Last updated: May 2026
Hi there! We’re Laurence and Jessica Norah, we’re full-time professional travel bloggers & photographers, and we’re the couple behind Finding The Universe & Independent Travel Cats.
We’ve been running this site since 2010, sharing travel tips, destination guides, photography tips, and lots more.
I’m Laurence, and I’m the primary writer and photographer here on Finding The Universe. I’ve been working as a professional travel photographer full-time since 2010. My photos have been featured by major publications including the BBC (a shot of Jedburgh Abbey in BBC News coverage of VisitScotland’s top social media images for 2016), the National Geographic homepage twice as Photo of the Day (a Santa Cruz long exposure in 2016 and a shot of Shetland’s Up Helly Aa Viking longship festival in 2019), CNN Travel, Condé Nast Traveler, the Calgary Herald, the Miami Herald, and Fox News. I’ve also been quoted as a travel photography expert in Forbes.
I launched my online travel photography course in 2016, and I’ve spoken at travel and photography conferences including TBEX, TravelCon, and The Photography Show. I shoot on Canon (currently the EOS R5) and have photographed in over 40 countries. Jessica is co-author here and runs Independent Travel Cats as her primary site, drawing on a previous career as a clinical research psychologist to write the methodical, research-driven guides ITC is known for.
Everything we write is based on our own personal travel experiences and uses our own photos. We visit all the places we write about (usually multiple times), cover our own costs (except in very rare circumstances), and do our best to keep content up to date and as accurate as possible.
Our main focus on this site is travel in Europe and the USA, as well as photography tips and advice. We do cover other parts of the world as well, as you can see on our destinations page.
This page has everything you need to know about who we are, how we started this site, how we met, where we’ve been, and lots more. Thanks for your interest, it’s appreciated!
Tell us a bit more about yourselves?
Photography is Laurence’s real passion. He loves nothing more than being out in the world with a camera, and his online photography course teaches the techniques he’s developed across more than a decade of full-time travel photography.
Jessica’s background as a clinical research psychologist shapes her writing style: methodical, deeply researched, with a tendency to go down rabbit holes on the culture and history of a destination. She also loves to meet cats all around the world, which is approximately half of why our other site exists.
When and How Did You Start Travelling?
Laurence started his full-time travel journey in June 2009 after leaving a nearly decade-long corporate IT career and looking for a change of scenery.
This blog was started in May 2010 as a way to catalog his experiences and share his photos, and has since evolved into a place on the web where you can find honest travel advice, tips on photography, and photography to inspire.
We met in 2014 at a travel blogging conference in Italy. Jess has been running her own successful travel blog, Independent Travel Cats, since 2013, offering savvy travel advice to independent travelers with more of a focus on luxury travel, cultural discoveries, and history.
We got married in 2015 on board the Queen Mary 2 (naturally Laurence took the photos of that).
Basically, Laurence likes to take the pictures and stand on mountains, and Jess loves to explore museums and discover what makes a place tick. Somehow, it works.
Where have you been?
Laurence’s first big adventure after leaving his corporate career was a year-long, 60,000km road trip around Australia in 2009. You can read about that here.
He then spent a summer living in Germany, followed by a year travelling New Zealand by campervan (largely hunting Lord of the Rings filming locations), and three years living in France, including summers spent helping run a small adults-only campsite there.
After meeting in 2014 in Italy, we’ve spent time travelling together across Europe, North America, and Asia. Check out the blog navigation bar to see all the places we’ve been, and if you’re interested in hearing more about Jessica’s origin story, check out her dedicated about us page.
We’re now based in the USA, where we moved in 2023 after eight happy years living together in the UK: four years in Edinburgh and four years in Bath, both beautiful cities. Before then, Laurence had also lived in central London for two and a half years. You may have seen us looking for our home in Edinburgh in an episode of US TV show House Hunters International.
Where are you from?
Laurence was born in Wales in 1980 to a British mother from Liverpool and a Seychellois father whose family has roots in those islands going back nine generations. He spent his childhood partly in Cornwall (where he’s returned regularly throughout his adult life) and partly on a small island around 60 miles north of Mahé in the Seychelles, where his parents managed a hotel through his teenage years. Jessica is from Ohio in the USA, and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area before she met Laurence.
Between us we’ve been lucky enough to have lived in a whole variety of places around the world.
What’s this site all about then?
