About Rachael Taft

I’ve been a travel junkie for a long time, probably tracing back to a two-week student ambassador trip I took to Australia when I was 12. In high school I spent a couple weeks on a homestay in Spain that further enraptured me with travel.

In college I spread my wings, making my first voyage to the South American continent for a spring break volunteer trip to Iquitos, Peru. I spent a semester in Florence, Italy, followed by six weeks backpacking through Europe. I loved studying abroad so much I did it again the next year, in Bangkok, Thailand, and then spent two months traveling solo in Southeast Asia and New Zealand before heading to Sydney, Australia, for a summer of interning abroad. Needless to say, I’m hooked on travel.

During my first solo trip in New Zealand, I saw this graffiti on a van which led me to create my solo travel philosophy: “Just Say Yes.”

After graduating from the University of South Carolina with a degree in mass communications (major: advertising, minor: geography), I found myself a fairly directionless, inexperienced girl in an unwelcoming economic climate, and everything seemed a bit hopeless and confusing.

And so a solo trip came to be the perfect solution to my overabundance of free time, as I hoped it would serve as a good opportunity for some self-reflection and hopefully a clearer vision of where my future lay.

And in a way it did. After I returned from three months backpacking solo through South America, I went to Sweden for two months to visit my then-boyfriend, Oscar. There we decided, partly influenced by advice from people I met during my travels, to move to Australia to live and work for a year.

After that, it was back to the States, to Florida, to work. The year of 2012 was a bumpy one, but I emerged from it a girl with a plan. My new job, doing marketing and communications for an international exchange nonprofit, led me to Baltimore, where I had a whole new city to explore and enough vacation time to continue my travels, both domestically and internationally.

When my company moved its office to Washington, D.C., it was time for me to move on. I spent a summer working in Fiji with an experiential student travel organization before taking a communications position with a travel insurance company in St. Petersburg, Florida, to be closer to family.

Any questions about me or my travels? Email me.

Want to work with me? View my professional portfolio at rachaeltaft.com.