Hi and welcome to our blog! We are Florence and Andy, the faces behind The Migratory Birds!
Travel is a passion of ours and, like most other travel-bloggers, we naturally love to explore new places, get to know different cultures and try new and unique experiences.
On this blog we will share our experiences, but also focus a lot on travel-planning as well as destination guides. With our posts, we aim to give you inspiration for your own travels and provide the tools you need to plan your own trips.
Why ‘The Migratory Birds’?
We searched quite some time for an appropriate name for us and let me tell you something, it was everything but easy to find one that wasn’t being used already.
Actually, we kind of stumbled upon this name by chance. At the time we had just decided we wanted to write a blog about our travels and that happened to be in spring around the time where migratory birds passed our home to get to their summer quarters. And that´s where the idea came from: migratory birds are birds that by regular seasonal movement change their whereabouts.
We liked the idea of the regular movement (even though migratory birds actually only move between their breeding and wintering grounds) and a life on the road. And that’s how we ended up as ‘The Migratory Birds’ (another factor was the fact that this name wasn’t being used by anyone on social media yet).
Who are we?
Even though we are both born and raised in Luxembourg, we actually met in Bonn in Germany. We both lived there for a few years while we were studying. In December of 2016 we became a couple and from the very beginning we started traveling together.
Our very first trip was a city trip to London only two months into our relationship! We both loved traveling even before we met each other and have done so with our families for years. However, for the most part those were destinations within Europe, which is why we are quite keen on exploring other continents as well.
We both love food, hiking and being in nature. When visiting a new place, we are always on the hunt for the best viewpoints. In general we love learning new things and enjoy discussing new ideas or things we stumbled upon (which is why you will probably encounter random facts here and there in our posts).
Another passion of ours is photography: Even though we are still amateurs we like to play around with what we know and get better along the way. Our current equipment consists of our Sony alpha 6400 with its original 16-50mm lens, a GoPro Hero 9, a DJI Mini 2 (our newest addition) and our phones.
Our ultimate goal is to slowly make our way around the globe and tick off all (or most of) the things from our bucket list! However, we will do so in no rush and we try to be mindful of every new experience and enjoy them to the fullest!
Currently we are …
…in Asia! During the last years, we both worked and saved up as much as we could. Before too many responsibilities and life in general can get in the way, we decided it was time to do something we always wanted to: a long-term trip. So, in May 2023, we embarked on this new journey! We don’t know exactly where this trip will take us yet, but we will probably spend the rest of 2023 in Asia!
What can you expect from this blog?
First and foremost, we want to use this platform to document our travels. The many posts to come should tell you about our experiences, talk about how we organize our trips, what the costs are and give casual advice as we do learn a thing or two on the road.
Our travel style is somewhere between hotel and hostel, meaning: we are budget travelers, but we also wouldn’t stay in every dosshouse and try to get the most worth out of our money. However, we sometimes do like to treat ourselves as we think that budget travel shouldn’t always be about having to say no to everything that costs. For us, travel is about experiences and sometimes these experiences have a price that we are willing to pay if it is something we always wanted to do!
The ‘Countries Been’ List
In our 6+ years together, we have traveled to over 15 countries together! Marked as visited are only the countries we have both seen together. Countries that only one of us has visited or that we did not visit together are not on this list. We currently do not have guides on all of these countries as we visited a lot of them before this blog existed.
Asia (Countries Been: 4)
North America (Countries Been: 1)
Europe (Countries Been: 13)
Counties Been Total: 18
But, enough about us now and on to the posts! Have fun exploring!