About

Hi! I’m Clara. Welcome to my blog!

I like to think I had a unique childhood. I grew up in a family of five kids, and two of my brothers were adopted from Guatemala. My parents love to travel, so my life growing up involved a trip to Guatemala about every other year or so with a few trips to Europe and many trips around the US sprinkled in between. When it was time for me to enter kindergarten, my parents decided to send me to a French immersion elementary school. You might think a Spanish immersion would have been more logical, considering my family’s connection to Guatemala, a Spanish-speaking country, but my mom, a French teacher and lover of everything French, had other ideas. So by the time I turned thirteen, I was fluent in French and could even speak some Spanish, had visited Guatemala a total of seven times, and had traveled outside of the country a whopping total of eleven times, to five different countries.

In the school year of 2012-2013, we had an exchange student from Spain stay with us for the second semester of the year. Two summers later, in 2014, I stayed with her family for about a month (you can read about it here). It was my first time ever traveling by myself. It was where I truly realized my love for travel. Of course, I’d grown up traveling and learning about other cultures, so I think I had always loved it, but this trip gave me whole new view on traveling, because I was doing it independently. I had kept a blog when I was younger where I posted pictures and wrote about the things we did while we traveled. My writing went a little something like this: “and then we did this… and then we saw this place… and here’s a cool picture something cool we saw”. What else could be expected from a nine year old? In Spain that summer, with a renewed passion for travel, I decided to pick up blogging again. But I became horribly bored with it, and, not knowing what to write about, I gave up after about a week. About six months later, I decided to try my hand and blogging yet again. That year in school I had discovered that I had a knack for writing, so I thought I’d put it to use. I’m not sure what went differently that time, but it stuck, and thus Roaming Elsewhere was created!

Through this blog, I hope to convey my love of traveling and learning about the world, develop my writing and photography skills, and inspire others to seek adventure and travel. Expect to find posts about my travels as well as posts about my adventures here in Minnesota. I hope you’ll have a look around my blog and maybe even stick around for more travel adventures to come!