Author image
22 posts

Contrast on the Carretera

The month of February brought an exciting adventure we affectionately named “Vanuary”. For thirty days, we drove and camped our way across 3,860 kilometers of often unpaved and sometimes harrowing roads through Patagonia in a 2 person camper van. Our road trip started in the rolling hills of Chiloé island before returning to the continent of South America. Once back on the mainland, we hopped on the famed Carretera Austral, a beautiful and ambitious road carved through and around...
Continue Reading

In-between Time

Opportunities are in no short supply while traveling and making your plans as you go.  However, the process of identifying the next _thing_, planning, pursuing, and enjoying the thing don’t usually line up so perfectly as to not create some sort of gap, which itself requires planning and pursuing. During long-term travel, the inevitability of these  in-between times becomes a regular reality and adds a different cadance to life on the road. Sometimes, these times create much needed space...
Continue Reading

Heard it through the Grapevine

Vines heavy with lush grapes stretch out as far as the eye can see. A golden sun slinks behind layers of foothills only to be replaced by a harvest moon and a sky lousy with stars. There are cute wooden wine barrels and colorful bottles that catch the light stacked all around. You fill your wine glass whenever you need a quick refreshment. You wear a big, floppy hat, maybe with a ribbon, and walk through rows upon rows of...
Continue Reading

Writing on the Wall

The old, vibrant port city of Valparaíso often leaves foreigners emanating praise for the lively city of graffiti-covered, hilly streets while Chileans express concern or even disdain for the place. For us, visiting Valparaíso involved plenty of time in the  artistic streets, as well as time relaxing in our apartment rental with coffee and good books. Valparaíso serves the history and identity of Chile by its status as an important historical city—a major gateway to the outside world. For...
Continue Reading

Pisagua: Part II

We return, by bus, to Pisagua a week later. We are unable to resist the temptations of shipwrecks and our first dive in the southern hemisphere. By car, the trip only takes an hour from Iquique to Pisagua. On the bus we rattle around for nearly four hours. When the bus stops in town, we clip into our backpacks and walk down the now familiar main street. Marcos greets us again inside La Roca, and we settle into our seaside...
Continue Reading

Pisagua: Part I

We only know about the tiny town of Pisagua for a scrawny paragraph in our guidebook. We think it might be an interesting and worthwhile stop towards the end of our road trip through Northern Chile. We have a few days before we need to return the truck in Arica, and the guide book made it sound interesting enough. We decide to set aside one night for Pisagua before traveling south to Iquique for fuel. The place witnessed many dark...
Continue Reading

On the Open Road

The souped-up Volkswagen pickup truck humming underneath us, we drove outside of the city into a small, unassuming valley ready to begin our first real road trip since leaving the United States. Our first stop on the journey introduced us to oldest known mummies in the world—thousands of years older than the oldest Egyptian mummies. The creation of Chinchorro mummies involved a complicated and extensive removal of all organs and tissues, with the skin placed back over the bones,...
Continue Reading

Chile: A Brief Introduction

A few bus rides separated us from our first overland border crossing of the trip. The almost absurd vertical sprawl of Chile appealed to us. At least route planning might be simpler now that the pesky east and west directions were more limited. After a confusing stopover at the bus station in the last Peruvian city of Tacna, we finally scrambled together the Spanish instructions we received from about four different people, we found the correct bus and boarded with...
Continue Reading

Leaving Peru

After the high of hiking the Inca Trail and giving ourselves a few days to rest and process the experience, something just felt misaligned. We received bad news from home and homesickness snuck in. Plans we made in Peru fell through or never materialized. Slowly, and then all at once, we felt like we didn’t know what we were doing or where we we going.Completing the Inca Trail represented the end of the second chapter in our travels,...
Continue Reading

One Step at a Time

In third grade, I remember pumping my arms, running full force to the end of the soccer field. Our grade was tasked with running the mile that week in gym, undoubtedly my least favorite activity in my least favorite class. Breathing heavy, I willed myself to round the corner finishing my third lap. Everyone else had completed four. I was the only one still out on the field, and I wasn’t even close to finishing. Our unpleasant gym teacher...
Continue Reading

Good Air

For dinner, we ate a bag of chips and chugged a bottle of pineapple juice at the airport while waiting for our Airbnb host. Finally, we had arrived in the Caribbean island of Bonaire! Traveling from Bogotá, Colombia to the midpoint island of Curaçao was stress-free enough, but we narrowly caught our flight from Curaçao to Bonaire thanks to a timezone mishap. From the chaos of the last few hours, Colombia already felt distant in our minds. While purchasing our...
Continue Reading

