2025: A Year In Review

Another year down and I’m here to sum up the year that was 2025!

I swear I say the same thing every time this post comes around; where on earth has the time gone?! This year has flown by but there’s a good reason for that which I’ll come on to very soon. Each year this final post of the year serves as a good way for me to look back on how much I achieved, how much we’ve done as a family and share some of my favourite images across the last 12 months.

I’m writing this in advance of Christmas and New Year this year, for once, so I hope everyone has a lovely festive period. I absolutely love the build up to Christmas even more so now that we have children.

This isn’t necessarily for everyone but, if you have time and fancy a deeper dive into my thoughts and my photos across the years, I’ve shared all of my previous seven year in review posts below.

2018
2019
2020
2022
2023
2024

2025

If you’ve been around a while, or at least since last year, you’ll know already that we were expecting our second child on the day after Evelyn’s third birthday. With it being our second child, it kind of felt that we were just waiting and preparing for the day to come rather than enjoying, as much as you’re able to, the pregnancy. See, with having done it all before, it becomes more of a practical pregnancy; do we keep all of Evelyn’s clothes, what can we finish off in the house etc.

Thankfully, our second little girl Elise arrived on 15th February 2025 all safe and healthy. I think it was me however that was panicking more during the labour than Emma but no matter how many midwives and doctors entered the room and no matter how many beeps were going off, all was well in the end.

So this year it has all been about family and adapting to life with two children. It’s definitely been an eye opening experience as Evelyn storms through the three coming up sixteen stage but we’ve loved almost every minute of it. You certainly forget many aspects of the newborn stage that’s for sure; we’re at the teething stage now so whilst we’ve got Elise in her own room, we’re still up and down (why we did we buy a house with three floors!) quite a lot. So, whilst we feel like we haven’t perhaps been able to focus 100% on all that comes with a little ones first few months, it’s still been amazing to watch Elise grow and develop into a cheeky ten month old.

In terms of travel, we’ve certainly been a lot braver this year than we were with Evelyn. Partly due to the lingering effects of Covid-19 and party due to simply being first-time parents, we didn’t travel abroad until Evelyn was 13 months old. This year however, we’ve been away as a family three times; to Cyprus in June (Elise was just 16 weeks old), Copenhagen in August for my birthday and Malta in November for some winter sun. Each one of these trips was incredible and it’s hard to believe that we managed all of them with two little ones and actually enjoyed them!

Of course, we’ve had plenty of trips out and about here in the UK and consumed endless amounts of coffee. Particular highlights were Wallington Hall in Northumberland and Lapland UK in Manchester – the best Christmas experience we’ve had so far for the kids.

I also did some travelling separately thanks to working with Jet2 again; Benidorm of all places in May (I was pleasantly surprised – I really enjoyed it) and Budapest in late September.

My Highlights of 2025

Here are some of my favourite blog posts from the year:

On The Streets: Benidorm
Fujifilm 16-55mm f/2.8 II Lens Review
Hotel Review: 25hours Hotel Copenhagen Indre By
On The Streets: Budapest
How We Spent 14 Nights In Japan (With A Toddler)
Hotel Review: Malta Marriott Resort and Spa

My Favourite Photos of 2025

This section is new for this year and I kind of wonder why I haven’t done this before. A place that’s all mine to share some of my favourite photos of the year without the pressure of likes, engagement etc.

The Year as a Travel Blogger

Well, I can finally say that, in 2025, I finally achieved a goal I set out to achieve on day one of my travel blog – in May, I finally received the coveted 50,000 monthly sessions which enabled me to join Mediavine. In the travel blogging world, this is a huge deal. Mediavine is a premium ad network that is considered, I think, the pinnacle of blogging. This finally meant that I could earn some real money from my blog, from my passion project and it felt incredible when that first payment hit my bank account. With the uptick in blog views also came a huge increase in income from affiliate marketing and so, by the end of the tax year, we’re talking figures that could probably be, with more work, turned into an actual income.

I’m still experiencing a traffic dip with the seasons, though not as much as normal thanks to it being summer in Australia for example, but I really need to start working on Autumn/Winter content for 2026! In total, I think I’ll end on around 800,000 page views which is incredible. I would have loved to have reached 1 million page views but that can be next years goal instead!

So that all sounds awesome doesn’t it?! Despite this achievement, setting up my own business and upgrading my home office equipment (hello Mac mini & MacBook Pro) I’m still a little disappointed. I always strive for better and the thing that’s let me down this year has been how little time I’ve spent creating new blog posts. Ordinarily I expect to see results from blog posts I draft within around 12 months or so and therefore, if I’m hoping for a good year in 2026, I should have prepared throughout the year. Unfortunately, or fortunately I guess as I have another lovely child, I only created 23 posts this year well short of my 52 posts a year goal. I have however shifted a lot of focus elsewhere; I’m sure you’ll see soon enough once there’s a hard launch. I also took the first steps towards setting up my own Etsy store where you can finally purchase my travel photography prints – more to come on this!

In this day and age it doesn’t take much to feel like you’re falling behind but I have to keep reminding myself that firstly ‘comparison is the thief of joy’, secondly I still achieved an incredible goal and I am making an income from my passion and I have a beautiful family. Everyone is on their own path and I’m extremely content with mine.

What Next?

When I wrote this post last year, I knew that things would be quiet on the travel blog. Fingers crossed that I can create some momentum in 2026 and have a really good year on here. Maybe if it’s really good I can start taking some concrete steps towards doing this full-time. That would be a dream come true for me. As long as I can take care of my family and the non-negotiable bills that come with that, that would be good enough for me!

In terms of our family life, we’ll soon have a four and a one year old which sounds crazy to type that. It really doesn’t put us off travelling with having two kids you know. I know a few people probably think we’re a little mad but we’re going to try and have a few more exciting adventures over the next few years. If you didn’t know or can’t remember, we never managed to get away for our honeymoon back in 2020 and we can’t stop talking about planning something similar back to Melbourne and New Zealand. It’s quite far on a plane though obviously. That, or interrailling, who knows!

Thank you so much to everyone that takes a moment to read what I share here; it’s exactly why I keep on doing this.

See you in 2026!

Jamie