We were lucky to catch up with Lauren and Julia McEvoy recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Lauren and Julia, thanks for joining us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.
Comfort is not always comfortable.
We are twin sisters, Lauren and Julia, better known as Off two wander. We have always shared a passion for exploration and travel since a young age, but being apart for the first time ever and living in two continents took us down a unique path. Only to be reunited again!
One thing that always remained the same, our desire to travel as often as we could.
With Lauren having worked in the travel and recruitment industry for over 6 years, during her last travel agency role, she found herself increasingly captivated by digital marketing. New leads meant commission. Commission meant more money for traveling! Her newly found interest inspired her to merge her professional skills with her love for travel. Having completed a whole bunch of online courses to up-skill, she was ready to apply her skills to a new job within the digital marketing field.
On the other hand, Julia had big plans on moving to Stockholm, Sweden in 2019 to pursue a teaching role at an international school. Lauren of course, couldn’t miss the travel opportunity and off they went on this new adventure. While Julia was at school, Lauren continued working online and completed various online courses to teach herself more about everything digital marketing.
Being inspired by the beauty of living abroad in Stockholm’s vibrant streets and infamous castles, we found ourselves constantly brainstorming ideas for our travel blog. Lauren would often listen to inspirational podcasts like “Boss Babes” and read blog posts about “how to start a travel blog”, until we eventually figured out our plan of action with the most fitting name. While traveling through the bustling areas of Stockholm, Gamla Stan being one of them, we found ourselves there almost every weekend, working on our plan and manifesting what our travel blog could become. Over plenty of coffees and “fika”, we came up with the name “Off two wander”. The story behind the name is that we were always traveling together and wandering when and where the next trip would be.
While in Sweden, Lauren had to return to South Africa due to visa regulations, and only being allowed to spend 90 days in a Schengen area.
And then… the world was put on pause for some time. The pandemic hit and travel was non-existent.
It was extremely difficult being apart during such an unknown time – no one knew what the future held being in different continents and not being able to travel together – had to say goodbye to those wonderful travel plans.
After what we would call a nightmare to get back home to South Africa, Julia returned home on a repatriation flight. Let’s not talk about the price of the one way flight….
Since returning to South Africa, we have both continued to travel as often as we can – when full time jobs and budget allows.
Off two wander is more than just a travel blog. It was manifested through some extremely challenging times in our lives, but we kept one thing in mind. Travel being what we both love, the thrill of exploring different cultures, learning the rituals and ways of life, is so beautiful to us. Bali is still one of our favourite destinations, and Lauren hopes that Julia stays working remotely so that we can be immersed in the rich Balinese culture again and take our travel blog to the next level. Of course, with Julia being a qualified teacher and having experience working in the marketing industry, she has aspirations to take her experience abroad where they can continue to explore the world together.
Lots of people found the pandemic times really challenging, but we used it to our advantage to challenge ourselves and take a leap of faith! With life’s ups and downs, one must learn to adapt and grow with the challenges.
We have big dreams to grow our platforms, while working full time jobs. Something that we try to focus on a daily basis, even if it’s something small like showing up on our social media platforms every day.
We often talk about the risks taken to get to this point and the risks we need to take to allow our travel blog to take off. The unknown of the future of Off two wander excites and leaves us enthusiastic about our future travels and where we will be off two next.
Stay tuned on our socials!
Lauren and Julia, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Lauren and Julia are identical twin sisters from Cape Town, South Africa who are passionate about travel, wildlife conservation and being surrounded by nature.
Lauren has experience working in tourism and currently works in digital marketing. She built Off two wander’s website as part of her portfolio. Julia is a qualified primary school teacher and has experience working in marketing too! Lauren does travel logistics & is the photographer, while Julia does the blogging and budgeting. If it wasn’t for Julia, Lauren would be in Bali right now…
We showcase traveling South Africa and internationally, and cover anything from travel tips, guides and to do’s from destinations we have wandered to. We love sharing our travels and inspiring others to travel too! We found on our trip to Bali that we had many connections wanting to know more about traveling. With Lauren previously working in travel, she has experience from start to end planning of trips for her clients, which helped sharing ideas with others to plan their itineraries.
