Meet the Antrim woman leading the sober travel revolution

‘I started experiencing blackouts for the first time… and I started getting into mischief, I just never knew what was going to happen every weekend and I was experiencing pains in my body.’

Lauren Burnison is recalling the moment that she knew she needed to make a change in her life.

‘I got to a point where it all just got to be too much psychologically after that kind of weekend and every weekend… and I thought I’m just going to try and not drink for one weekend.’

Much easier said than done but after taking herself away for an alcohol free weekend and getting through it she felt ‘vulnerable’ but ‘amazing’ and discovering adventure travel on her sobriety journey proved to be a saving grace.

These days the mum-of-one, who hails from Antrim, specialises in organising adventure trips for people who have decided to get sober through her company, We Love Lucid, which is inspired by her own story.

At the time of her blackouts, Lauren had been living in South Korea where she was teaching English in 2015 but her relationship with drugs and alcohol had begun years earlier.

‘I grew up in the Nineties, in this generation of drinking in the park… [but] my kind of initiation into drugs and alcohol is a little bit of a different one, I went on a church trip when I was 18 to South America and got into cocaine.

‘I used to go away and work, or work and party all over the world, I’ve always loved travelling but it was very much an extended party and when I went to South Korea in 2015 this time to teach English and well you could say, the s**t hit the fan,’ she tells EVOKE.

Recalling that time and how travel supported her decision to get sober she says: Being there was simultaneously the worst and best times of my life. I got into adventure travel when I got sober in South Korea and it was a real eye opener for me because it provided me with this freedom which I was trying to get for so long with alcohol and drugs.

‘You know, anybody who takes alcohol and drugs… essentially, it’s freedom that they’re after, either freedom from who they are, or freedom from uncomfortable feelings and uncomfortable situations and so I just fell in love with adventure travel. I got a bike, and I biked along the east coast of South Korea, which, in fact, was a big inspiration for me for one of the events I’m running next year.’

A round the world trip followed which saw her ride across the Mongolian Steppe on horseback and backpack through Siberia.

‘I did all of these things that I wanted to do for so long but wasn’t able to because I was either hungover or didn’t have the money,’ she explains.

The next step for Lauren was to launch We Love Lucid which caters to people who have been sober a number of years and which she launched on the tail end of COVID, running her first trip while she was seven months pregnant with her daughter.

‘So generally the trips have been, group trips of about 12 people, and everybody there has to be stable in their sobriety. These trips are not for people who are just recently sober, most people joining are in their first six or seven years of sobriety.

‘I started off running trips to Rhonda and the trips always included some kind of outdoor activity.’

‘In Rhonda we did moonlight kayaking in a big lake. We did cheese making one time, lots of nice food and alcohol free drinks, we usually get an alcohol free drinks company to sponsor us.’ Upcoming trips include sober hiking in the Balkans and the Camino de Santiago in 2025.

Lauren admits that she built her business model around the concept of flash packing where people in their thirties and forties enjoy boutique adventure travel but she’s not strict about the age range.

‘It’s more the focus of what the activities are and getting outside but generally we would get that age group, anything from 35 to 50 and a few years outside of that.’

Lauren has a mantra that she shares with those who don’t feel that they can enjoy a trip away without alcohol.

‘There’s a thing that happens when you quit drinking. All of your associations with fun are related to alcohol. You don’t have any memories that associate fun and not drinking, and so you feel this immense feeling of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out] [and] you just have to go through it.

‘And what happens then as time goes on and you start to gravitate towards doing other things, other activities that don’t involve alcohol, you build up this bank of memories and associations of fun and not drinking and after a while the balance kind of tips and I say it’s going from FOMO to JOMO [The Joy of Missing Out].

‘That’s what happens at the beginning you feel like “I’m going to be missing out, and life is boring and there is nothing going on” and it’s the same with the travel. People cannot get their heads around it and they come away on one of my trips and their eyes are really opened and they say this is brilliant and it fills people with such confidence.’

For more on Lauren’s sober travel company, We Love Lucid, check out their website.