Boring wins, yet I still openly celebrate the quiet wins. AdSense approval on my revived blog may seem like nothing, but this milestone amidst a milestone truly deserves a write-up. Those avid voyagers who enjoy these updates—this is for you, and I appreciate you.
✉️ A Note on the Voyage Journal
The Voyage Journal is a collection of personal reflections written throughout my travels—capturing raw moments, transitions, and experiences as they happened. These entries are less about guides and more about the human side of the journey.
The Beginning of A Perez Voyages
2010 was the birth of my first true APerezVoyages.com platform in the realm of social media. This is nearly two years before I even started Instagram. Hell, the domain name aperezvoyages.com was acquired around the same time I started calling myself A Perez Voyages.
This blog is the true beginning, the heart and soul of the way I share my life’s story of voyaging, even if at the beginning I was going through some of the lowest lows of my life. The spirit and passion of living the life I live now still scream through my very first voyage journal, Dear Key West.
The Blog That Carried My Life of Voyaging
This blog stayed alive over the course of nearly two decades, from a college life in Florida to a fresh start in South Carolina, from my first ever trip to the Florida Keys, to the edge of the Balkans, down to Wallis and Futuna—where I am bound to be next.
I journaled and journaled, just as this blog was meant to be. During COVID, I started to integrate ways to make it a half guide, half journal hybrid, hiring a college web development buddy to oversee a makeover and SEO optimization in hopes of bringing in eyes and creating a stream of income, whether small or large. However, the site’s performance started to get progressively worse.
When the Blog Slowly Died
As I began to pick up a real camera and let my storytelling passions evolve—living in Hawai‘i, Palau, then American Samoa and Tokelau—this blog fell into the shadows. Eventually, I neglected it. What I initially thought was a shift in media focus was, in truth, pure neglect. It took an average of six hours to create and build one blog post due to slow performance. I simply lost inspiration.
Realizing What Was Mine
Returning home from my two-year voyage in the Samoas and Tokelau grounded me in many ways and helped me realize something. Any one of these social media apps can go away tomorrow. My place in them, let alone funding from them, can disappear in a heartbeat—as my Facebook nearly did a month prior. Which hit me like a train in the realization that, Aperezvoyages.com is mine – and it always will be.
Rebuilding From the Source
So in February of 2026, I did what I do best and troubleshot from the source. I gutted the blog from the backend all the way to the front end bringing in old web development knowledge into the mix to tap into what I originally went to school for. I switched hosting to fix the site’s performance, and that alone brought back my joy and passion for the APV origins.
For two months straight, I rebuilt the front end to aim for monetization that was lost over the decade—going through everything from the original journals to my new blog on Wallis and Futuna—optimizing and refining it on new levels. But bringing both the spirit of journaling and a hint of guide at least through the knowledge and experiences I’ve had, into one place.
Why monetization? Because why not generate income from something I’ve been doing for nearly two decades? Why not share with the world what my experiences are truly about—what film and photography alone cannot fully capture? And last night at 1:30 a.m., after six frustrating rejections, I was approved for monetization on what only a few months ago was a nearly dead blog.
A Platform of Resilience
This deserves a post of it’s own of how parallel this is to the realities of storytelling and voyaging. There are ups, and for damn sure there are downs. Missteps and pains alongside joys and gains. While my blog may be just a wisp of wind and a simple blog or facebook post among many, it represents something deeply parallel to my own life. Just like my earliest writings, where I felt helpless and hopeless, the inner fire stayed resilient and stayed the course.
Aperezvoyages.com is a platform of that very resilience, the same force that keeps me moving forward gracefully across this blue sphere.
Thank you for supporting and staying the course with me, voyagers. 🙂
