Leave The Map Behind

Growing up, I always had a profound wanderlust and craving to be outdoors. I was the kid who explored every secret spot in my neighborhood, and if I saw a tree, you better believe it was getting climbed. As I grew up and met my now wife Nikolina, that thirst for exploration started manifesting into weekend warrior trips to the mountains with goals to climb new peaks and hike different trails. In our primarily local travels around the American West, we eventually found an intense craving to explore the rest of our country and the world.

We quickly found that exploring the world is easier said than done. We were living classic American lives, commuting to and from work, paying bills, and buying a lot of material possessions. This lifestyle fell flat for us and didn’t give us a sense of purpose. Through research, we found information that we could travel for my wife’s work as a Mammographer, so we asked ourselves, why not? We quit our jobs, rented out our house, sold off possessions, threw the rest into a storage unit, and started traveling the U.S. for work with our cat Dexter and what we could fit inside two cars. We started traveling internationally between contracts, and we’ve been doing that for 3 years. We have been to 14 countries and counting, and this blog will offer travel advice and perspective on each of those beautiful places.