Welcome to Hippie in Heels! We’re glad you’re here.

This blog was started by Rachel Jones in 2013 to record her wild and magical life around the world. Rachel spent the first part of her life in small town Ohio with her parents and older brother, Travis. There she created memories with friends she would have her entire life. After going to the Ohio State University, where she earned her degree as a nurse, she decided there was a lot more to life, and she was going to find it.

Rachel dabbled in travel during undergrad, with two summers backpacking in Europe and one month living in Uganda, but her life really changed when she decided to quit nursing while in Charlotte, NC to backpack India for 3 months… solo. It was at the end of that trip that she met Ben, and only a few months later, after a short return to nursing, she decided to uproot her life and move to a little Indian state called Goa.

She would call Goa home for the next six years, starting Hippie in Heels during her second year. From then on, she inspired fans all around the world as she regaled readers with tales of life with Ben in the jungle and her increasingly more glamorous adventures around the globe. She wrote like she was giving advice to her same best friends from Ohio and at one point, she was reaching over a million readers worldwide.

Unfortunately, we lost Rachel in late April 2019, which you can read about here.

Hippie in Heels Today

“You belong among the wildflowers
You belong in a boat out at sea
You belong with your love on your arm
You belong somewhere you feel free” 

– Tom Petty’s “Wildflower”

While Rachel is among the wildflowers now, her hundreds of posts and words are the legacy of Hippie in Heels and are still here. We, her family, hope to continue her memory through the same ways she reached all of you. We want to help you travel and pursue the adventures you’ve been putting off, and we want to keep her spirit alive in the very site she put her heart and soul into.

Whenever possible we are keeping Rachel’s articles untouched. That said, to keep the blog fresh, one or more of the below is consistently underway:

  • We selectively update Rachel’s articles in partnership with Rachel’s good friend, Jules. Jules lives in Goa and provides honest and accurate updates regarding restaurants, places to stay, fun things to do & such!
  • We work with select female-solo-travel-freelance writers, many of whom knew or knew of Rachel, to add new content. It’s important to us that the writers embrace the same love of travel Rachel did.
  • Samantha, Rachel’s go-to support while she ran Hippie in Heels, continues to run the day to day of the blog. She does a fantastic job! You should absolutely check out her own blog There She Goes Again
  • We intend to highlight female travel bloggers and you can see a few of those here here and here
  • Finally, we are working to update Rachel’s ebooks by the end of 2020

We appreciate you being here and hope your travel experiences are amazing.