One Country Each Year (My First Blog Post)

"Where are we going this summer? Let's pick a place!" Wide-eyed and wild, I grinned at my husband.

Less than a month after returning from the rainforest in Costa Rica, I was already getting the itch. The bug. Restless feet. My Pinterest board crammed with links to favorite restaurants and photo-op's in far-away cities and my Instagram newsfeed overflowing with brightly-saturated pictures of lost alleyways in famous cities, I contemplated with my husband, Jet, about our next destination.

Exploring the base of Arenal Volcano, Costa Rica

"Where are we going this summer? Let's pick a place!" Wide-eyed and wild, I grinned at my husband.

Less than a month after returning from the rainforest in Costa Rica, I was already getting the itch. The bug. Restless feet. My Pinterest board crammed with links to favorite restaurants and photo-op's in far-away cities and my Instagram newsfeed overflowing with brightly-saturated pictures of lost alleyways in famous cities, I contemplated with my husband, Jet, about our next destination.

Japan. Iceland. Peru. South Korea. Croatia. Vietnam. Turkey. All places on our list. All places we will one day explore. Sometimes I catch my breath, calculating out the time I have left on Earth with all the places I have yet to see. I sometimes wonder why more people don't think like this.

We both work full time. We have a home, we cook dinner, we sit on the couch, and watch TV. We don't travel full time--we're not travel bloggers. We don't work for Nat Geo. We didn't quit our jobs and decide to travel for a year. For us, travel has become a long-term goal.

I'm a teacher and he is self-employed. We don't have children or huge financial obligations, so yes, we are lucky to have options. As I have the summer off and he is his own boss, taking several weeks off from year to year is totally doable.

But the justifications stop there. Travel is so much more than just a, "why not?" idea for us. I truly take to heart the saying, We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us. I don't feel like I've lived unless I've traveled.

One country a year. That's our goal. 40 or 50 years left on this planet to travel, and so many places yet to see. We all have our hobbies. We all have our ways of feeling alive. This happens to be our mutual interest. 

I built this blog because I'm not really sure how people traveled before Google Maps, Tripadvisor, Kayak, and Pinterest, some of my travel app standbys. I built this blog because I needed a place to share these travel experiences, learning some things the hard way, that I wish someone had told me before. I built this blog because there actually aren't too many travel blogs out there dedicated to the couple on the cheap. I build this blog to target an audience other than my friends and family, a little sick of hearing about my escapades on Facebook.

But mostly, I built this blog because I want others to have that itch like I do. To enjoy that juicy, delicious time before a trip begins and you're full of romantic, magnificent, and tremendous ideas about the places you will visit, and the time after when it was even more glorious than you could have imagined...

​Navigate through my photos on the main page, and see my ever-growing list of countries. Visit my blog for travel tips and destination allures for the countries we've experienced. Enjoy, reader, as I have enjoyed, and never lose that itch to travel, as I hope I never will!