Welcome to the travel site of the Lightfooted Chelsea! My name is Chelsea Lightfoot and I am addicted to travel. This blog deals with different adventures I’m going on, how to afford things on a tight budget, and facing fears and challenges while abroad. I hope you enjoy the journey that we are going on together! Also, don’t forget to check out my Instagram with all my travel photos, @lightfootedchelsea.

I have always been someone who has loved to travel. When I was young my parents would always pack me up on weekends and take me all over California on camping road trips, the Southwest on longer vacations, and we even took a 3 month road trip up through the Pacific Northwest, Canada, down into the Midwest, then back to all the Southwestern states and straight back up to our home in Northern California. I started flying cross country to visit my family in Florida, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere when I was just 6 months old. So I guess you could say that I was exposed to the travel life early.

When I was 13, the summer before 9/11, my parents took me on a trip to Europe. We explored Rome, Pompeii, Sorento and Capri. We walked through the history of the Bible in Turkey, spending time in Ephesus. We wandered through great philosophers playgrounds and relived the stories of the Greek Gods in Athens, Mykonos, and Santorini. I came home from that trip and I was hooked. I had discovered that there is so much more to the world than the suburbia where I then lived in Southern California. I realized that I wanted to see it all.

I was a bit of a geek in high school, people didn’t know who I was, I blended in, and I was in band. And while I still may get a lot of jokes about “this one time, at band camp…”, being in band gave me a lot of opportunities for travel where I may not have had them otherwise. One spring break we went on a band tour in Australia and, at the ripe age of 17, I could brag that I had been on a 16 hour plane ride (and unfortunately, I did brag… traveling isn’t about bragging, by the way). My mother, with the bachelors degree in art and a passion for all things beautiful, took me on a mother daughter trip to Paris where we spent nine days falling in love with the city and exploring as many art museums as we could find. And the summer after my senior year of high school I was lucky enough to go on one more band tour with the Southern California Ambassadors of Music. We toured through London, hopped a ferry to France, spent time in Paris, drove to Switzerland and stayed in the Alps, visited Venice, stopped in Liechtenstein on our way to Austria, and finished our trip in Germany. I was about to start my life of adulthood and all I knew is that I wanted to keep traveling.

Now, life took a few rough turns, I had some deaths in the family that really affected me, I married a Marine at the age of 20, I got stuck in an endless loop of working full time and going to school part time, my marriage failed six years later, and other than a few trips to Vegas and one to the Bahamas, I was 26 years old and I hadn’t been anywhere else. So, when I had an opportunity to chaperone a 2 week mission trip in Panama with my church’s high school youth group, I jumped on it. And what happens next is where this story begins.

If you want to contact me for any reason, please don’t hesitate! I would love to hear from you. You can also find photos of my travels on Instagram at @thechelsealightfoot.