This site is the focal point for our travels and photography. We share our thoughts and tips on travel and photography, accompanied by lots of photos of our adventures to inspire you to go see the world.
Our goal is to take our first-hand travel experiences and turn them into useful tips and information for people planning their own trips, for every style of travel and budget.
When we’re not writing about our travels, you’ll often find Laurence running his online travel photography course, and Jess writing longer-form pieces on travel, history, and culture over at Independent Travel Cats.
And the name? That’s a bit weird, isn’t it?
Is it a co-incidence that Laurence’s favourite author’s books happen to include a reference to the Universe in many of their titles? We think not.
Laurence is hitch hiking his way through the Universe folks. He just ended up on Earth for longer than expected, met a girl from Ohio… you know how it goes. This blog is about life, the universe, and everything…
What’s next?
We’re always having adventures! We’re going to keep exploring the USA, UK, and Europe, with trips further afield depending on where our mood takes us.
What else do you write about?
Laurence likes travelling, taking pictures, and technology. He likes to write about how he experiences travel, share tips on how to make the most of your travel experiences and take better photos, technology tips related to travel and photography, and does his best to share some awesome photos.
Jess writes more long-form posts on everything from the psychology of travel through to detailed trip advice and stories. You should head on over to the Independent Travel Cats blog for more of those type of stories.
I like your stuff, how do I tell the world about it?
The simplest way is to hit any one of the sharing buttons on each post.
How can I keep up to date with your adventures?
The best way is to sign up for our monthly newsletter. As well as sharing all our travel news and plans, we give travel and photography tips and run an exclusive giveaway for newsletter subscribers.
You can sign up for that (and see our latest giveaway) here.
How do you keep your content accurate and up to date?
We visit every destination, attraction, and product on this site personally, usually on multiple trips, and we take all the photos ourselves. Where prices, opening hours, transport details, or product specifications matter, we verify them against the operator’s own site before publishing, and we update articles as things change.
If we get something wrong, please let us know in the comments or by email at laurence at findingtheuniverse.com, and we’ll fix it. If we’ve been hosted on a trip or received a product for review, we always disclose that on the article in question.
Do you get paid to do this?
Not in the traditional salaried sense. Any revenue comes from advertising content, partnerships with travel brands, and affiliate income when you purchase from a brand or product we believe in and link to.
Note: if you are a brand who wants to find out about how we can work together and feature you on the site (one of the world’s most popular travel blogs, which has also been featured by Buzzfeed, Facebook, Instagram, CNN, National Geographic, USA Today, and more), then check out our partnership page instead.
Isn’t travelling so often bad for the environment?
In a word, yes. We are very aware that travel is not exactly environmentally friendly, especially flights. We do a number of things to try and minimize our carbon footprint. First, we calculate our carbon footprint from all our travels each year, and offset it. You can read about that here.
We also do our best to minimize the trips we take that require flying. If we do fly, we try to take longer trips, and see more, so we aren’t hopping around on flights. We also try to take more local trips (hence all our Scotland and UK content from our time living there) that we can achieve either by car, or even public transport.
Finally, whilst this isn’t related directly to the environment, we do want to leverage our blogs and give back. Each year we pick a charity that is related to travel and our personal experiences, and donate some of the income from our blogs to that charity. You can read about that on our charitable giving page.
Can I buy or use your photos?
Of course. We take all the photos on the site, and pretty much every shot you see is available for sale. Head over to our photography sales page for more information and to place an order.
Laurence currently shoots with a Canon EOS R5 (more on our photography gear here). For other needs, just drop Laurence an e-mail at laurence at findingtheuniverse.com, and we can work something out.
How can I contact you?
E-mail is the best way: laurence at findingtheuniverse.com. Or you can just leave a comment in the comments box if you have thoughts on a particular post.
Where else can I follow you?
You can find us at all kinds of places on the web:
- on Twitter / X as Lozula & TravelCatsBlog
- on Facebook at Finding The Universe & facebook.com/Independent Travel Cats
- on Instagram as Lozula & Independent_Travel_Cats
I have more questions!
Well, we can’t answer everything here, sadly. Post a comment somewhere on the site, or drop us a line, and we’ll do our best to help out. Or you can read 14 things you didn’t already know about Laurence, and see how you score. That’ll pass a bit of time.
I’ll leave you with this excellent comic from the xkcd genius, which explains us (Laurence at least) far better than I ever could…
