TRAVEL TALK with Donna Irene, The Sunny Traveler

Welcome back to Travel Talk, the show where I interview people whose lives are focused on travel or have been inspired by travel and there's no better way to get to know someone and to have a drink with them. Cheers! We're here at Lincoln's Beard Brewery in Westchester, Miami and I'm interviewing my friend Donna Irene from The Sunny Traveler. Donna is a travel photographer and blogger. Donna, welcome. Thanks guys, I'm so happy to be here especially with craft beer in my hands. This is my favorite thing to drink. Me too. Cheers. Tell me about yourself, how you got into traveling and, you know, where you're from. Yeah, so I have been doing photography for 10 years. I got into it my freshman year of high school and joined my high school's photography club and back then it was just purely for fun, for hobby, for passion and sooner or later I got better and better and realized, man, maybe I should actually consider turning this into a career and in the midst of all that I started traveling as well and my photography took me to some cool places like in high school I got to take trips to New York, Chicago and Italy with our photography club and all of that kind of broadened my horizons to the world of travel and eventually started traveling after college more full-time and got hooked. Where can people find you and what do you want your fans to take away from your work? So I write for a budget travel blog at SunnyTraveler.com and the biggest takeaway is a couple things. I want people to know that you don't have to be rich to travel. I'm just a regular girl, no one special and I need it work. I just made it a priority for me and decided to cut back on some unnecessary things in my life and the other thing is I just want to invoke a spirit of adventure and just show people there's so much out there, you know, step outside of your comfort zone and could change your life. I feel the same. Yeah, that's why we do this. And in terms of destinations, like for you, what is the place that is the mix of adventure, food and photography? Oh man, this is such a hard question. I was trying to think of an answer when we were talking about this earlier and for me, my favorite country that I've been to so far is Italy. I'm also Italian so I could be biased but I think Italy just has it all. It has incredible history and architecture, it has amazing food as we all know, incredible wine and beautiful scenery and very diverse. You can go, you know, along the coast to Cinque Terre or the Malfi Coast further south and get amazing beaches. You can go through the countryside of Tuscany or you can hit up, you know, the big cities Rome, Florence, Venice, Milan and get a more urban experience and have the best of both worlds. I was gonna say, I'm very biased because I'm all the time. Same thing for me, it's like go back forever and never get bored of it. Yeah, that's the best. I love it. Was there a trip or a certain time in your life that was like, okay, wow, I need to keep doing this, I need to make this a career. When was that moment for you? Yeah, I feel like there wasn't one single moment but a bunch of moments put together. My first big trip I ever took was to California when I was 13 years old. Went to visit a friend out there and hopped on a plane by myself and spent two weeks with her and I was blown away by the beauty of California and that sparked interest in me and in high school, you know, I got to take those trips to New York and Chicago and right after college I did a trip with EF College Break which is a group for those who don't know geared towards college students to be able to go on trips backpacking style without having to worry about all of the planning and we went to seven countries in two weeks by bus and it was absolutely incredible. Went with one of my best friends and that just changed my life and I just realized how much there is out there and I just never stopped. The rest of that summer I kept traveling and I haven't ever since. Sometimes, you know, we have these moments when we're traveling where it's like or wow what was like your most shocking, weird, or incredible moment? Man, kind of shocking experience I had was I was in Malta which if you don't know where Malta is it's an island off the coast of Sicily and I was flying my drone standing on the edge of a cliff filming my friend in the ocean below me and I was standing on this cliff with the remote in my hands and all of a sudden my phone dislodges and falls off 60 feet below into the ocean and of course I freak out, that's my lifeline for the whole trip. I'm distracted like, oh, what just happened? As I'm distracted my drone crashes into the cliff the next second, falls into the ocean so my friends down below and I'm like grab the phone, grab the drone so she's swimming one way grabs the drone, pulls it out of the water, I'm like the phone, the phone, swims the other way grabs the phone, pulls it out of the water. Neither were salvaged, sadly, but I had insurance on the drone so. With your phone? The phone. Oh man. I had to buy a phone at like a local phone shop in Malta, some like ancient iPhone and use a SIM card the rest of the trip but that's life, man. Yeah, by the way, Malta's an amazing island. It is. One of my favorite islands. The food is like a mix between African and Italian like Sicily. Oh, blew my mind, that place. Yeah, it's beautiful. Beautiful water. When did you go? I went about a year ago. A year ago? Okay, for me it's been like, wow, like six years. Yeah, sadly that famous structure, the Azur Window, was knocked down in a storm. You saw it though? I did see it. Yeah, I saw it too, thank God. Yeah. I'm like, I got that one. That's where the drone crashed, at the Azur Window. Oh, were you up there? No. You were down. I was on a cliff, kind of above the ocean. Okay, but not on the window. Yeah, not on the arch. People were walking all over it. That's why it fell. That's scary. What's a destination that you can like return to over and over again and never get bored? Man, you know what? I honestly do not have one. Okay. And the reason for that is my love for travel comes from my desire to see new places and places I've never been. So as much as I love everywhere I've been and would love to go back, I don't feel a strong pull to do so. I feel pulled to go to places I haven't seen yet. Honestly, for me, as much as I love nature and I love the outdoors, as for living, I'm a big city girl. So, you know, I think, you know, making a big city home, whether it be a place like New York or if it's abroad, Cape Town, Tel Aviv, one of those places I think would be somewhere that I could stay for a long time. Very cool. Yeah, I'm the same as you. I mean, for me, it's always new, but like when I go back to places, either for meetings or whatever, it's either like New York, love it, London, love it, Barcelona, like I can go there and go there and I can live in these places, you know. We're gonna do some rapid fire questions now, okay? Okay, let's do it. All right, these are all one word answers. Okay, one word? One word. Oh, wow. Yeah. Favorite food. Favorite type of food. Mexican food. Favorite drink. Craft beer. Favorite place for photography. That I've been? Morocco. City with the friendliest people. Amsterdam, no question. Favorite airline. Virgin, all the way. Favorite airport. LAX, because they have the best vegan options for me. Awesome. Where are you off to next? I'm gonna be visiting Copenhagen, Istanbul, Santorini, Budapest, a few cities in Belgium, and Paris. Wow. Cheers. Cheers, my friend. Thank you. To travel. Like this video, please comment, let us know what you thought about the interview, where you guys want to go, and? If you want to follow me, you can follow me at thesunnytraveler on Instagram or at www.thesunnytraveler.com, and make sure to follow David on Instagram at David'sbeenhere or his site, David'sbeenhere, and YouTube channel. Please subscribe, it's awesome. Hey, thanks for doing this. Yeah, of course, it's fun.