About Whitney

Hi, I'm Whitney.  

I’m a 30-something American woman, living the dream.  Okay, maybe not "the" dream.  Probably not your dream.  But I'm definitely living my dream.  

I was born and raised in the beautiful Pacific Northwest of the USA - Washington State.  I have the best family and friends a girl could ask for (no, seriously.  you'd love them).  I went straight to University out of high school, joined a sorority, and graduated with a degree in Marketing.  You're starting to think I'm pretty average, right?  I can't say you're wrong.  Until I was about 25, I didn't really question where my life was headed.  I did what I thought I was supposed to do.  

There are many things I could tell you about who I am, and why, but SCUBA diving is the string that holds my story together, so let's start there.  I first fell in love with diving as a University student, though I’ve always been obsessed with water.  It's my element.  After getting my Open Water Certification in 2007, diving became a vacation habit for me.  Over the course of 10 years I went diving in Hawaii, Australia, Thailand, Honduras, Belize, Mexico, and Panama.  

Throughout that time, I explored careers in retail, business to business sales, law, finance, and non-profit management.  While there were highlights of all most of these fields that I enjoyed, I still lived for vacation.  I yearned to be on a plane, traveling somewhere, anywhere I hadn't been before.  

I was introduced to the world of professional diving in 2012 during a liveaboard dive trip in Australia.  You mean people do this for a living?!  Mind. Blown.  Being the person I am, I started researching, dreaming, and planning.  This happened when I was - you guessed it - 25 years old.  

A few years later, after falling head over heels for Koh Tao on a vacation in 2016, I vowed to return and finally pursue my dream of becoming a PADI Professional.  Prior to this, it was the idea my mind occasionally wandered to when I started dreaming.  This time, I set a goal behind it.  I worked, I saved, and I sacrificed.  

In January 2018, I moved to Thailand.

In October of the same year, I moved to Australia. A year later, I moved to Curacao, still chasing my dreams of teaching, diving, and traveling. Today, I still live in Curacao. After 3+ years, it feels like home! During this time I also took vacations - several times to the US to visit my family, a week in Hawaii, 3 weeks in Mauritius, a week in Bonaire, and a fancy 4-day liveaboard dive trip in Australia.

If you're wondering how I did this, the short answer is living life on a budget. The long answer is held within the stories and how-to posts on my blog.