Culinary travel writer and publisher, Ayngelina Brogan

What happens when you decide to take a leave of absence from a successful advertising career to travel? Well, if you’re Ayngelina Brogan it means embarking on a journey that’s a lot bigger than getting on a plane and backpacking for a few months.

In this week’s episode of our Creative Canadian Women series I sit down to chat with Ayngelina so we can all get to know my September co-host better.

Ayngelina Brogan is the publisher of the popular culinary travel website, Bacon is Magic, that shares “the best food around the world and how to make it at home”. She started the site in 2010 as she embarked on a year of travel after taking a leave of absence from her Toronto advertising agency career. That leave of absence turned into a true journey - of travel, self-discovery and the road to successful entrepreneurship. 10 years in, she now splits her time between Havana, Cuba, her home just outside of Halifax, Nova Scotia and, when we’re not in the midst of a global pandemic, traveling the world in search of good things to eat.

Listen To the Episode

Here’s a direct link to Episode 25 - or you can listen via the players below:

When Ayngelina Brogan was a kid writing every day and filling up journals with details of her life, she didn’t think of herself as somebody who was creative. Nor did she have an inkling that one day, people all over the world would want to follow along with her stories - whether it was through her writing, her photography or her videos.

She also had no idea that in the year where she’s celebrating the 10th anniversary of her popular culinary travel website, Bacon is Magic, that she’d find her self grounded - back at home in Nova Scotia, living with her mom. A travel website with no travel.

But such is the year 2020 where so many of us have found ourselves in highly altered circumstances that we didn’t expect. (But we’ll talk more about pivoting in times of change next week.)

How does a self-proclaimed non-creative who embarks on a science degree at Dalhousie University wind up traveling the world and producing engaging travel content as a decidedly creative writer, photographer and videographer for a decade?

Well, it wasn’t long into working towards that science degree that Ayngelina met somebody who did PR for Acadia university - a career she didn’t know even existed, but that used so many of the skills she had learned in high school. So she switched to the business faculty for a year and then left the following year to head to Mt. St. Vincent University to enroll in their public relations program.

After graduation she spent some time working at a PR agency but, when she realized the marketing department got the lion’s share of client budgets, she decided that’s where she wanted to be. So in 2001, she left Atlantic Canada and headed to Toronto to join an ad agency.

taj mahal 10.jpg — “I think regret is probably the most terrifying thing in my life. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. Mistakes… you get over. But having the regret of not doing something was just something I couldn’t get over”

The Big Question

Ayngelina loved the advertising agency environment and found herself thriving - moving forward in her career quickly. But then… she turned 30. And that’s when she started to wonder…

how long do I have left here before I have to have children and this part of my life could be over?

It’s a question a lot of women with thriving careers have asked themselves and, it’s a question a lot of us aren’t sure we should say out loud. But that wasn’t all - there was something else nagging at Ayngelina as well… an unsettled feeling that she was settling. In her own words she was

“95% happy…and for so many people that’s enough. To be 95% is happier than most people but for me, I only felt the 5% that was missing. I couldn’t understand why everyone else was so content and why I was still searching for something”

She was making more money than she needed, had a job where she was appreciated, good friends, a long term boyfriend - all the boxes were ticked to show that she’d “made it” and yet, she felt like this couldn’t be it. There had to be something else.

She had always had a lifelong love of travel, often taking less salary in exchange for more vacation time and this seemed like the right time to head out and see the world - and adventure before settling down to have a family. But, the idea of taking a career break and traveling solo was a scary prospect and she worked for months to convince her partner to come with her - with no luck.

And so, she decided to go it alone because while she was afraid to head out on her own, the fear of not going and missing out on the opportunity was bigger.

I think regret is probably the most terrifying thing in my life. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. Mistakes… you get over. But having the regret of not doing something was just something I couldn’t get over.

What started out as a planned short term career break in 2010 turned into a 10 year journey of entrepreneurship through the quickly changing landscape of digital content creation.

Leaving On A Jet Plane

Before leaving on her trip, Ayngelina started a small website on WordPress called Bacon is Magic. It was meant to be a portfolio of sorts - so she could show family, friends and potential employers what she had been doing during her year away. Blogging, at the time, was not a well defined career path with the potential for full time income. For most, it was a hobby, or a “jobby” at best, with enough income coming in to pay for a few extras or, in the case of travel writers, get them to the next destination.

But that first year of travel was not the glamorous life you see so many influencers portray on social media. There were no smart phones. She got lost. A lot. Her luggage didn’t always show up. She barely spoke a word of Spanish (but had chosen to start her journey in Mexico). She missed her boyfriend, she constantly felt like she didn’t know what was going on around her and she spent a lot of time crying on curbs and in buses.

All throughout that first year she kept getting emails telling her how brave she was which prompted her to write an article called The Year I Walked Away From Love describing all the conflict and fear that comes from leaving things behind. Travel didn’t give her the light bulb moment she had hoped for but what she realized over time is that life is like a slow dimmer that gently illuminates the road you’re meant to travel down with many paths and side streets along the way.

The Road To Finding Ayngelina

While her initial itinerary included touring through Latin America before heading to South Africa and then up through the “stan” countries, Ayngelina never made it out of Latin America on that first year away. She fell in love with the area, started to learn Spanish (she’s now fluent) and immersed herself in the cultures and the people.

Slowly, she started to learn who she was when there weren’t other people around to define her and that is truly the greatest gift of long term travel for many people. Upon returning home for the first time after a year and a half away, she had opened up, become a warmer person who had learned to lighten up and be a bit more vulnerable.

