Hello, I’m Tony.
I am a middle aged recently married guy with some goals. I want to travel. A lot. I want to make traveling my life so I started this blog to document both how I make that happen and my travels themselves.
I learned to love travel early. My mother’s family is scattered across the United States and we drove to see them. Every couple of years we would take to the road to visit my aunt and uncle in the hills of Eastern Kentucky or Northern Mississippi or my other aunts and uncles in the bay area and Washington state. My mom, brother and I once took the train from Minneapolis to Utica in Upstate New York. We Flew to Orlando to visit family and go to Disney world. You get the point, we traveled quite a bit. Those experiences gave me my interests in history, geography and more. Learning about the places I went fascinated me, from the way people speak english differently in different parts of the country to the different types of bugs and amimals we would encounter along the way and more!
As a young adult I went to Europe for six weeks. Other than 2 days in Canada a year or two later, that was the last time i left the country. My passport expired as I dealt with health (lack of) wealth issues. For various reasons I didnt take a vacation of longer than four days for over fifteen years.
Then a few years ago, with my health issues worked out, i started a new career that paid well enough to allow me to travel again. Over the past four years i have taken two epic road trips with friends and spent a week on a canoe trip in the wilds of Northern Minnesota. In the midst of all that, I met my wife. It has been an eventful and wonderful last few years!
Somewhere in there I stumbled upon a podcast that was about location independence. The idea of being able to make money while traveling intrigued me so I decided to look into it. We all know how that can go. I was in a new career that i enjoy, had taken some great trips and just met the love of my life. I talked about it often enough when Jaklyn (my wife) and I discussed our dreams but I never really made the decision to do it. Not until COVID 19. I don’t think the pandemic was the reason i decided to make the change but the isolation of lockdown certainly made the decision easier.
I started to do some research and discussed it with the wife. We have now set about making it happen. This blog is my first concrete step in that direction.
Over the next few months I will detail our progress here. I will also be publishing essays written about my travels, from my first few roadtrips with my family growing up to my honeymoon during a pandemic. I will talk about my existing passions like hiking and fishing, my enjoyment of theater, from broadway musicals to drag shows. Most of all I want to talk about experiencing the different cultures and geography of the places we explore. We are super exited about where this journey will lead. A little scared too, its a big risk to give up what is comfortable and familiar. It is also a very exiting challenge, a challenge we think more people should take up, especially if your life is just not quite where you want it to be.
Join us, its gonna be a hell of a ride, no matter where this road leads!