Planning Adventures Big and Small

About Sarah Puckett
Asia
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Travel Planning and Budgeting
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About Sarah Puckett
Asia
North America
Oceania
Travel Planning and Budgeting
Contact Me

Asia

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Recent Posts

Instagram Photo Spots in Madison, Wisconsin
How to Travel with Anxiety Without it Keeping You Down
Tongariro Crossing Hike – Guide to NZ’s Best Day Trek
Cape Reinga Day Trip New Zealand
Port Arthur Day Trip

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organized_adventurer

#travelgirl back to the 9-5 after 500 days on the road
Living in WI, working in Cali
Travel guides and planning tips ⬇️
Fka @our21stcenturyodyssey

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I've got a thing for deserts. .
People have asked me if I'm a mountain or a beach person, and I'm just like HEY what about the desert?
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I love any kind of outdoor natural space, but deserts have a special place in my heart. Maybe it's because I never saw desert landscapes growing up, so they've always been this mysterious, isolated place I only knew about via documentaries.
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Whether it's the Atacama in Chile, the American Southwest, the dunes of Namibia, or even Antarctica (yep, it's a desert), I always find deserts to be some of the most colorful and mesmerizing places on earth. .
This photo is from a less remote desert destination - none other than Palm Springs, California. I was able to visit for a solo relaxation weekend a few months ago, and the hot desert sun warmed my skin as well as my soul ☀️😍
. 📍Palm Springs, California
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#California #backpackersintheworld #cali #visitcalifornia #socal #westcoast #californialove #visitusa #palmsprings #palmdesert #gltlove #iamtb #desertlife #dametraveler #girlslovetravel #darlingescapes #sheisnotlost #wearetravelgirls #ladiesgoneglobal #traveldreamseekers #travelblogger #travelgram #instatravel #wanderlust #travelgirl #womenwhoexplore #beautifuldestinations #solofemaletraveler #girlswhotravel #desertvibes

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Oh hey Ramses, didn't see you there.
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Oh, it's PHARAOH Ramses THE GREAT, you say? Oh, you were, like, THE most important Pharaoh in ancient Egypt? Got it.
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This photo is from Memphis, Egypt (NOT Tennessee though I'm sure that's nice too). A short drive outside of Cairo, Memphis was the former capital of the unified Upper and Lower Egypts in 3100 BCE (that's a solid 5k years ago guys 🤯🤯🤯). In its heyday, the city had so many palaces and temples that it was the cosmopolitan hub of the Kingdom of Egypt.

Today, it’s an open-air museum that I could barely recognize as ever having been a city. Hardly any of the ruins remain, but it’s an important historical place to see. Though the ruins are few, there are many large statues that reflect the magnitude of what the ancient Egyptians built.
The most notable of these is the upper half of a statue of the Pharaoh Ramses the Great (also known as Ramses II), which lays horizontal on a rectangular base. Standing next to it and seeing it from that perspective (rare, since most statues are standing vertical), brought to life the sheer scale of the Egyptian monuments.
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This was one of the first things we saw on our Egypt trip, and just the start of over a week of being constantly in awe of everything. Getting to see Egypt remains one of my most cherished travel experiences ❤️
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Is Egypt on your bucket list?
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#Egypt #egyptology #egyptianmuseum #egypt🇪🇬 #egyptshots #egyptianhistory #ancientegypt #amazingegypt #myegypt #visitegypt #memphis #egypttravel #egyptianhistory #CoupleGoals #globecouples #earthcouples #adventurecouple #adventuretogether #travelsandchill #romancetravel #travelduo #backpackersintheworld #gltlove #iamtb #thetraveltag #marriedtravelers #welivetoexplore #tasteintravel #theglobewanderer #welltraveled

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Me: *trying to think of a "waterfall" quote that isn't TLC.* .
Nobody: .
Me: DON'T GO CHASING WATERFALLS🎶🙋🏼‍♀️
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If you have this song stuck in your head the rest of today... sorry, not sorry.
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This is one of my favorite spots in Wisconsin, in Governor Dodge State Park. You don't have to hike far to get to Stephen's Falls, but you can if you want to. We normally take the long route, which goes through rock gorges and cliffs following a stream. It's only an hour from downtown Madison, and is worth visiting year round. They even have snowshoe and cross country skiing trails for the winter!
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What's your favorite state or national park near your home? Tim and I plan to take a big road trip in a few years all around North America and I would love to learn of some new places to add to our list!
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#Wisconsin #wisconsinblogger #madisonwisconsin #visitusa #wisconsingirl #visitmadison #wisconsinoutdoors #Wisconsingoodness #wisconsinstate_photos #governordodgestatepark #backpackersintheworld #wisconsinlove #travelbloggerlife #travelWI #travelwisconsin #womenwhoexplore #hikerchick #optoutside #womenwhohike #gltlove #iamtb #thetraveltag #adventuregirl #wearetravelgirls #shetravels #womenwhoexplore #darlingescapes #sheisnotlost #worldnomads #lonelyplanet