We are in the process of becoming freelancers and offering our digital marketing services – watch this space if you’d like to work with us! Our website is an E-commerce website, where we sell products online and we’re open to widening our range soon!
We are go-getters, organizers, planners, enthusiastic, and have great work-ethic with our combined skills and traits. We share travel insights with our followers and support them on making their travel dreams happen!
We are most proud of starting Off two wander, building our website, creating social media and putting ourselves out there, even when we were sharing to our few followers in the beginning. We appreciate the support from our friends, family and followers on our socials.
We love to enjoy what we do, share our knowledge with others and build genuine relationships through conversations. Being twins, we have the same hard work, go-getter, high work ethic standards, where we always strive to give 110% in everything we do. On weekends, we take our chill time very seriously, and you’ll often find us getting a coffee by the ocean. Work is work and play is play.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
Yes! There are a few goals and missions that drive our creative journey for Off two wander.
As twin sisters with a shared passion for exploration, we are always striving to be better in every way.
One of our primary goals is to achieve financial freedom, allowing us to travel whenever and wherever we want. We believe in living life on our terms, free from the constraints of a “normal” 9-to-5 job. This freedom enables us to immerse ourselves fully in each destination and experience it in the most authentic way possible.
Every journey we go on, is a learning opportunity. We are constantly inspired by the people we meet, the cultures we encounter, and the stories we hear. With each opportunity, we make an effort to engage with the locals. We feel this fuels our creativity, allowing us to share more insightful and meaningful content with our audience.
By sharing our adventures and the lessons we learn along the way, we hope to inspire others to pursue their own dreams of travel and exploration. We aim to show that it’s possible to live a life full of adventure, learning, and personal growth, all while maintaining financial freedom.
We hope to encourage our followers to keep exploring, keep learning, and keep inspiring. We are driven by a desire to experience the world on our terms and to encourage others to do the same.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
Your qualification does not define you.
I remember in our primary school days, I would use our little chalkboard to teach Lauren the content for upcoming tests. It was a win for both of us! It was a great way for me to learn and for Lauren to actually study. She didn’t enjoy traditional schooling and mainly went to school for hockey! (Side note: we both played Provincial Hockey and loved every minute of it!)
Once you finish high school, it’s such a stressful time when you’re having conversations with friends who are so invested in what they are going to study and have their next 20+ years of life planned, to a tee.
Lauren knew she had to study something after school and enrolled in a Tourism course. She thoroughly enjoyed the content, the lecturers and was excelling! She worked in the tourism industry for a few years and disliked the long hours, long traveling times to the office (before remote working was a thing), working weekends and low pay for the work put in.
For a long time, she would always wish she had also studied a degree, as without it, it made her feel like her aspirations were out of reach. This, however, was not the case.
While working in tourism, Lauren used her passion and enthusiasm to take the plunge on signing up for a digital marketing course.
Now that Lauren is loving working in digital marketing, working async, working fully remotely for a European company, she’s so glad to be in the place she once thought would never be a possibility!
Julia also experienced that this “qualification doesn’t define you” lesson, just after returning home from Sweden. During the pandemic, there weren’t many teaching roles due to the fact that people were staying in their secure paying roles during a very uncertain time. She had to adapt with the times and continued to work in marketing and focussed on Off two wander. Turned out, we lent our camera lens to an old school friend, who saw her as a perfect fit for the agency she was working at. Julia used her skills, passion and traits and loved what she was doing in marketing. To the recruiters with blinkers – teachers have so many skills that are very suitable for any company and industry, you just have to be open minded to see the candidates potential!
Julia is proud to be a testament to this – “My degree does not just make me a teacher, but more so much more.”
Don’t let your belief on these limitations imposed by societal norms distract you from your passion, curiosity and love for what you do every day. Changing our mindsets has opened a world of possibilities and allowed us both to follow our dreams and passions.
PS: It’s never too late to learn and grow. Whether you’re 18 or 30, you can still pursue your dreams and work in an industry you love.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.offtwowander.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/offtwowander/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/offtwowander/
Image Credits
off two wanders photos