Itchy Feet Traveler Spotlight: Ashleigh Bugg

How a small-town girl from Texas became a world traveler

Hi friend!

It’s your fellow travel enthusiast, Daniel Catena, here.

Welcome back to Itchy Feet. Thank you for reading and your support! 🎉

This week’s edition is special. By special, I mean I’m super excited to share it with you.

I’m honored to present a BRAND NEW feature to the newsletter:

The Itchy Feet Traveler Spotlight

So, what the heck is it? 🤔

Great question!

The Traveler Spotlight is an exclusive interview with someone who I think is an amazing traveler. My goal is to share their knowledge with you, inspire you, and add fresh perspectives of the world.

The first edition of Traveler Spotlight is with my friend Ashleigh Bugg.

She grew up in a small town in Texas and always wanted to travel.

She’s been all over the world and is one of the most experienced travelers I know.

We taught English in Murcia, Spain together back in 2018. She and I were part of the North American Language and Culture Assistants Program (NACLAP).

I found her travel story enlightening and wanted to learn more. Ashleigh was kind enough to be my FIRST guest. 

Thank you Ashleigh for chatting with me. 🙏

I learned a lot in our conversation and hope you do too.

Ok Itchy Feeters, let’s get to it! ✈️

---

You’re a friend who’s travel background is really inspiring. Could you explain some of your background and your travel history?

Sure. I've been doing it since 17, and I'm 31 now, so it's been a while. I’ve always just wanted to travel, ever since I was a kid.

I was 10 years old and did a project about Ireland. I was l captivated by other countries.

So I was like – oh, I wanna make this happen. How can I make this happen?

I went on my first trip when I was 17 and haven't really stopped.

Ashleigh on one of her adventures.

So, my travel history is a little bit of a mix. I started with study abroad and then interning abroad. I began looking for working abroad opportunities, like with our program in Spain. 

And then also worked in Brazil for an international company teaching English.

Now recently, I've transitioned to traveling and working at the same time.

People call me a digital nomad, I guess, but I just say remote worker who happens to travel.

I’ve also been taking some short vacations just so I can focus on the actual trip.

What was your internship that you did?

During college. I was a journalism major and they made us have 3 different internships. So I did one for photojournalism.

I found a position in Slovakia just with a random Google search.

I happened to know some people who worked for this nonprofit, and they were working with the Romani people. It was before having a smartphone.

I don’t think I even had my laptop.
 

Very cool. How many countries have you visited?

I've been to about 41 if you count like Vatican City.

That's incredible. So talking about working remotely, how did you find your current job?

I work for a cybersecurity company and I found it on this website called WeWorkRemotely.com. It's all remote jobs. I definitely recommend We Work Remotely to everyone who’s looking for remote jobs and things like that.

Is there a community of remote workers that you have found?

The main one that I’m personally a member of is Female Digital Nomads. It’s been a pretty nice space and a lot of the people are close to my age or going through similar things as me.

They have a lot. You can get very specific with these remote work groups.

You can narrow them down to the country or to the city. 

I know a lot of people don't use Facebook anymore, but I use it solely for these groups because it's so good for travel and to get real firsthand knowledge from people.

And there's a lot of locals.

There are a lot of locals in the Buenos Aires group, for example. It’s very much an international community.

Which is the most underrated place that you've visited? 

It depends on who you ask, but I thought the Balkans were really underrated.

Everybody talks about Greece and Italy or the South of France, which is rightfully so, they're gorgeous.

But then you also have North Macedonia, and you have Albania, and you have Montenegro in all these countries, Bosnia.

They are some of my favorite places that I've been to, and they're much more affordable and people are really nice.

If you're from the US, you can stay in Albania for a year without a visa.

I went to Tunisia last year for my friend's wedding.

I thought it was really underrated just because when you think of North Africa, you think of Morocco and everyone talks about Egypt.

Tunisia and Algeria. I think those are some underrated, beautiful, and very welcoming countries, so I would recommend them.

Is there a place that you consider to be overrated?

When I taught in Brazil, all my students wanted to go to Disney World in Florida. They were like, we want to visit Miami, Orlando, Disney.

And I'm trying to tell them that, yes, Florida is great.

It has beautiful stuff like dried tortugas and the Everglades.

There are all sorts of beautiful national parks, But there's more to the US than just Florida.

And, also, if you live in Brazil, you have the most beautiful beaches in the world.

I told them about the American Southwest.

There are other places in the US that you should visit like the Pacific Northwest.

Don't just go to Disney World is what I tried to tell them. I think it's a bit overrated and overpriced now.

Do you feel scared about going anywhere? And how do you overcome that fear? 

I definitely always have a bit of travel anxiety before a trip. It never really goes away.

The easiest thing for me is to just start planning the trip, go, and then once I'm there, it alleviates it.

But a lot of times you have all these scenarios running through your head. 

You have relatives telling you, especially for Tunisia, about travel alerts.

People were sending them to me.

And then I get there. It’s the safest place.

It is good to be aware of what's going on and to be cautious going anywhere for any trip. But a lot of times it's just stuff that is in your own head or in people's imaginations that have never been there.

The best thing for me is just to tell myself – you know anxiety is a thing that you're gonna have no matter what, but you just have to push through it.

And once I get there, it's usually alleviated, and I realized it wasn't a thing. 

When you go to a country where you don't speak the local language, what do you do?

Well, for Tunisia, I tried real hard.

I had been learning Arabic before, and I stopped it. And so I got back with my Arabic teacher, and I was trying to learn Tunisian Arabic.

Once I got there, most of those phrases, I had them all written out.

I usually write down a couple of key phrases mostly to just be polite, like please or thank you.

I found that a lot of people speak English and Spanish. We're around the world. So a lot of times you can get by with some basic phrases in Spanish.

You'll know some basic phrases in their language. 

Nowadays there's Google Translate. There are a lot of things that you can use that help. 

I remember I was in a taxi in Morocco and the taxi driver didn't speak.

I was with my two friends Asia and Victoria. Together we spoke French, English, and Spanish. 

And he didn't speak any of those. He only spoke Arabic.

Then he called his wife on the phone, and his wife only spoke French. Victoria was the only one who spoke French, and she was talking to his wife. 

And so we were just saying random Arabic phrases, and it was the best conversation.

You need to have a desire to communicate and it doesn't matter how well you know the language or if you have an accent.

If two people have a desire to communicate, they will make it work. 

I think just being open, learning a couple of phrases, and not being afraid to make a fool of yourself goes a long way.  People would be responsive to that.

---

Ok, folks, let’s set the anchor ⚓️ for this week.

Stay tuned for part two of Ashleigh’s interview next week!

In the meantime, check out some of Ashleigh’s excellent travel blog, Travel Bugg! ⛵️

Take care and thanks for reading,

Daniel