Despite a year and a half of travel that had, in many ways been frustrating and unhappy, Ayngelina knew this trip home was just a pit stop before heading back out. By this point, she had connected with other travel bloggers and was starting to feel like she had a community and she wanted to see where it would go. Could she explore an unconventional life and make it work?

The Road To Entrepreneurship

Up until this point, she had been living off her savings in countries with a lower cost of living than what she was used to. And while travel blogging wasn’t really at a point where it could pay the bills for most, Ayngelina could see possibilities. Her marketing background kicked in and she started to see how she could make herself useful to tourism agencies and brands through the press trips that were starting to come her way.

While those first press trips didn’t pay - they were simply a trade of a great paid trip in exchange for written content about the destination - she did manage to land a freelance writing job for About.com as their South America guide. It paid $900 a month, which covered off her monthly expenses.

But those free trips, as anyone who has worked in the influencer field knows, are never really free. They’re a tremendous amount of work with long days and long nights of tight itineraries, a lot of time in front of a laptop and many deliverables for clients. Ayngelina started to think about how she could take this blog, which was a fun hobby that gave her new opportunities, and turn it into a long term business endeavour that could be sustaining.

This was the turning point. She stopped doing free trips and started taking a good hard look at what the actual business of Bacon is Magic was going to be. She knew travel burn out was a real thing (she had experienced it first hand) and needed to avoid it. It meant having a home base. It meant making connections with real people so she didn’t lose herself - and so she could find paying work.

The Business of Bacon if Magic

One of the first things she did was get a cheap apartment in Toronto, where most of Canada’s large agencies were located. This would be her home base. With her background in marketing and PR, pitching was not new to her and she set about introducing herself to agencies around the city who worked with clients that might be a good fit for her website. She aimed for in person meetings so she could show agency staff the work that she did and the things she could help them with.

Paying bloggers was still in its infancy in Canada in 2014 but Ayngelina knew what agencies were usually looking for. She had the in house agency experience to present them with ideas that would appeal to them while also encouraging them to come to her prior to pitching their clients to see what she could do on a particular campaign.

Soon she was able to charge rates that were at the top end of the spectrum for bloggers in Canada at that time and she did it by taking the time to show her value to potential clients and give them solutions to their problems. And, she was confident in the value she brought to the table. She knew she didn’t want to overwhelm her readers with branded content and that anyone she worked with had to be a good fit for her audience and that made her willing to be patient for the right opportunities to come up.

And Then There Was a Restaurant

It was around 2015 that another bend in the road came up. Ayngelina’s site was doing well, she was doing some great travel, she had an engaged audience, solid and appreciative brand partners and things were ticking along really well. But it was on a trip to Prince Edward Island that she met a chef and that’s when she walked back towards love.

It didn’t take long before the chef had accompanied her back to Toronto and she was helping him run a popup restaurant in the back of a dive bar. Then the two of them launched a Kickstarter campaign to open their own stand alone restaurant. It was the first Kickstarter restaurant campaign in Canada and it resulted in them opening their restaurant on Toronto’s Queen Street West. It was an unexpected path for somebody who had never wanted to open a restaurant or settle down with a chef - or for somebody who traveled frequently for their career. For many, it looked like she had found the fairy tale ending: the chef and the culinary travel blogger.

The relationship was very public - the chef had a very popular instagram account and the Kickstarter campaign had created a lot of buzz. And while things were great for a while, eventually, the relationship started to falter and the decision to split up and sell the restaurant was made. Ending a relationship is never easy for anyone involved but ending a relationship that’s quite public is even more difficult and Ayngelina found herself retreating off of the internet. She eventually did write about the experience but it wasn’t until she had taken the time to process and work through her emotions.

The restaurant was a learning experience - one that has made her a better culinary writer today. She started to get back out on the road. She headed back to her happy place, Mexico. She cried on more buses as she healed her heart but she also embraced the fact that there were new opportunities waiting that she was now free to explore.

On to Cuba

While in Mexico, Ayngelina and some friends decided to take a short trip to Havana - a city she hadn’t been to yet and this led to the next chapter. After a discouraging few days of not finding the great food she had hoped for they met some locals who offered to take them off the beaten track to find that great food. And here she did have a light bulb moment!

If she, an experienced traveler who spoke the language and who could usually find the gems off of the tourist track, couldn’t find the great places to eat in Havana, how could the casual tourist? She decided to come back and rent an apartment for a month and really dive into Cuban culture with the plan to eventually write a guide for independent travelers.

That was two years ago and now, if she’s not traveling for work, or at home in Nova Scotia, she’s putting down some roots in Havana, a city she has fallen in love with.

And Then There Was a Global Pandemic

Halls Harbour Lobster Pound ayngelina.jpg

The Covid-19 pandemic has dealt a massive blow to the travel and tourism industry this year (2020). In March, Ayngelina flew home to Nova Scotia when Prime Minister Trudeau put out the call for Canadians abroad to come home. She spent 14 days in quarantine and while at the time she thought she’d be back up and traveling in a few months, things haven’t worked out quite like that.

But for now, she’s content to be at home with family while she - like so many others - has figured out how to pivot her business during major global upheaval. And, perhaps surprisingly, the gift of time she’s been given by a global pandemic has allowed her to spend the summer months exploring (safely) Atlantic Canada, helping provincial tourism boards get the word out that there’s lots to see and do for locals right in their own backyard!