A Little R & R

Dear Salento,I can’t believe we almost missed you, almost ignored you completely. You are so beautiful, so calm, so refreshing. Thank you for all the good times, and all the good coffee. We will never forget you. Thank you for being our favorite.A fan,KateAfter some fast-paced adventures in San Gil coupled with illness, we longed for quiet, calm, relaxing days. Salento, nestled in the foothills kind of between Medellin and Bogotá, proved to be just what...
Continue Reading

Road Friends

The bus stopped in front of what I believed to be a restaurant. As the time approached 11:00 at night, not much was open including the supposed restaurant or nearby buildings. Not exactly the bus station we expected, but Lane quickly identified we were in walking distance from our hostel.Until this point, we’d had a fairly mixed experience with hostels. Sure, our stays had been fine, but more accurately described as barely cheaper than many Airbnbs and...
Continue Reading

Moments in Medellín

If you read aloud in your head like I do, when you read Medellín, make sure the double “L” sound forms more of a “J” sound than a “Y”. That’s the only guidance I can provide right now regarding the Colombian accent. It’s a beautiful one and fairly easy to understand—please read as my comprehension didn’t drop drastically in comparison to Mexico. And comprehension level will vary quite dramatically given the topic of the conversation and...
Continue Reading

Colombia bringing the heat

I love small airports in foreign countries. Not just because they are easier to navigate than their behemoth cousins, but because I feel way more adventurous when they roll stairs up to the plane and you make your way down metal steps and place a foot in this new and foreign place. This happened when I landed in Belize City back in 2013. A storm had rolled in above the city, and I clung to my hat and the wind...
Continue Reading

Advancing the Slideshow

Your mind wanders in a different, more honest way when you are separated from the daily tasks and distractions of working life. Perhaps this mental wander provides a more honest depiction of who you really are, and not just what you are occupied with at the moment. Maybe the distance created by travel instigates a mental longing to familiarity and connecting with your roots. Although I’ve lived states away from my family for several years now, the miles seemed...
Continue Reading

Opportunistic Travel

Lane and I travel in a style we call “opportunistic travel”. By “opportunistic”, I mean that we generally don’t pre-plan too much while we travel. We’ll have a rough idea of where we want to go and what we might want to see, but ask us for specifics before we leave and we’ll shrug our shoulders. We generally book a hotel or an Airbnb no more than a week before and, more often, the day or so...
Continue Reading

What to know about Querétaro

Welcome to Querétaro—a colorful city where every baby is the cutest baby, there is never a wrong time to eat ice cream, and you may lose count of sweater-wearing chihuahuas you see while you walk past a clown show. Seriously. There are clowns everywhere. Clowns have been performing on the streets of Querétaro for over 300 years, at least that what we heard from one of the red-nosed performers. Consider that 300 years is older than our country and...
Continue Reading

The Lens of a New Language

We walked into our first day of Spanish language school not knowing what to expect. We sat down in narrow desks, waiting for our first instructor. With her long hair pulled back, she smiled kindly at us. I would later learn she was the age of my youngest sister. With that, we opened our books and began class. For the next hour, not a word in English was spoken. We reviewed basic concepts in Spanish; letters, numbers, nationalies, food. All...
Continue Reading

¿Comó se deci, 'goodbye'?

The departure for our trip was really a series of departures. First, we said goodbye to our amazing friends in Colorado, followed by our amazing friends in Austin, followed by my amazing family outside of Houston. Lane's family departure takes place in August, more on that later. To minimize the amount of tears shed compiling this post, I want to keep this short and sweet while including my favorite photos from our multi-tiered bon voyage. In Colorado, our friends hosted...
Continue Reading

The decision to travel

It all started with gingerbread. Traveling the world long term never crossed either of our minds as a possibility. I knew it was something some people did. Surely, I thought, it must require to you have lots of money, lots of time, or lots of guts to cut it alone. I didn't feel I fit any of these categories and put aside the idea of long-term travel. I grew up thinking I would really enjoy travel, but assumed it to...
Continue Reading

Hi there

On July 7th, and Lane I leave our colorful Colorado life to embark upon a year-long trip around the world! How this trip unfolds, only time (read as finances, encounters with friends we haven’t yet met, weather, whims, our inclination) will tell. We’ve spent countless hours choosing our backpacks and shoes, so I think we are all ready to go. Right? Our first stop brings of the journey brings us to Queretaro, Mexico. For one month, we hope...
Continue Reading