contests!

don't be fooled by the title of this post, i am not doing a contest for you guys just yet. but i've come to realize lately that my blog which i sort of started off as and hoped to be a beauty blog has turned into more of a travel blog, which i personally think fits me better since i travel lots and i love to blog about it. so i thought what i am about to talk to you all about is quite fitting for a travel blog! one of my friends just entered this contest run by Free and Easy Traveler called "100 day giveaway" on facebook and i thought it looked pretty rad. they're giving away 100 days of travel to a lucky winner and you can pick from a number of places like Indonesia, Peru, Thailand and Greece! *hearts in my eyes* so here's the thing, when you enter you get this url and if people click on it to enter as well, it gives you more chances to win, pretty sick, right? so i thought i'd post it on here for all of my lovely cc readers to check out and enter as well ;) and then get your own url's and post those on your facebook, twitter, and possibly blogs if you chose! it's free, why not enter?

here's my url
https://fnez.com/dream-trip/9ol2yfvd1qb37ch8

if you enter through my url thank you so much and good luck!

stay cheeky!

past travels part 3!

i'm back everyone!

although i have called this post "past travel part 3," the trips that i would be talking about in this post, i have already talked about with you guys (exuma and las vegas) as well as Spain but i thought i'd spare you from the boredom. so i thought that i would use this post to tell you guys why i'm boring you all with these stories of the trips i've taken in the past.

my intention with these posts was not to brag or tell you about all the things you are missing out on, but instead i was hoping to encourage you to travel. you will never find anything more exillerating and satisfying than trying new things in new places, seeing new faces and living a different way of life - even for just a little bit!

the world you live in is so much more amazing than you can even imagine, why not explore it? i just got home from arizona last night, after staying in las vegas for a week prior to that and during the drive home from the airport i looked around at the city i have been living in for my whole life and i realized just how, well, boring it is! of course there is no place like home, but i've come to realize that there are so many interesting places surrounding me that need to be explored!

my family and i stayed in sedona, arizona for the past week and i can honestly say that i have never visited such a beautiful place before in my life. everywhere you look there are these amazing burnt red mountains encircling you. whilst in arizona, we visited a place near our rental home called the devil's bridge. i thought this was just an interesting name for a trail, but i later found out why it was named so. this "hike" was  much longer than we had anticipated and you could say we were a tad ill-prepared. with no water, no sunscreen and blistering heat, i'm pretty sure we all thought we were going to pass out and fry up under the sun. but after about 2 hours of walking (yes 2 hours!) we reached the end of the hike and made it to the devil's bridge, which a number of fellow hikers who passed us by had told us we "had to see!" i then realized why this trail was named devil's bridge.

when we got there i was totally blown away, all that walking and thinking that i was about to die was completely off my mind and worth it after seeing the view. i turned around to my mom and said 'isn't it amazing that we could've gone on living our lives at home, never have come on this trip and had no idea that this place was even here?" it was breath-taking.

all in all, you'll never know what's out there if you don't go out and look for it! travelling is truly eye opening.

hope everyone had a wonderful last two weeks and is ready for the month of september!

stay cheeky :)

past travels part 2!

 so let's pick up where i left off.

when i was in grade 10 (around 15 years old) i had the opportunity to go to europe with a few friends of mine. it was organized through our school but it wasn't like a normal school trip. the teachers that came along didn't really chaperone us, they just came along to be there in case any of us needed an adult. we had lots of freedom to go and do what we wanted which was great. this was the first time i was going on a trip without my parents and it was to a crazy and far away place, excited doesn't even begin to explain what i was feeling before i left. i was so young that i was almost too daft to be scared about it. i mean i was going to friggen FRANCE AND SPAIN! the flight to Paris was  9 hours and felt like an eternity. i tried to sleep but failed miserably. it was sort of a disaster when we got there because of the time difference and everything our tour guide decided it would be best it we just stayed up for the whole day and went on our first few excersions. if i remember correctly i was up a total of 40 something hours, you could say we were dead. i actually started to go a little bit insane during that day, i felt as though i had been drugged and still to this day believe that haha. but i was told it was exhaustion which i guess makes a bit more sense. i don't know why it affects me more than most people, but it does. we visited so many places in Paris, like Versailles, Museum de Rodan, Notre Dame,  the Arc de Triumph and of course the Eiffel Tower. we went to a few other places in France, like orange (pronounced or-rawn-sh) and nice (pronounced like niece).

