My Interview with the Cape Breton Post

I was featured in the Cape Breton Post, my hometown community newspaper.

Check it out here:

Sydney Mines native turns her love of travel into popular publication

SYDNEY MINES — A former Sydney Mines resident has turned her sense of adventure

Sydney Mines native Lesley Carter (Stubbert-Samways) is shown skydiving over Fiji in a tandem jump with Tim Joyce of Skydive Fiji. She writes about her travel experiences in a popular blog and has entered a contest to win an around the world adventure.

into a life of travel that people the world over now read about each month.

Lesley Carter, formerly Stubbert-Samways, said her taste for travel that has taken her to 35 countries and counting can be traced back to her mother’s private trades school that offered travel and tourism classes.

“A lot of times people from Cuba would come to Nova Scotia and take courses at the school,” said Carter, who now lives in Charlotte, N.C., with her husband and daughter.
“I was just a kid when that happened, but I absolutely loved the idea of going to Cuba so I kind of got that in my mind and was stuck on that.”

Once she finally made it to the Cuba, the 1999 Memorial High School graduate’s curiosity about other exotic cultures continued to grow through to her university years when she started “extreme” traveling after her second year at Dalhousie.

“In the summer I decided to do a trip around Europe and so we took 12 weeks and just backpacked around Europe and got to see new things. I went to eight countries during that time so I guess that is when I seriously started to travel.”

Adventures since that trip have included skydiving, piloting various aircraft, operating a jetpack and on and on.

When she met her husband while teaching in New Brunswick she found he shared her love for travel, which led to even more adventures such as her wedding in Jamaica all the way through to a recent trip to Fiji.

She began to blog about her adventures when her husband’s career took them to California about 18 months ago and she wasn’t legally allowed to work in the United States.

“It just seems like it went from a couple thousand views a month to a couple of million views a month. It happened almost overnight. I don’t even know how it just exploded like that, but with social media, that can happen.”

Found through wordpress.com, her blog now gets about 1.9 million views per month in 202 countries and has led to gigs through tourism companies and magazines that in turn have helped fund her love for travel.

“It is not like I don’t make money per se, but I’ve been able to do all of these things at little or no cost and we’ve been having the life that we have always dreamed of, and it doesn’t cost us very much to do it. It is kind of the perfect set up for us right now.”

She recently entered the Biggest Baddest Bucket List contest for a chance to win an all expenses paid trip around the world and $50,000.

Based on her travel experiences and the millions of people who read about them, she believes she has a chance to win the bloggers-only contest.

“When it comes down to voting I know I won’t have a problem, because I have quite a large following on my blog and hopefully I’ll get the support of people in my home and Cape Breton and the people around Charlotte.”

The contest is still open to entries, but there are only 32 bloggers currently in the hunt from around the world and just one other Canadian-based entry.

View Carter’s contest submission and vote online at www.mydestination.com/users/lesley/bbb#tab.

Her blog can be found at lesleycarter.wordpress.com.

gmcneil@cbpost.com

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