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"Memory is an instrument of simplification and selection." - Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel
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Tim and I have been home in the US after 500 days of traveling around the world for 5 months now. While we've definitely been having fun back on our home turf, most of our thoughts about travel have been memories vs planning.
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And memory is a funny thing. Humans don't remember EVERYTHING we experience, and we are really bad at accurately recalling how we actually felt later on. As time goes on, memory carries more and more weight than the actual experience itself did. The moment was fleeting, but the memory of it, accurate or not, is what remains.
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I look at pictures of India and want to go back. I remember the beautiful palaces and the Himalayas and the Ganges. I forget about how my pants clung to my legs from all my sweat, or how I really did go to the bathroom THERE, or the general harassment. Because at the end of the day, I was still traveling. I was in a country I'd always wanted to visit and seeing these things I'd dreamt of seeing. I think, objectively, I was really frustrated a lot of the time in India. But when I remember my time in India, I only feel warmth and gratitude for the experience, and a desire to go again.
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Are there any places like that in the world for you, that were challenging to travel in at the time but you look back on so fondly?
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If you're curious about what to expect traveling in India, and how to avoid some common mistakes that we didn't, check out my guide to India for first timers, linked in my bio!
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ORGANIZEDADVENTURER.COM
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📍Amer Fort, Jaipur, India .
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#india #incredibleindia #amerfort #jaipur #jaipurdiaries #visitindia #backpackersintheworld #jaipur_trip #travelindia #indiatravel #worldnomads #lonelyplanet #wearetravelers #creativetravelcouples #travelustcouples #coupleslovetravel #relationshipgoals #travelcouple #coupleswhoexplore #travelduo #marriedtravelers #globecouples #adventurecouples #travelingcouple #journeysofcouples #gltlove #iamtb #thetraveltag #coupleswhotravel #india🇮🇳

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While Googling fun facts about NYC I ended up taking a "Which Gossip Girl Are You" quiz instead. I got Serena Van Der Woodsen, and while I don't think that's true, I'll take it. The actress who plays her dated my celebrity crush Leonardo Dicaprio so I'm not about to argue 🤷🏼‍♀️
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Gossip Girl is an interesting show - it portrays this whole world of NYC's mega rich beautiful people that I don't relate to at all. I don't even know if it's based on any kind of reality. And yet I can't look away.
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It's actually similar to the city's appeal to me when I was a kid - this glamorous, unreachable place that only the super cool people ever visit. If a new kid moved to my normal American town of Chesterfield, Virginia from New York, they would automatically be cool in my eyes (even if it was upstate bc I didn't know the difference 😂).
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If NYC was the location for Hey Arnold, Home Alone 2, and Friends, certainly there was something special about it, right? .
I remember my first visit to New York City in college. My friend and I took the China Town bus from Richmond, Virginia for a weekend visiting @trekkingwithtracy. We did all the tourist things, took a boat to the Statue of Liberty, went to the top of the Empire State Building, and pretended to understand art at the Guggenheim Museum.
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I still get that little butterfly in my stomach whenever I visit NYC, even though I've been so many times. Some of my best friends live there, and I'm always excited to see them of course. But there's also something special about the city itself, and that feeling when you see the skyline and all those famous buildings from movies and TV.
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As much as I love traveling to remote and lesser known places, there's still something magical about seeing with your own eyes these iconic places you were raised hearing about in pop culture.
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Case in point - I'm 32 and have traveled the world, but I was still so excited to see the Brooklyn Bridge that I obviously had to get a selfie 😍
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When's the last time you visited a place that brought you back to that childlike excitement?
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Thanks @eastmeetszest for snapping this photo for me!
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#newyorkcity #nyc_highlights #nycblogger #newyorkgram

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Tim and I decided to be Bond, James Bond for Halloween. Just kidding. We were both birds. But we did channel our inner Bond for this photo. I think we look so much cooler than we actually are. How do you think we did? 😂
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Are you/did you dress up for Halloween festivities this year? Tim was a blue-footed booby and I was a bird of paradise - the one from the opening scene of the new documentary on Netflix "Dancing With the Birds" (if you didn't catch my Stories last weekend, don't worry, you can still see it on my TikTok with the same username @organized_adventurer). Personally, I think it's pretty funny. .
By the way, if you're on TikTok and want to be friends, follow me! It's going to be (errr, already is) full of goofy non-travel whimsy, and a place for me to express some creativity beyond my travel side. There may or may not be a lot of cat videos on the way. We'll see 😻
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📍Don Q Inn - this is the outside of the airplane I posted about 2 posts ago! Dodgeville, Wisconsin, about an hour outside of Madison
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#Wisconsin #wisconsinblogger #madisonwisconsin #visitusa #wisconsingirl #midwestcouple #backpackersintheworld #wisconsinlove #travelbloggerlife #CoupleGoals #globecouples #earthcouples #adventurecouple #adventuretogether #travelsandchill #romancetravel #travelduo #travelustcouples #marriedtravelers #wisconsinoutdoors #Wisconsingoodness #wisconsinstate_photos #madisonwisconsin #madisonwi #travelWI #travelwisconsin #coupleswhoexplore #halloween🎃👻 #welivetoexplore #tasteintravel