my friends and i went a little wild and tried to do and see everything we could in between going to the museums and such, that we actually got lost in France at one point! we had an hour break to do whatever we wanted and we separated from our group (the group of students from our school, our chaperones, and tour guide). we had absolutely no. freaking. idea. where we were, and to top it off none of us to speak french. just the odd word here and there is all that we could speak. luckily my one friend had a map and knew where our group was headed to after our break was finished. but, unfortunately we were in a very quiet part of what ever town we were in, there were no people to try and ask directions to! we found a woman after about half an hour of wandering around and tried saying how do we get here? to her in french and then attempted to piece together the few french words we knew that were coming flying out of her mouth a million miles a minute. we thought we were doomed. my one friend knew that she told us to take a right at the end of the street we were on and to turn left after passing a certain shop. so we tried doing just that. but our group was no where to be found. at this point we had a serious conversation as to what we were going to do, seeing as we were lost at large. i was starting to get that nervous tummy ache because it was getting kind of scary, it had been two or more hours and we had no idea where we were or how to find our way back to our group seeing as they were constantly moving from place to place and potentially moving farther and farther away from where we were. this is when the luckiest moment of my life happened, our group appeared out of seemingly no where across the street from us. so, of course, we ran over as happy as can be screaming OH MY GOD WHERE WERE YOU GUYS!? OH MY GOD! this is also the moment we realized they had no clue we were even missing! all three chaperones started to laugh saying that they had done numerous head count and some how managed to miss count FOUR MISSING HEADS everytime. how does that even happen? real reassuring eh? anyways once we were with our group again we stayed pretty close for the rest of the day, until the next day when we went crazy and wandered again, we didn't get lost on the trip ever again though! haha. but a few days later we went for a night walk up this chapel in Paris, it was gorgeous and especially beautiful at night! after the walk we went in to this little town and walked around there and got some mcflurries (we were so surprised they had mcdonald's in france but i guess there's no reason there wouldn't be since they're everywhere) and then we walked through the town and watched people on the merry-go-rounds and all the passers by. this is when i almost got kidnapped. i was approached by a sort of scary man who asked me directions to somewhere, which is when i told him i didn't speak french and couldn't help him and began walking away. as i started to walk away he grabbed the strap of my backpack and pulled me back to him, i screamed and my friend ran over to my rescue, karate chopped his arm, and then we both ran. it scared the beegeebies out of me! but other than getting lost and almost getting kidnapped, France was an absolute blast. i'm going back there for sure.

stay tuned for part 3 where i talk about Espana!

stay cheeky!

Summer Travels

Hello CC readers!

Every summer my family and I go on a summer trip. Sometimes we just go to one place, but we often go to two just because we can't pick just one place! Last summer I was lucky enough to go to Las Vegas and then Exuma in the Bahamas. Both were awesome! Las Vegas is so weird to me, it is literally a city in the middle of the desert. Flying over the barren land to this lively and exciting place is unreal to say the least. It was easily one of the hottest place I had ever been, it wasn't humid it was dry heat, like that heat that rushes out of a hot oven except it was constant. I didn't mind it at all though, I like it hot!

our house in las vegas

My mom's boyfriend is one of those people who likes to experience everything. If there is something to do, we're doing it. He always does research to find out all the best restaurants, best scenes and places that the locals would go to but not necessarily the tourists. I love that he's like that because I feel like I always get the most out of every trip we ever go on. I never leave a place wishing I had done something. We never miss a thing. 

