First Travel Blog
It’s the things we do, not the things we posses.
The moments in our lives cannot be sold, yet they are the most valuable things we own.
In 2015 I was certifiably broke. Freshly discharged from the Air Force, in a new city and starting my life over. Phon was working in the pharmacy at CVS, I was mowing lawns and going back to college. We were essentially starting at zero after being married for 5 years.
I enjoy looking back on those years because even though we had nothing, we had each other; and that was all we needed. Earlier that year, we had packed up my tiny Ford Focus with everything we owned and drove 2,000 miles from Connecticut to Texas.
For me, that was the first chapter of our life of travel. We stayed at the cheapest hotels we could find. There were crunchy beds and moldy walls that I will never forget (I’m looking at you Red Roof Inn), but we were infatuated with the journey. Crossing the country showed us that the world was only a road trip away.
We stopped and took pictures everywhere. We had a stuffed Mickey Mouse that we hid in pictures in different places. Hidden Mickey was our theme for the road trip. I remember running across the road to put Mickey Mouse in a tree that would be somewhere in the background of the picture. We had fun with simple things. The adventure, discovering places and doing something we’d never done before. That’s what made it fun.
I remember driving in East Texas and being in awe of the size of the Lone Star State. Driving by ranches of thousands of acres and knowing that someone owned all that land. Discovering a new place unlocked curiosity, imagination and inspiration inside of me.
I think that’s where my desire to discover and experience new places comes from. Exploring a new place gives me inspiration for what could be. It makes me question my goals, my ambition. It plants a seed in me to think differently, think bigger, think more concisely. Having good perspective is crucial in life, and many times the best way to improve perspective it is to go somewhere and get a new one!
The other thing I did was document our journey. When I talk to our daughter Alice, she remembers the year and destination of all our vacations. She remembers so many details, and I believe one of the reasons is because she loves the videos we’ve made of our trips.
I’ve always loved making videos, and making videos of our family vacations is one of my favorite things to do. For Fathers Day every year, I flip on our YouTube channel and go through all of our old trip videos. It’s the little documentary of our lives and one of the things I’m most grateful for.
Along the way of traveling and documenting our journey, we’ve built an audience that seems to have more questions and more desire to travel, which brings us here.
I have two reasons for our blog:
1.) Selfishly, I want to document more of our journey in a new way that I can look back on and enjoy. I love the pictures and videos we have, but those mediums don’t always express my thoughts the way writing can. I want to look back at these trips and remember deeper ideas and capture those moments of curiosity better.
2.) We’ve heard from many of our friends on social media that they want to travel more! This is truly exciting. Social is great for sharing the highlight reel of our trips, but I wanted a place to get more informative to help people that are ready to take action on creating more experiences.
So with that I give you our travel blog!
Some posts will be highly informational with everything you need to know about certain destinations. Other posts may be more thought filled and a journal entry from the road.
Either way, I hope you take some value and some joy from reading them because I know I truly enjoy writing them. Most of all, I hope we can be a small help in your journey to explore the world and create more moments that you can carry with you forever.
I’ll see you on the next adventure.
-Tim