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Behind every hike is an awkward story about trying to pee behind a rock or a tree without anyone seeing 🤷🏼‍♀️keep reading ⬇️
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Last weekend my friend @lblevins9 came to visit and we took her hiking at Devil's Lake State Park. And let me tell you, pictures don't even do justice to the gorgeous fall colors we saw in the treetops surrounding the lake.
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But what the photos also don't show is my debacle of an attempt at taking a discreet pee behind a rock appropriately shaped like the poo emoji 💩 .
Tim had just peed in the vicinity without disruption, so it seemed liked a safe place. I was wrong. .
The first problem is that I accidentally put my hand in Tim's pee puddle. Touching each other's pee is well outside of the scope of our relationship, but, we did have salmonella poisoning together once, so I figured, hey, things could be worse!
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So then the stream started flowing and things were going pretty well. Until a swarm of hikers descended upon this portion of the trail out of nowhere like zombies approaching the cast of the Walking Dead while they're literally just trying to live.
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My friends, for all their efforts, failed epically at blocking people from passing. And I'm sure my yelling "Play better defense guys!" didn't help hide my location either.
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Once I was done with my business, I couldn't stand up to pull my pants up right away because so many people were still around. One couple even stopped and stared for a weirdly long time.
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Eventually I gave up and stood up in full view of all my spectators.
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A few minutes later I realized I didn't have my phone anymore. So we went back to the scene of my disgrace, and sure enough, it had fallen out of my pocket. I was happy to find it, even though it was a little damp (if you know what I mean). 🤢
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Thankfully one of the people who had witnessed this whole thing go down had some hand sanitizer she was happy to share. So at least there was that 😂🤷🏼‍♀️
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#Wisconsin #wisconsinblogger #madisonwisconsin #visitusa #wisconsingirl #visitmadison #wisconsinphotographer #wisconsinlife #wisconsinstate_photos #Wisconsingoodness #wisconsinlove #wisconsinoutdoors #devilslake #travelWI #travelwisconsin

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"The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.”
M. Barrie, Peter Pan
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The greatest realization I ever had was that even the wildest dreams take flight when you take them seriously. All you have to do is figure out what the next step is towards your goal, and take it. And then take the next one. And the next. And you keep doing that until you get there, no matter the set backs. You might have to change your plan as you go, take a few detours, and deal with unpleasant surprises. But keep going. It's cliché, but true - all it takes is one step at a time.
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Don't doubt your ability to fly. Just take off and see what magic happens next 🤗
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When is the last time you took a chance and trusted your ability to fly? .
About this spot:
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📍Inside the airplane at Don Q Inn, Dodgeville, Wisconsin
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When Tim and I went exploring in our backyard a few weekends ago, we finally stopped at the Don Q Inn, a quirky hotel famed for its themed rooms. We'd always wondered about the retired airplane in the lawn in front of the hotel, and to our surprise, it's just open to freely explore. So that's what did, and this is what we found! If you're driving to Governor Dodge State Park from Madison, you'll pass right by it!
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#Wisconsin #wisconsinblogger #madisonwisconsin #visitusa #wisconsingirl #visitmadison #gltlove #iamtb #thetraveltag #wisconsinphotographer #wisconsinlife #wisconsinstate_photos #Wisconsingoodness #wisconsinlove #travelbloggerlife #Wisconsintravel #travelWI #travelcouple #coupleswhoexplore #travelduo #travelustcouples #creativetravelcouples #marriedtravelers #globecouples #adventurecouples #travelingcouple #mytinyatlas #welivetoexplore #tasteintravel #backpackersintheworld

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Traveling abroad has enabled me to see my home city with new eyes. Over the last few months, I've had fun exploring all the amazing places right in my backyard. For example, I run by this beautiful bridge at least once a week, but never actually stopped to spend time here until a few weeks ago.
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The truth is, Madison, Wisconsin is an underrated American city that is absolutely worth a stop when traveling through the USA, but more famous "Instagrammable" cities like San Francisco and New York tend to get more attention.
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That's why I'm excited to share my latest blog post - a rundown of all my favorite spots in and around Madison that are not only worth visiting in their own right, but they will also land you some amazing pictures if you like photography (for the 'gram or not!).
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There are over 15 unique locations included in my guide, plus visiting tips and a map to make it easy for you to find each one. From picturesque bridges, unique (and UNESCO-listed!) architecture, slot canyons, lavender fields, street art, and so much more - Madison has it all!
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I hope you'll check it out, and consider a visit to this amazing little city. And if you do, let me know - I'd love to show you around 🤗
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📍Tenney Park, Madison, Wisconsin
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#Wisconsin #wisconsinblogger #madisonwisconsin #visitusa #wisconsingirl #visitmadison #gltlove #iamtb #thetraveltag #wisconsinphotographer #wisconsinlife #wisconsinstate_photos #Wisconsingoodness #wisconsinlove #travelbloggerlife #travelgirl #backpackersintheworld #dametraveler #travelgirlsgo #femmetravel #girlswhotravel #darlingescapes #sheisnotlost #wearetravelgirls #ladiesgoneglobal #traveldreamseekers #girlsvsglobe #girlaroundworld #usatravel #exploreusa

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