Hi! I'm Elena! Welcome to my travel blog Creativelena.com.
For me, it is all about “life-seeing instead of sightseeing”: Join me as I create, eat & live my way around the world. Curious?
*Check out my book, “The Creative Traveler’s Handbook”, for learning more about what we mean by creative travel. Travelling means the world to me, makes me fit for everday life and sometimes, I trust, also calmer on the inside. Read this blog with a smile, share what you love and remember to check back regularly: After all, when was the last time you did something for the first time?
“You’re going to Switzerland to stay in a monastery!? Is that even possible?” There’s quite a few questions over my upcoming trip to Disentis Monastery in Switzerland, located in the Swiss canton of Grisons (Graubünden). And I must say, I’m actually quite excited myself – especially in times like these. Will it be possible to cross the border […]
“Isn’t it that you ARE already married?”, our friends are asking us these days, smiling. So what’s that thing you had there at Weissensee Lake in Carinthia, then (except it looked really good ..?). Well. It would not be the Paschinger family, if there wasn’t some degree of travelling involved in getting married. While it’s true […]
Our son Liam turns one today. One incredible year, likely as intense (or even more so) than many of my wild travel years before his birth. And what an exciting road it has been! So much that we’ve learned from and through him. For one, it’s that clichés (don’t) hold true. Some do, yes. But […]
I am full of what the Portuguese people call “saudades” right now. Saudades, a term deemed to describe the indescribable: A feeling of nostalgia, melancholy, a feeling of far-away-ness. The way it is, pictures like these won’t become reality quite so soon again, as it still was the case earlier this year, in January 2020, at […]
“Évora is, in my eyes, the most beautiful town in Portugal”, says Beatriz, as we meet her and her husband André in Lisbon. Évora, haven’t I been there before, I’m thinking. And remembering that yes: Back in spring 2015, I have been hosted on a foodie trip through Portugal’s Alentejo region, including a stop in Évora. […]
The year 2019 has come to an end, and we are busy preparing for our first flight to Lisbon with our seven months old son. Daddy being on (paid) leave time, and mummy utterly flexible working from home (or everywhere), we make use of this special family time given to us in order to travel both […]
For more than two years, I have been working with the tourism destination #VisitArdenne (the three country-region between Belgium, Luxemburg and France) in order to deliver a professional homepage for its international audience. The German edition www.visitardenne.com/de is now finally online (and so are the Dutch and English versions of the homepage), so you may navigate the […]
The city of Prague is at our very Austrian fingertips. There are hourly connections to reach the Czech capital city from Vienna, the distance is an easy four hours by train or car, and historically speaking, there are more commonalities than differences between our two countries. Strange, then, that we have never really been there before. […]
Our first trip with our little son outside Austria took us to Prague. By train. Why Prague? And why by train? Well, Prague is located at a distance from Vienna that on the one hand side can easily be combined with “baby sleep during the day” (it is about four hours by train), and on […]
“So how will you continue with your work?” – “Will you still be travelling as much?” – “Are you actually on maternity leave?” – “You know, you should really write a blog post about it, Elena!” Well, eventually I did, and here it is. Kudos to a new situation that is sometimes keeping me and […]