Intro Blog

My mom spent 40 years as a middle school teacher… she’ll be receiving her sainthood any day now. For a while my father was also teaching, which meant our summers, thankfully, were filled with vacation. Now… they primarily consisted of hopping in a barren Ford Econoline van that my father added bucket seats to and enduring week-long drives through the great American West to some sort of national park. Because of this, I’ve seen Yellowstone, Rocky Mountain National, the Great Sand Dunes, Glacier National, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite and countless campgrounds in between. For this, I’m incredibly grateful.

This also meant that I never stepped foot on to an airplane before the age of 20. I actually realized about a year ago that I have never been on an airplane with either of my parents.

And then everything changed when Sarah and I got engaged and instead of asking for STUFF we were the first in our friend group to use Honeyfund. We put together a lovely list of all of the things we planned for our epic honeymoon, skipping all toasters and Kitchenaid mixers. We started planning a honeymoon in Chile and Argentina and I was forced to go to the passport office for the first time.

This was the beginning of my personal obsession with being anywhere other than “home” and the first time I started feeling like “home” was a state of mind and not a physical place. Home is my abuelita’s enchiladas. Home is the theater where I fell in love with Shakespeare. Home is the smell of baked bread from the bakery next door. Home is truly where the heart is… and we know the heart will wander, now don’t we?

As soon as we got to Argentina, I started trying to figure out how to move there. Literally. My first truly international trip and I’m already trying to MOVE there. And, frankly, I figured it out and it became a plan, but that’s a story for another time. I was star struck by everything… the difference in culture, the food and wine I was having that I knew was once in a lifetime, the way people in other countries lived and the difference between them and everything I knew.

More interestingly, I was also fascinated by the challenges. I knew a little bit of Spanish, pero solo sabía hablar el español de cocina. Necesitaba mucha práctica. Also, this was before cellphones and Google Maps. We were literally grabbing printed maps everywhere we could and trying to find things called “camino de tierra firme” or “firm dirt road.” It was hard. We made mistakes, and one of them even sent us in the wrong direction for about an hour… but we stumbled upon a winery and a lunch that was one of our favorites. That would never happen today and that’s kind of a shame.

Travel isn’t easy… but as of late we started having conversations about how everything is a little too easy now. I’d like for my kids to go through a little adversity, even if that’s just a train delay. Being obsessed with travel and having worked in the service industry for years, one of my favorite writers is Anthony Bourdain. He once said “If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.”

And the time for us to move, is now.