“To travel is to live”
– Hans Christian Anderson
Our Story
Hi!
We’re Tony and Katarina Melchiorri. I think our story started the same as a lot of people’s. We toyed with the idea of longterm traveling. Read the blogs. The stories. Took as many international trips as we could, usually no more than a week at a time thanks to our work schedules.
For several years we dreamed about spending a year or more traveling the world. But we just kept putting it off over and over. We had plenty of reasons which you might have thought of yourself. Careers, buying a house, all that fun stuff.
Well, this is kind of corny, but I remember a line in The Lumineer’s music video, “The Ballad of Cleopatra,” where a young guy says to his girlfriend (and I might be paraphrasing): “If you don’t leave this town now, you never will.”
We realized we just had to do it. Make a plan and go. There would always be reasons not to go. Reasons to keep us rooted.
But there was one question that kept coming up. In ten, twenty, thirty years, what would we regret more?
We decided we needed to take the plunge.
In December of 2021, we booked a one way ticket to Lima, Peru and begin our lives on the road. We’d traveled everywhere from Southeast Asia to central Africa, around South America and Europe, but never before had we spent more than a couple weeks abroad at a time.
Living and traveling slowly in new parts of the world just hit different. It’s allowed us to get a better grasp of the locations we visit. We’re definitely lucky to get to spend the time we do exploring new cities, trying new foods, and embarking on new adventures. Our hope is that this blog can make traveling, short or long term, more accessible. Hopefully we can provide the resources, itineraries, and stories that help someone else make the leap, whether it’s a weekend journey to a new place or a year-long trip around the world.
Together, we’re going to write our adventure.
(Fine, it’s cheesy. But whatever!)
Best,
Tony and Katarina
How’d we make it happen?
Before the big shift, Katarina was a licensed psychologist and Tony ran a bioprinting lab at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
So how did we make the shift?
Tony is also a science fiction author.
We’re fortunate that Tony’s career supports us wherever we go. And being a writer, he can work anywhere in the world.
Now realistically, we’re not just on one long-term vacation. We’re working wherever we go. Tony’s got book deadlines, contracts, and all the other fun business stuff that comes with being a published author to deal with.
But with that career comes the freedom and financial support that has made this possible.
While we earn some very small commissions from affiliate links on this website, travel blogging isn’t even close to being our main source of income. So rest assured, we’re doing this as a passion project, sharing the experiences and places we love with other people. Plus, using this as a chance to document our adventures.
Now the “write our adventure” thing hopefully makes even more sense. The whole “Tony being a writer” and all. 🙂
About the Blog
We’ve started the blog as a passion project. While Tony’s a professional author, neither one of us are typical journalists and certainly not award-winning photographers.
But we still hope we have something helpful to share. We’ve hiked and camped on an active volcano in Guatemala, meditated with monks in Japan, ate bugs in Cambodia, and come face-to-face with gorillas in Uganda. We want to share all we can on these adventures so others can embark on their own adventures. Hopefully something we’ve written can help you plan your next trip!
Places We’ve Been
We’re slowly trying to catch the blog up on all the different places we’ve been. But the list is probably going to be longer than what we’ve got under our destinations list for a long while. So just in case you have questions or are interested in anywhere we’ve traveled, here’s what where we’ve been:
- Argentina
- Austria
- Azerbaijan
- Bahamas
- Belize
- Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Brazil
- Bulgaria
- Cambodia
- Canada
- Cayman Islands
- Costa Rica
- Croatia
- Estonia
- France
- Georgia
- Germany
- Greece
- Guatemala
- Honduras
- Hungary
- Ireland
- Italy
- Japan
- Jordan
- Latvia
- Lithuania
- Mexico
- Montenegro
- Morocco
- Norway
- Peru
- Portugal
- Romania
- Serbia
- South Korea
- Spain
- Taiwan
- Thailand
- Turkey
- Uganda
- United Kingdom
- United States of America
- Vietnam