About me

Hi, My name is Cindy Rhoads and I am the Owner of Because I’m Worth It Travel & Retreats.  I love to travel and I believe that travel changes lives!  I’ve always been the one that will say “yes” to any opportunity to travel anywhere and I’m always trying to get friends to go on that next adventure to explore the world with me.  Over the past 30 years, I’ve traveled the world solo, with friends, with family...I’ve organized groups and have taken  a bunch of teenagers on a cruise a few times.  I’m really good at this stuff and I love doing it!  So when I was trying to decide what to do with my life after I retire in 2022, becoming a travel agent was at the top of my list!  The COVID shutdowns helped to accelerate my plans by giving me the time away from my usually hectic life to actually take the classes to become a certified travel agent and I passed the test in November 2020.

The retreat aspect of my business came about after the trip of a lifetime to Fiji in early 2020..right before the shutdowns!   I saw a post by Elizabeth Gilbert (the author) where she said that she was invited to a women’s retreat in Fiji in February to do a creativity workshop and if it spoke to anyone, here was the link.  It spoke to me…I was enchanted with the idea of going to Fiji!  I clicked on the link to a website for The Ultimate Girls Week Away!  It was inviting women from all over the world to come to a resort on an island in Fiji for a week.  We would have the island to ourselves!   It offered all the activities you could imagine…from yoga to meditation to art to self-help to life planning.  Although I was enchanted with the whole idea, I immediately started talking myself out of it.  It was too expensive...I’d have to take time away from work...all my friends thought I was crazy...but I kept going to the site and one night, I decided to just go for it!    As I sat there on my couch with my finger hovering over the “submit” button, I was hearing the words of well-meaning friends in my head telling me I was crazy to go half way around the world on my own and my practical self telling me that I was killing my carefully balanced budget and I asked myself out loud why am I doing this??!!  And my answer was a resounding BECAUSE I’M WORTH IT!!!   (Just in case you were wondering how I came up with the name for this business….)

So I went to that women’s retreat in Fiji and it changed my life.  I needed that trip.  More than I realized.  When I stepped off of that plane in Fiji, I was nobody’s mom, wife, sister, friend, aunt, co-worker, girlfriend, etc.   I had the luxury of spending a week doing things for me.  I walked on the beach every morning.   I went to Liz’s creativity workshop and just let go of a bunch of stuff that I had no control over.  I tried yoga.  I tried Quoya (a type of dancing).  I laughed.  I cried.   I met dozens of amazing women from all over the world with amazing stories that I now call friends.   It was so worth it...  

I came home a different person.   And I knew that, in addition to helping friends create wonderful travel memories,  I wanted to recreate that magic of retreats  for other women  to have the same experience that I was blessed to have in Fiji!

SO, whether it’s the idea of a fun trip for you, your family or friends that brought you here or a curiosity about the retreat part of the business…I thank you for stopping by and hope I have the honor of helping to make your travel dreams come true!  Because you are worth it!!  ;)

~CIndy