She almost didn’t make it here. Grateful she did.
Travel was never supposed to be part of the plan. Growing up in a small town where survival was the only agenda on the table, I spent my childhood in books, reading about places, cultures, and lives that felt like another world entirely. The world outside those pages was harder. A baby at 15. Three kids by 21. A marriage that took more than it gave. Decades of living paycheck to paycheck and putting everyone else’s needs ahead of my own.
I did what I had to do. Got a trade at 17. Became a nurse. Left. Rebuilt.
Then after the pandemic slowed down and I finally had a moment to look up and breathe, I got my kids’ passports and my own and boarded a flight to Ghana.
Something changed on that trip that no amount of time or therapy had touched. Standing in a place where my ancestors stood, surrounded by a culture that did not ask me to shrink, I felt something settle inside me that had been restless my whole life. I came home different. Started seeing the glass as half full instead of half empty. Started unlearning everything I had been told about who I was allowed to be.
I have been traveling ever since.
What this site is really about
Shae B. Travelz exists because of a specific woman. She is in her 20s or 30s. She has been through things. She works hard, takes care of everyone around her, and somewhere in the back of her mind is a place she has always wanted to go: a trip that feels just out of reach, just too complicated, just not quite meant for someone like her.
This site is for her.
Every guide, every itinerary, every packing list, and every budget breakdown on this site is built around one question: what does a woman who looks like us actually need to know to take this trip and feel safe, prepared, and fully herself while she is there?
Not the highlight reel. The real information. What to book first, what it actually costs, what it feels like to walk into a new country prepared instead of scrambling. The details that make the difference between a trip that overwhelms you and one that changes you.
A little more about me
Nurse. Mom of three. South Carolina based. Deeply committed to my garden, my home, and the particular satisfaction of taking an idea from nothing and building it into something real.
I travel as a mom, as a solo woman, and as a Black woman who spent too many years being told the world was not built for her and who now goes out of her way to prove otherwise.
Travel, for me, is not about escaping. It is about arriving. At new places, at new understanding, at a version of myself I could not have met if I had stayed home.
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