Sky’s the limit
Sydney Mines native lives life to the fullest
She’s stepped foot on every continent, visited more than 100 countries and has no problem swimming with sharks, riding camels, skydiving or even piloting her own fighter jet.
“When you grow up in a small town people just assume that you’re going to go back to that small town and then it’s really limited in to what jobs you’re going to have … or in Cape Breton, people assume you’re either going to be there or in Alberta,” said 37-year-old travel blogger Lesley Carter.
“Sometimes that’s all you see. That’s your world but it doesn’t have to be your world.”
After graduating with two university degrees and teaching English and journalism at schools in Manitoba, Cape Breton and New Brunswick, Carter made the whirlwind decision to relocate to California in 2011.
Her former husband found a well-paying software job before the big move, but Carter knew she would be unable to teach in the United States.
“I just started a blog as something to do on the side because I wasn’t working and I could write about my new experiences in California, so my family could follow along and it wasn’t just telephone conversations,” the Sydney Mines native said by phone from her home in Montreal, Que.
“I started posting a lot of things I had done in the past, past trips and things like that, because I’d already visited close to 40 countries at that time … and I did a lot of extreme things like skydiving, bungee jumping and base jumping.”
Carter’s urge to travel began at an earlier age. Her parents were operators of a private school known as the National School of Learning that was once located on George Street in Sydney.
The school taught English as a second language to pupils from predominately Spanishspeaking countries. It was at age eight that Carter’s parents allowed her to board her first solo flight to visit family friends in Cuba.
She continued to find any opportunity to travel, adding stamps to her passport during her university studies, including summer teaching gigs in places such as Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Ireland and France.
And soon after launching Bucket List Publications, major organizations and companies came knocking, including Visit California, Tourism Fiji and GoPro.
“Somebody had seen that I had gone for helicopter lessons before and they said ‘Oh my goodness that would be great promotion for us for our lessons that we offer here in Costa Mesa,’ so they offered me helicopter lessons,” she said.
“I wasn’t doing it for money in the beginning. If somebody would offer me an experience for free, I would write about it on the site and they would share it on their social media as well.”
She later reached out to one of the biggest hotels in Las Vegas, the Venetian, asking for a free weekend stay. In exchange, she would write an article on the condition that her blog posts be shared to help her gain more followers.
“It got to the point where tourism boards started to offer me media trips in exchange for coverage,” said Carter.
“Once they started promoting my site, it just grew and grew and grew. It was a snowball effect … so I had (tourism) boards from all over the world sharing my posts and my social shares. It grew from a few thousand views a month to a few million.”
Carter’s blogging career reached a pinnacle in 2014 when she met Saved by the Bell actor and television host, Mario Lopez. The star had recognized her at a Hollywood event and noted that he had been following along on her adventures.
“That was one of the biggest turning points in my whole life
because I realized then that this is the ideal, dream job,” she said. “But you don’t have to live in Hollywood, and you don’t have to be a superstar, and you don’t have to grow up rich, and you don’t even have to have the university degree that everyone thought that you needed to have.”
To make a living as a fulltime travel blogger, Carter accepts paid sponsorship, paid posts, advertising placement, social media campaigns and public speaking events. She describes Instagram as her most profitable platform.
Early blog articles centered on Carter’s extreme adventures. Now her trips usually include daughter, Athena, who will turn six in April. Since flying internationally to Cape Breton at just two days old, Athena has visited at
least 50 countries and enjoyed activities such rock climbing, para-sailing, snorkeling and skiing.
“It’s been a big shift for me but it’s been a big shift in my audience as well. It is now mostly young families that are looking for places that they can travel with their kids where they don’t have to restrict their lifestyle,” she said.
“There are absolutely insane times but I am very appreciative of the life I have. It is 100 per cent a dream.”
Carter now hopes to send a message to small town students, telling them to widen their mindsets about what they can accomplish. She hopes that by sharing her story, youngsters will set no limits for their future.
“It’s become my motto that the more unrealistic you are
with your dreams and goals the more you can achieve because you don’t have to restrict what you want from life,” she said.
“All you need is a computer, all you need is a phone, all you need is an idea and you can do anything now.”
Among the challenges of her career, Carter said she must sometimes turn down travel opportunities to create balance between life at home and life on the road.
Since its inception six years ago, Carter’s blog has grown to an audience of more than 500,000 unique views per month, over 200,000 subscribers and an additional 100,000 followers on other social media outlets, including over 60,000 followers on Instagram
Some of her most extreme adventures include sailing a tall ship to Antarctica and trekking with chimpanzees and gorillas in Uganda.
Her upcoming travel itinerary includes trips to Jamaica, Mexico and Germany.