Stacey Shevlin
- Oct 9, 2017
- 7 min read

Liebster Award Winner!

Updated: Aug 20, 2021

~About Me~

Hi, as you may know from following the blog I am Stacey Shevlin.

I packed all of mine and my husbands things up and we left Los Angeles in April of 2016, and we’ve been traveling ever since! We fell in love with a tiny town called Stari Grad on the island of Hvar in Croatia and bought an old stone house. We are deep in renovation at the moment, which will take about 2 years if we hustle. If you’d like to follow that journey you can at www.croatianrenovation.com.

For travel tips and tales stick here at Word From Abroad.

I build this blog for our travels last year, we were in a different country every month, for a month. I wanted to document our travels and provide content that would help you if you decided to visit one of the places we had the great fortune to visit. Since we bought the house the blog has slowed down a bit in favor of construction, but I am well on the way to picking things back up.

Last month I was nominated for a Liebster Award for new blogs – (which I still consider mine). Thank you so much to Amber’s Compass for nominating me.

~About Amber~

Amber Alexander is the woman behind Amber’s Compass. Traveling is her passion and she has created a blog to showcase book reviews and travel recommendations. She specifically seeks out adventures and books that go together.

Thank you so much to Amber from Amber’s Compass for nominating me!

Please visit her on social media and at her blog!

Facebook Link https://www.facebook.com/amberscompass/

Insta https://www.instagram.com/amberscompass/

Twitter https://twitter.com/amberscompass/

~About The Liebster Award~

The Liebster Award is given to bloggers by other bloggers to help introduce newcomers to a wider audience. “Liebster” means kindest in German, which is what this award is all about! The rules of the award include:

On your blog, thank the blogger who nominated you for this award.
Link back to the blogger that awarded you.
Upload the Liebster Award to your blog. This can be done by writing a post about the award and uploading the award image in your sidebar.
Answer the questions you have been asked by your nominator in a blog post so we can get to know you better.
Nominate 5 blogs with less than 200 followers that you believe deserve to receive this award.
Notify the owners of those 5 blogs that you’ve nominated them so they can accept their award. Bloggers can be nominated more than once, giving their readers more chances to learn more about them.

Nominees, pick which icon you want to display from Here.

https://theglobalaussie.com/blog/liebster-award-2017/

~Questions for me from Amber’s Compass~

1. What is your favorite travel themed book? I must admit I don’t often read travel themed books. I suppose I would stretch the genre and include Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins. In my research I found that people stretch the travel genre far and wide and I’ll do that here as well. While I wouldn’t file this book n the travel section of the book store, I think it can be considered travel because the reader travels to Seattle, Paris, New Orleans and back in time through Eurasia with the characters. It’s a wonderful tale of the search for youth and immortality, I highly recommend it.

2. What is your favorite travel themed movie? I must admit I was tempted to site a film that I didn’t really think fit into the travel genre. So rather than do that, I started visiting some blogs to see what lists others had assembled in regard to this topic. Turns out I don’t watch many travel films! So I have decided that I will begin to go down that path. I am going to make a list based on the suggestions I read on the blogs I found and I am going to watch a film a month.

3. Where are you going next? Tells us about it. I’m Headed back to Croatia. Stari Grad on Hvar Island to be exact. During our year of travel we fell in love with this place, and had the good fortune of finding a house. We are deep in renovation. We think it will take about a year and a half to complete.

4. What was your most memorable activity during your travels? My most memorable activity while traveling actually occurred a long time ago, when I spent my semester abroad in college. I spent the semester outside of Amsterdam in Zandvoort. During the semester my friends and I spend about 1/2 of the time traveling. While in Budapest one friend found an opportunity to go caving. I had no idea what I was getting myself into! I thought maybe we’d go walk through some caves like I’d done in New Mexico in the US. Oh no. We arrived and they had us put on full coverall suits and hardhats with lights. I know we were in for something a bit more rugged than I had imagined.

The 4 of us willingly followed our guide into the side of a mountain to find a single rusty ladder leading down into a hole with no bottom in sight. We were signed up and we were gonna do this thing. We traveled down and down till there was no light whatsoever. We followed our guide who spoke very few words of english but we just had to put our faith in him that he knew what he was doing, and where we were going. 4 hours later – after shimmying through rock holes, jumping over ravines and challenging ourselves past the point I thought we could go… we emerged. It was an amazing lesson on the strength and ability that we all have that we don’t know is there within us. I would never ever do it again 🙂

5. Why did you start your blog? I started my blog because I wanted to document our year abroad. At first it was just for us as a keepsake, and for friends and family to follow along with our journey. Then I started to expand it and participate in social media to try to reach a larger audience.

6. What do you hope to accomplish with your blog, what are your goals? I would love to monetize the blog at some point. I know there are thousands of blogs out there delivering travel content and that the market is tight but you gotta try right? I will keep creating content that I hope is helpful to my fellow travelers and continue to learn social media to get the word our there.

7. How did traveling change your life?

How has traveling changed my life. My husband and I left Los Angeles in April of 2016 to travel through Europe for a year. We chose a different country/city for each month and stayed there for a month. I needed a change of pace, I wanted to leave Los Angeles and put my career on hold to see what else was out there. At first I had no intention of staying out on the road long term. It was going to be the year then back to LA. In September we came upon the island of Hvar in Croatia and the town of Stari Grad, which I have mentioned. It changed our lives forever because we fell in Love and with the help of friends we met there, we bout our house. Now we’ve changed course for our lives completely. We are spending 3 months in Stari Grad to work on the house, then returning to LA for 3 months. When the house is finished, I think we’ll go back to traveling part of the year as well. Setting out on that 1 year journey has turned into a new life and I am so grateful.

8. If you could visit any fictional world, which would it be and why When I thought about this question the first thing that sprang to mind was Westeros – I love Game of Thrones… but then I though wow that world is pretty intense and I don’t think I am prepared for it. I have no practical survival skills and I can’t fight with swords, maybe best not to visit. Then I started thinking about other fictional worlds I have enjoyed and the planet Thra came to mind. This is the setting for the movie The Dark Crystal. I loved this film as a child, and while the world is in trouble at the beginning of the film, truth and love find their way and at the end I think it would be a pretty special place to visit.

9. What is your favorite souvenir? I don’t collect tangible souvenirs. We travel full time now with one suit case each, so there’s no room to collect anything that isn’t essential. I collect photos of the memories we share with those we meet and the places we see, so I guess you could say my blog is my favorite souvenir.

10. And most importantly, where in the world would you go in the zombie apocalypse? Wow hard question. But probably the island we bought the house on. I figure zombies can’t swim so it will be pretty safe. There is great agricultural land to grow food, and ample fish in the clear blue ocean surrounding the island… so we’d be pretty set there.