn that the Maldives were a quick and relatively cheap flight away from Sri Lanka. Since we were already going to be all the way over there, it would be silly to not tack on this iconic destination as a pit-stop.

Of course if we were going to visit The Maldives I knew we had to stay in one of the iconic over-water bungalows. While they can get quite expensive, we managed a fairly affordable 3 day, 2 night stay at the Taj Exotica which was the perfect “vacation” from traveling through India for a month. I highly recommend tacking on a quick trip to the Maldives if you ever find yourself in that part of the world and if you book with FORA benefits it makes all the difference! We were able to get a free upgrade, $100 food and beverage credit, free daily breakfast, and a 5pm late check-out.

Finland

Hayden and I really wanted to see the Northern Lights, but of course there is never a guarantee to see them! We are currently in a Solar Cycle that is hitting its peak in 2024-2025, which results in higher activity of Aurora Borealis, which means a higher chance of seeing the elusive Northern Lights. We wanted to take advantage of this increased chance and knew we needed head somewhere North to test our chances.

We decided on Finland for multiple reasons. Compared to other destinations where you can see the Northern Lights, we didn’t really have a desire to visit Finland in the summer—versus Iceland, Alaska, and Norway where we want to visit in the summer for hiking and other outdoor activities. Finland also offered a bunch of other winter activities that would keep us occupied and happy in case we didn’t get to see the Northern Lights—such as skiiing, snowshoeing, snowmobiling, etc. It’s also a fantastic destination to try and see the Northern Lights as it’s very easy to make your way past the Arctic Circle and into areas with minimal light pollution. To top it all off, we found a great flight deal and were able to make the trip pretty affordable. We had a fantastic trip to Finland and were lucky enough to see the Northern Lights multiple times! The trip was cozy and fun, filled with lots of outdoor activities, hot chocolate, candy, saunas, and soaking in the snowy landscape.