We had a year ender post ready for you guys but for some reason, we couldn’t properly access our blog site for the past three days :( I was even so scared that it got hacked or someone tried to! Thankfully, it was just a cookie related problem on our end and finally fixed it! :) We’ve wanted to share our Northern Lights experience for a while now but we wanted to squeeze the most out from our Paris photos so we wanted to finish those first… Finally, here it is!!! :) We want to start our 2017 here on the blog on a positive note with you so hopefully this story of ours will make you hopeful about the year ahead :)
To see the Northern Lights take a lot of patience and time. It literally took us 3 flights (Manila – London – Reykjavik), a 1200 mile drive, a 5 day search with only about 4-5 hours of sleep on each one and 4 layers of clothing to brave the close to 0 degree weather just to see the best show nature will ever put up. Vern and I have dreamed of seeing it in person for so long but we knew that 2016 will not be the year we’ll do. We wrote this last December 2015 just to show you how much we knew it would be impossible!
It wasn’t going to be possible for her and I to go because we don’t have the proper driving skills to go around Iceland on our own let alone trust a tour guide to go just with us, two young travellers who are very prone to danger. We checked our savings at the start of the year and while we reached our financial goal for 2015, we knew that it had to stay in our savings account for our future. Plus when you look at the world map, it’s that little country with a heart right there and it’s just so far from Philippines! I mean it’s literally near the tip of the world!
Then 2016 started and more and more travel opportunities started to come in. We became more inspired after each trip and just wanted to see more. So we worked double time and tried to juggle school and work the best that I can. Even with our energy drained from almost taking a total of 92 flights, delays, getting stuck in airports because of cancellations, we went home to get blog posts done, social media posts out, meet deadlines for both school and companies, do meetings and get our creative juices flowing because we knew that it was the only way to make all our travel dreams come true.
As October was about to come to a close, we had a meeting with our manager/mentor/friend, Franco and the topic of Iceland came up. We finally found someone who was willing to spend time and money to go there! We all then decided that we NEEDED to go together ASAP because this was going to be the last winter we could see the Northern Lights best. After that meeting, we both checked our earnings for the year and saw that it was actually possible to go!!! We decided on December, booked everything and then it happened :)
Making our Northern Lights dream come true proved to us that with hard work, you can do anything you want you to. Make a list of goals, keep your focus, pray constantly for guidance and have a a lot of patience because it will take years, tears, a lot of errors, embarrassing moments, and failures to get there. Just keep this in mind while you’re in the process: Once you’ve crossed that number 1 goal, in our case, when we got that call at 4:30 am to go outside our hotel because she was finally showing off and we saw green lights dancing in the black sky, it will be all worth it.
Happy New Year!
