At Automattic, you get this awesome 5-year perk, a 3-month vacation, a well-deserved sabbatical. I was due for this perk in December 2020, but because of the pandemic, I decided to postpone it to 2022, since we really wanted to travel, and things were quite bad back then.
When my sabbatical started, in March 2022, it was a mix of feelings, you want to do lots of things with so much availability, but at the same time, you don’t want to overwhelm yourself. So the only planned thing we had was a trip to the US. Our last time there was back in 2019, so we were pretty excited! 😄
I’ve always been a big fan of Florida, to be more exact, Miami – Orlando, but this time we wanted to go to a different place, and avoid touristic areas (because of the pandemic, but still be close to Orlando, hahaha). So we went to Tampa, and it’s now our new favorite place! I’m sharing below a few pictures of our trip, and a couple other things we did afterwards!
Our hotel was just across the street from the University of South Florida, a really nice place to walk!
Being closer to Orlando, we couldn’t miss the famous boat ride to get the Mickey Beignets!
I also fulfilled a dream of 10 years and finally got a nice camera to take better shots.
After Tampa, we spent the last days of our trip in Fort Lauderdale, to be closer to the airport in Miami. It was an oceanfront hotel with a very nice view, so I was able to use the new camera even more!
Back home, we went to my favorite city, Gramado, to a hotel that won as the most romantic hotel in the world by TripAdvisor, it was magical!
And the city also has a nice Zoo, so I had the opportunity to take more pictures!
These 3 months flew by, and I went back to work on June 1st, into a rotation outside of support, working with training and feedback. The sabbatical was such a unique and interesting experience, I was excited to be back! ❤️
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