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.
Everything we write is based on our own personal travel experiences and using our own photos.
We visit all the places we write about (usually multiple times), cover our own costs (except in very rare circumstances), and share what we know to help you plan your own independent adventures around the world. We also do our best to keep our content up to date and as accurate as possible.
Our main focus on our blogs is travel in Europe and the USA, as well as photography tips and advice. However we do cover other parts of the world as well as you can see by checking out our destinations page.
This page has everything you need to know to learn all 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 who you are?
Hi, we’re Laurence and Jessica. We’re full-time travelers, photographers and writers slowly exploring the world, and we’re currently based in the USA after eight years living and travelling in the UK and Europe. More on that shortly.
Laurence (that’s me!) is an award-winning travel photographer and writer from the UK. He’s proud to have seen his photos appear on the BBC, National Geographic homepage, and various newspapers and other media outlets around the world.
Photography is his real passion, and he loves nothing more than being out in the world with a camera, or teaching other people how to get better photos through his online photography course. He started this blog, Finding the Universe, in 2010.
Jessica is an award-winning travel writer from the USA, who started her blog in 2013. Her passion is discovering the culture and history of a destination. She also loves to meet cats all around the world.
She’s won awards for her travel writing at a variety of levels, and loves to really dive deep into the details in her writing.
When and How Did You Start Travelling?
Laurence started his full-time travel journey in June 2009 after quitting his 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. She’s 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. Since meeting we’ve decided to move on through life together, share the experience of travel, and see what the world has in store for us!
Where have you been?
Laurence’s first adventure after leaving his corporate career was a road trip around Australia in 2009.
This trip was a yearlong 60,000km adventure around Australia, much of which you can read about here.
Laurence then spent a summer living in Germany, followed by a year travelling New Zealand by campervan, largely hunting Lord of the Rings filming locations. He also spent summers helping run a small adults only campsite in France.
After meeting in 2014 in Italy, we’ve spent time travelling in Europe, North America & Asia – all sorts of places! Check out the blog navigation bar to see all the places we’ve been, and if you’re interested to hear more about Jessica’s origin story, check out her dedicated about us page.
At the moment we’re based in the USA, where we moved after eight happy years living in the UK. In the UK we spent four years living in Edinburgh and four years living in Bath, both beautiful cities. You may have seen us looking for our home in Edinburgh in fact in an episode of US TV show House Hunters International!
Where are you from?
Laurence was born in the UK, but spent a lot of his childhood growing up on a small desert island in the Seychelles. Jessica is from Ohio in the USA, and moved to live in 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 serves as the focal point for our travels and associated photography. We share our thoughts and tips on traveling and photography, accompanies by lots of photos of our adventures to inspire you to go and 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.
We exclusively write about destinations we have experienced ourselves (usually on multiple trips), so the information is accurate, relevant and useful.
We also do our best to keep all our content up to date, usually by revisiting the same destination multiple times over the years to check the accuracy of our information. It’s really important to us that we help you by providing what we think is helpful, useful, and above all, correct information.
When we’re not writing about our trips, we’ll often be talking about photography (Laurence also runs an online photography course) or offering advice from our travel experiences. It’s only one half of our online presence – Jessica also runs a travel blog which you can find 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 be 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 as well as an exclusive giveaway for newsletter subscribers.
You can sign up for that (and see our latest giveaway!) here.
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 findingtheniverse.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…
