MAKING LIFE AN ADVENTURE
ASHLYN GEORGE HAS MADE A CAREER OF TRAVELLING AROUND THE WORLD
When she stepped onto a beach in Antarctica a less than a year before her 30th birthday, her heart felt so full she was sure it would burst, Ashlyn George says.
“It was a little bit surreal, a little bit emotional, too. Even now it gives me goosebumps; the weather was extraordinary, there were whales, we did a hike up the side of a mountain and there were penguins going up little penguin highways ... I wanted to slow things down a little bit. I had a little celebration inside. It’s not like I jumped around or anything, but stepping off the boat and onto the mainland felt pretty satisfying.”
When George landed in Antarctica in January 2017, it marked the completion of a years-long dream: To visit all seven continents by the age of 30.
More than a year after hitting that milestone, the Foam Lake native is still adventuring as much as she can and takes every opportunity explore new countries, try new outdoor activities and poke around her home province of Saskatchewan.
“The bucket list never ends. It gets longer and longer,” George says.
“When I first started travelling, a lot of people asked me when I was going to settle down and start real life. And it kind of offended me a little bit because, for me, this is my real life.”
George, now 30, wishes she could remember what sparked her love of travel. It’s not something she’s dreamt about her whole life. She didn’t get on an airplane until she was 14 years old, when she travelled with her parents and brother to visit family in England.
When she started taking arts and science classes at the University of Saskatchewan, she remembers being flabbergasted that one of her friends wanted to go abroad for a semester of school.
“I was like, 'What? I love it here. Why would you ever want to go to school somewhere else?' " George recalls.
But then she went on a few trips with family and friends — to Mexico, back to England — and decided travelling was something she could get behind.
As she prepared to graduate from the University of Saskatchewan with degrees in education and English in 2010, she didn’t feel ready to enter the workforce.
Instead of looking for a job as a high school science teacher — which had, at one point, been her plan — she made a five-year travel plan that involved alternating between six months of seasonal summer work and six months of travel. She decided to take her first big trip to Australia and New Zealand because they were easy destinations; people speak English and they’re culturally similar to Canada.
She stayed in hostels to keep costs down and met many travellers more seasoned than she was. She vividly remembers a conversation with a man from Britain who was looking forward to a trip to the Angkor Wat Temple in Cambodia — a monument she had never heard of in a country that “seemed so exotic.”
“I remember thinking: There’s so much of this world that I have no idea about and I want to see it all,” George says.
By the time she got back from Australia, she was hooked on travel. She spent the summer working for the City of Saskatoon’s parks department and devoted her free time to planning her next trip. She went on to explore southeast Asia, South America, Central America and Africa over the next four years and made it to the Angkor Wat Temple in 2012.
She’s not a city person and tried to spend as much of her time as possible in nature, doing different activities. Her friends and family grew to accept her lifestyle and continued to support her, even as they understood she wouldn’t always be home for holidays or big occasions.
George created a website, The Lost Girl’s Guide to Finding the World, where she documented her adventures as a solo woman traveller and shared travel tips, including the aggressive budgeting strategies she employed so she could afford to keep adventuring.
She turned to the “universities of Google and YouTube” to learn about photography, videography and social media to keep building and developing her site. Rather than flood the Internet with glamorous photos of herself in beautiful locations, she put on her teaching hat and focused on showing people how they could travel and adventure themselves.
“Every day I want to be adding to myself as a person, and I want other people to be passionate about development of their own selves that way as well,” she says.
At the end of 2014, George’s five-year travel plan was coming to an end and she was getting worried about the future.
“I didn’t know what I was going to do next. I had no idea. I didn’t know what job I was going to have to go home and apply to and then sit in an office after having these amazing experiences and this incredible freedom,” George recalls.
But then: Serendipity. The Government of Saskatchewan was looking for a Saskatchewanderer, someone to spend the next year travelling the province and writing about it. George knew she would thrive in the position. She applied while travelling through Madagascar and was interviewed while in Swaziland.
