“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
A question that haunts us our entire youth. In the beginning, our imagination acts as the sole restraint of what we could be. As we grow older, those possibilities slowly start to shrink. By the time we need to choose a career path, we are lost and left to choose a random road to go down in the hope we made the right choice.
At the stroke of midnight on our eighteenth birthday, in the eyes of society, we have gone from child to adult. Throwing us right into the deep end, letting us drown in adulthood before we could finish fully mourning the end of adolescence. Then after taking out thousands of dollars in loans and spending four years studying a subject most of us chose with uncertainty, we graduate as lost as when we started. We replace our days in school with corporate life, told by prior generations that this is how life works. Working 9-5, 5 days a week, and enjoying life only for the weekend and the occasional paid leave if you’re lucky.
Some reject this concept of life, rather than embrace the uncertainty, they choose to travel to the West Coast, work a seasonal job at a ski resort, nanny for a family in sunny California, or volunteer on a farm in Hawaii. Feeding into the childlike imagination, looking at a map, and exploring whatever new corner of the world meets their fingertips. Some may call that a fantasy, but that is just a summary of Lexi Matejeck's reality. After three years of documenting her travels online, Lexi has accumulated over 167k followers on TikTok. Sharing the highs and lows of traveling, how to make it affordable, homesickness, and more.
Her business “Travel with Lexi” partners with travel companies and hosts women and LGBTIA+ group trips that take place all over the globe. Connecting travelers in extraordinary adventures such as hiking Machu Picchu, backpacking through Central America, seeing the northern lights of Iceland, and more. I had the opportunity to sit down with Lexi at Finca Ganadito, an eco-village and tropical sanctuary in Drake Bay, Costa Rica. It was a pleasure to not only experience firsthand her second group trip to Finca Ganadito with Worldpackers but also unpack her journey of turning her passion for traveling into her life’s work.
How did you come to the decision to travel rather than take up a traditional post-college job?
It always felt like a pretty easy (and scary) decision. I was in college for marketing, and I chose it because I knew it was a degree that could be used in many different career fields. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I wanted to take a gap year, but to be able to go to college and afford it, I needed my scholarships. I needed to go from high school to college to get the scholarships I qualified for. I thought I'd wait until after college and figure out what I wanted to do job-wise because nothing sounded fulfilling at the time, especially a career/degree I didn't enjoy.
What was your original plan for your travels? Did you have a career path you expected to return to afterward?
I told everyone I was going to leave for six months. Six months to a year, I moved to Hawaii at first, working as a volunteer on a farm in exchange for a free place to stay, so I could afford to start traveling. I did come back after those six months in Hawaii. I came back for a chunk of time, applied to a 9-5 marketing job, and could not land a single one fresh out of college. I had good grades, a good resume, and two internship experiences; I took that as a sign to be like, "Okay, good, I don't have to do this whole going to a 9-5 thing. I'm going to keep traveling," so that's what I did. I was like that was a sign from the universe.
While meeting other backpackers from around the globe, how did you find other countries' views of traveling different than the US?
People in a lot of other countries I feel just view life and work so differently. I felt like from the people that I met, some other countries do view work as less important and are more focused on hobbies, traveling, their mental and physical health, and family. It's not every culture and country, in some countries they don't view traveling as positive like “why would you ever leave your family? why would you go far from home?” It was an eye-opener when I started to meet other people with different mindsets.
Over the course of two years, you have accumulated a large following of like-minded individuals with a itch to explore. What was the evolution of your social media to documenting your travels and sharing informative videos? What were your initial intentions when you first started sharing?
It started by just genuinely posting for fun, being in the pandemic before I went traveling. I posted for fun, as I had no following at the time. During my first six months of travel, I posted little videos of my trips here and there, but it was just more for myself and my friends. Once some of the first videos got traction, I immediately tried this, like you never know what could happen. I posted a few videos on World Packers and the concept. It got maybe, ten thousand views. It wasn't crazy, but as soon as it got any bit of traction, I was like, okay, well, I'm just going to go for this, and I kind of went from there. It honestly was a ripple effect that I feel very blessed that it's fell into my lap so easily which is why I think it was meant to be just how it was meant to be that I didn't land at nine to five after graduation.
What was the moment when you thought this platform could be a possible career path?
It was once I started to make money, in the first month I made $30 and thought that was crazy, the second month $150 and it went from there.
Travel content usually consists of the highlights of the journey; what aspects of traveling do you think is often times left out of the discussion?
I feel like what comes to mind is, for sure, the negative aspects of how being out of your home environment and your routine can affect your mental health. Sleeping in hostels where you're literally sleeping around strangers at all times weighs on you after a long time. I try my best to do videos of that as well and show how gross problems can be and the crazy experiences that can happen.
Most social media is skewed; you want to show its positive side because you're trying to inspire people to go. After all, it's 90% positive and 10% just awful sometimes; videos of that need to be shown more about how gross travel. How hard it is to live around other people, always like introducing yourself repeatedly; not having a real community is the hardest part about travel for me. Every time I'm in a new hostel or a new town, I make incredible connections, but they last for a day, three days, or two weeks; lucky if you get more than two nights. I feel like long-term travelers are the only ones that understand that because when you're short-term traveling, it's like so exciting, but if you do it for more than months a month on end, it just gets like you're like oh my God I have no stable people in my life even if you meet the coolest people.
Going from guest to host, what importance goes into planning group trips, what aspects of group trips do you look for when organizing these trips?
I like to do a variety of trips, and that's mostly from the standpoint that I am also trying out all these trips for the first time. I'm learning which companies I like more than others. Basically, any company I've done multiple trips with are typically companies I enjoy more because I'm going to them again and hosting them again.
For the most part, it's like I just have to go and experience it, and I hope it's great. Literally, every group trip has been amazing. It will always be amazing because of the people that make it amazing, but for the most part, I look or I try to focus heavily on my itinerary because I feel like some trips I've seen online just charge so much money and then include nothing. You can't charge people $2,000 to go on a week trip that just covers your accommodation because you know your accommodations aren't $2,000. They could make that trip for a quarter of the price, but they just sell an idea.
I want trips to give you all your accommodations, food, and learning opportunities. The World Packers (Epic Trips) have so many learning opportunities that you get so much out of it.
I also try to host affordable trips because it opens up travel to people who otherwise wouldn't. I feel like many people haven't found the confidence to go solo for the first time without being in a group because it's fucking scary. I didn't have the confidence either, I went with a friend to do the World Packers in Hawaii because I was like, I'm not about to go alone. I get people do not have the guts to go alone unless it's a group. Sometimes, you need the first trip to realize you can do this.
Why or why not do you think it is important for young adults to travel on some scale?
I genuinely feel, I mean, it goes back to privilege, but if you have the means to do so, and by that I don't mean come for money, I mean, have the ability to work super hard, save up enough money, have the ability to go rent or list for a few months, put your stuff in storage, put your stuff in family houses to go travel. I know so much comes along with dropping everything but if you can make it work and you can make it happen, I feel like it's so important to go and do it because it genuinely forever altered my life because I just got to see what life really was versus what I thought it was.
What advice would you give your younger travel self?
Follow your gut. I feel like there were so many times in my travels I questioned what I was doing: why am I doing this? Why am I working all these weird jobs but like not really making any money when I could be making a decent income with my degree if I was working a 9-5? What am I really doing? And instead just trust my gut.
I guess, honestly, just tell my younger self not to worry so much. I spent so much of my first travels worrying about what I was going to do after and when I was going to go back and find a better-paying job. I very much enjoyed those travels, but so much of it was filled with worried, and tell myself to be more present.
Written by Ashley Murphy