About me (aka the short version)
Hello, I’m John. I’m a British expat/naturalized German in his mid-30s currently living in Cologne, Germany. I like maps. And I love Eurovision.
Right now I work full-time, blogging and travelling in my spare time. I spent a good few years working for trivago (which you can see traces of throughout the blog), but I now work for an international logistics company which is based in Bonn.
I’m originally from Worksop in the north of England but have also lived in a handful of other places including Manchester, Yaroslavl, St. Petersburg, Leipzig, Manchester (again) and Düsseldorf, but I am now very much at home in Cologne.
I started this blog in 2013 with ambitions of building the next Lonely Planet or at least becoming the next Michael Palin (I’ve grown slightly more humble over the years) but now I just want to share my experiences with anyone who is interested, offer a bit of advice and perhaps shed some light on destinations that people might not have heard much about yet.
12 quick facts about me
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- I like trains
- I lived in Russia for a year
- I have 1 tattoo
- I love finding cheap flights and once got return flights to Peru for 290€
- I love languages and can speak English, German and Russian
- I am a keen runner
- I love hiking
- I am afraid of heights but regularly climb high things and then regret it
- I once accidentally locked an old woman in a cupboard
- I throw excellent Eurovision parties
- I was once a contestant on the Weakest Link
- I am a curator of pop songs in languages I don’t understand. This playlist is my pride and joy.
Blogging & the story so far (aka the long version)
I started this blog in 2013 (under the original name of Continental Breakfast Travel) as a way of documenting my trips and encouraging more people to travel within Europe.
Six years later and travel-wise, not a whole lot has changed tbh: I’m still travelling as often as I can and exploring new destinations across the continent – but I’ve started looking further afield too, setting my sights on Siberia, the Middle East and Central Asia in the next few years.
But when it comes to blogging, I’m really trying to recreate my glory days (as depressing as it sounds.) In November 2016, CBT reached an all-time high: almost 7,000 unique users visited the site, resulting in over 11,000 pageviews of which around 62% was from SEO traffic (i.e. entirely free and requiring no effort). In the years before I’d built up a really solid SEO base, as well as a bit of a following and had even done some minor collaborations with a few brands.
So what happened? It’s hard to say really, other than I just fell out of love with blogging. At the time I also was convinced that my stats were rubbish and I couldn’t see any way of improving them.
I went on a bit of a hiatus and discovered my love of hiking. I suddenly just didn’t have time for blogging anymore. My domain renewal lapsed and I didn’t renew, naively thinking that all my content would automatically revert to my original wordpress.com site. It didn’t. The domain was bought out from under me and by the time I realised I wanted it all back, there was no chance of recovering the domain name or any of my former Google rankings. (I’m sure there’s a lesson in all this somewhere…)
But in January 2018, I published something new on my new domain and slowly, my love of blogging worked its way back into my life. Throughout 2018 I had a conscious effort to try to keep a good balance between blogging, hobbies (i.e. hiking) and friends, publishing far less often and never putting myself under pressure to write.
In January 2019, I was ready for a fresh start and rebranded the blog and here we are.