The interview was an adventure in itself; George rented a conference room in a four-star hotel to ensure she’d have either Internet or phone. She bought a professional top so she’d look good in the interview (as for the bottoms, George figured they didn’t matter because the interviewers wouldn’t see them on a Skype call).
Johnathan Potts, executive director of Tourism Saskatchewan, remembers the unconventional interview.
“There was a lot stacked against her, but her personality and her drive and her enthusiasm and her understanding of what it takes to be a great social media personality came through in flying colours in the interview,” he said.
“We knew when we hired her that we had a gem on our hands.”
George accepted the Saskatchewanderer position while in South Africa and quickly made arrangements to return home to start the new job. She was excited, but also nervous. She knew her future career could depend on her performance over the next year.
“I knew it was my springboard to getting me to where I would like to be one day and so I needed to take every single opportunity to network, put myself out there, give it absolutely everything I had in that year, never say no to an experience” George said.
She devoted herself to exploring as much of her home province as she could throughout 2015. She fell in love with Prince Albert National Park, which has become one of her favourite places for winter activities, and was left in awe by the beauty of the Gem Lakes in Narrow Hills Provincial Park, roughly 150 kilometres north of Prince Albert.
Her most memorable experience as the Saskatchewanderer was flying in a military jet with the Canadian Forces Snowbirds. At one point, the pilot handed the controls over to her.
“It was pretty outrageous in an extraordinary way,” George says.
She also made an effort to explore provincial attractions that can’t be found on a map. One such stop was a little pottery stand between Dafoe and Wynyard where a woman leaves homemade pottery in a shed and lets customers purchase pieces on the honour system. George was delighted by the setup and wrote about her experience chatting with the trusting artist. After her post, traffic at the pottery stand increased, much to the delight of artist Marea Olafson.
“She’s getting into places that people might not necessarily think of. For her to stop at my little store on the side of the highway on Highway 16, it would have been just as easy for her to say, 'Oh, that isn’t one of the big attractions,' " Olafson said.
“I really like that she gets into the places and offbeat things so she brings to light maybe not what everybody knows, but opens their minds to what we should all know about.”
When her term as the Saskatchewanderer ended, George hopped on a plane to Iceland for a few weeks and then came home to launch her career as a freelance travel writer. She has written about her travel experiences for the CAA Saskatchewan magazine and has landed contracts with big companies that want to tap into her social media reach to get their messages out.
In 2016, a Mediterranean cruise company hired her to take one of its tours and shoot video of the experience. She’s done work with Travel Alberta and Tourism Medicine Hat. For the last five years, she’s taken photos of herself eating McDonald’s Big Mac hamburgers in every country she’s visited and recently signed a contract with McDonalds to do work with them.
In 2017, George was nominated for a YWCA Women of Distinction Award in the under 29 category and received the Saskatchewan Tourism Travel Media Award for her writing about the province. Her website was voted best Saskatchewan blog by SaskNOW.ca and she was named a CBC Saskatchewan Future 40 recipient.
George describes her life as a freelancer as one of ups and downs. Some weeks she’s inundated with work. Others, she checks her email inbox nervously, hoping something will come in.
“Online it looks really easy, but behind the scenes it’s a non-stop of ‘Where am I going to make money this week?’ ” she says.
After more than a decade of travelling, George still has a long list of places she wants to explore. Among them is Canada. She has visited more than 55 countries on all seven continents, but the furthest east she’s ever been in her home country is Brandon, Man.
George says her lack of travel outside the Prairies in Canada has been intentional. Travel within the country is expensive, and she figures that if she eventually has children, it will be easier to travel within Canada with them than off the continent.
“I don’t know if this is something I plan to do forever,” she says of her freelance existence. “I love it right now and it works great, but I’m also considering, if I choose to have a family in the future and have kids, how do I want to build my lifestyle around that?”
Perhaps she’ll start a media company. Or maybe she’ll consider going back to school. For now, George is grateful to have turned her passion into a job, and says she can’t wait for wherever her next adventure takes her.
When I first started travelling, a lot of people asked me when I was going to settle down and start real life. And it kind of offended me a little bit because, for me, this is my real life. — Ashlyn George