The last month or so has been a whirlwind of excitement, celebration and adventures for us! We’ve had some pretty major changes here on the blog and as most of you will know we got married and honeymooned in Sri Lanka and The Maldives! We thought it was about time that we shared an update of where The Aussie Flashpacker is at and a peek into all the changes and adventures in our life of late!
A BLOG UPDATE
I’ve been wanting to migrate our blog across to WordPress for a long time now. When I first started The Aussie Flashpacker its only purpose was to update my parents in Australia on my adventures as an expat living in the UK and I never could have guessed how much it would grow and how many followers we would gain across the world. I found myself getting so frustrated with Blogger and hitting brick walls and dead ends and I honestly think we’d taken our site as far as we possibly could with Blogger. The main reasons I wanted to migrate to WordPress were for the design capabilities, the options for site responsiveness and for the inbuilt SEO options and plugins.
I felt like I’d trawled the entire internet (maybe a slight exaggeration) but I just couldn’t bite the bullet based on the varying reviews I’d come across and was worried I’d lose all the hard work we’d done over the last few years. Last week I found myself incredibly frustrated with our site when I was attempting to make some design changes and found myself again researching companies who offer Blogger to WordPress migrations. I’ve stumbled across pipdig a number of times over the years and have always heard great things from other bloggers and website owners and their reviews were outstanding.
After a couple of emails back and forth with Phil I finally bit the bullet and paid for him to complete the migration. I’m still making a few design changes and plan to go back and further SEO optimise all our posts, plus re-categorise them but I am over the moon with how The Aussie Flashpacker looks now. I also love how WordPress reads from the back end of the site and how responsive our template is across all devices.
Once I’ve finished with all my design changes and re-categorisation I plan to write a more in depth post about the whole migration process, what we’ve learnt and what is to come with The Aussie Flashpacker.
WE GOT MARRIED!
On the 28th October, Dan and I got married in our beautiful hometown of Port Macquarie, surrounded by our closest friends and family and I know it sounds cliche but it was honestly the best day of our lives! I plan to dedicate a blog post to our wedding in the next few weeks but until now I thought I would share a few photos from our perfect day by the lovely and very talented Nic Donohoe Photography.
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WE HONEYMOONED IN SRI LANKA…
A few days after our wedding we flew to Sri Lanka, a country we’ve both wanted to visit for a long time! We had an epic week exploring all that Colombo, Ella, Udawalawe National Park, Midigama and Galle had to offer. The highlight of our week in Sri Lanka was without a doubt our Safari in Udawalawe National Park and stay tuned because we are going to share a ridiculous amount of photos and stories of Sri Lanka’s beauty on the blog soon! [spacer height=”10px”]
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… AND THE MALDIVES!
Sri Lanka and the Maldives are so close to each other that it made sense for us to visit both of them on our honeymoon! The Maldives are literally the ultimate honeymoon destination and a country that I’ve been wanting to visit FOREVER! I literally have spent hours drooling over photos of overwater bungalows and those incredible blue waters. The seven nights we spent at LUX* South Ari Atoll were worth every cent of the $9,000+ we spent to stay there! The Maldives are even more beautiful in person (if that is even possible) and I literally cried on the seaplane as we flew back to Male to fly home at the end of our honeymoon. Since we arrived home I’ve been constantly scrolling through all our photos from the trip (holding back sobs that we aren’t there anymore) and planning our return to heaven on earth! I’m apologising in advance for all the Maldives posts which are about to flood the internet…[spacer height=”10px”]
That’s all for now and is just a taster of all the stories and photos to come from the last month, which honestly has been the most incredible month of our lives!
Let us know if you’ve been following our honeymoon & wedding images on Instagram!