     

at a little restaurant (I can't for the life of me remember the name of this place!)                                                

It was an amazing place. We were only there for four days but, man, those days were packed with things to see and do. I was lucky enough to visit sin city once, but I'm even more lucky because I am going back there again this summer, and I can't wait! 

driving around red canyon park

Exuma was SO beautiful. In all of my travels I have never seen a place with such perfect, clean, clear, blue water. It was literally incredible how perfect it was. The people there were so nice and happy. Everywhere we went there were people greeting us with a friendly hello and a smile. 

the buildings were so colourful I loved it!

We stayed in Exuma for two weeks. I know it doesn't sound like too long, but I honestly felt like a local  by the time we left. I was an island girl as far as I was concerned, beach hair, freckles everywhere, and bathing suit attire all day. It was ridiculously hot here as well, but much more humid. Luckily the ocean was just a short walk from our house, and we had a nice pool, so we could cool down when the heat got too much.

our house in exuma

We went to a different beach everyday just because we could. All of them were awesome, but, tropic of cancer beach was definitely the best. It had the whitest, softest sand and the swimming/snorkelling was great. There were no rocks, or grossness (is that even a word?) underneath us while we were swimming, just perfect sand. I saw a baby octopus (I made it ink, whoops), a barracuda (scariest s*** ever), and loads of pretty fish.

my mom swimming at tropic of cancer beach

We went to a place called Stocking island which is just a small little island but it had these HUGE stingrays that came and swam around everyone who was swimming at the island. It was an amazing experience but they all still had their barb thingers at the ends of there tails which scared me a bit. You could feed them as well but my mom's boyfriend got bit and I was like "I'll pass." 

as you can see, they were quite large stingrays

They also had this really cool little restaurant/snack shack called Chat n Chill. It was cool, the roof had hundreds of t-shirts all over it and the atmosphere was literally chill. While you are there, they give you permanent markers and they said you can leave your name to let people know you were here. We are a group of 9...and we went a little buckwild. Needless to say the place was covered with our names and Canadian flags after we left haha. 

at the chat n chill

Another day we went to a restaurant called Santana's. Not only was the food ah-mah-zing, but we found out that while filming one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Johnny Depp ate there. Johnny Depp... ate there...*faints.* It also had one of the chillest dogs I've ever met, he was such a cutie. 

one of the many pictures of Johnny Depp just casually having a beer with the owner of Santana's -- she said he was one of the nicest people ever which makes me very happy

the chillest dog ever

We also went to a restaurant called Charlie's which had a great vibe as well, great music and people. But, later on in our trip my mom's boyfriend had researched this boat tour, cruise thing which looked like a lot of fun. It was kind of expensive (I think it was around $300 CA per person but I could be wrong) but it was THE MOST FUN I'VE EVER HAD. It is a full day excursion but you do so much. We got to see huge, live starfish, swam with nerf sharks (they're like babies and harmless), swam with exuma's famous swimming pigs (actually hilarious), lunch at one of the nicer yacht club's restaurants, you get to swim in an under water cave that's not really under water... it's hard to explain but it was unreal, we got to stop at Nicholas Cage's island which is COVERED in iguanas for some reason and got to feed them, and finally we visited the sand bar where Pirates of the Caribbean was filmed.

mom, a starfish and I

horrible picture but I swam with the pigs, you didn't have to but I couldn't pass up the opportunity 

they were giant

mr. iguana

We had so much fun in Exuma and I miss it, I would go back in a heartbeat. This summer my family and I were supposed to be going to Hawaii which I was stoked about but it turns out, not too many flights leave for Hawaii and our group is so large that it would be hard to get 7 seats on the same plane, so the possibilities right now are up in the air! I'm thinking Greece but we'll see ;) Anyways, I'll keep you guys updated with my travels. I'll make some posts while I'm on the trips and afterwards as well. I hope that you guys keep checking in to see what's up! Let me know if you have any suggestions of places we should visit or if you're going on any trips yourself! I'd love to hear what you guys are up too!

Til next time! 

Stay Cheeky :)