I have a picture my wife took of me the minute I became infatuated with traveling around the world.  It’s August 30th, 2006 (Thanks timestamps!) and I’m sitting at my computer pointing at the monitor of what appears to be a longtail boat in Thailand.  I had stumbled upon a blog by a couple named Sarah and Brendan.  You can still see their website here. This was in 2006, before the indulgence of travel blogs that currently litter the internet existed. I asked my wife why she took the picture of me and she told me that I wouldn’t stop talking to her about it when she got home from work and I would sit and read these stories of this couple while she watched tv.  She could see I was hooked and thought it was cute.  Their blog linked to a blog of another guy doing this from Boston and his stories were just as impressive.  I wish his site still existed…The guy posted one blog post a day while he was gone for a year and he stuck to it.  It was impressive.

The idea of actually doing this ourselves sat in the back of my head and marinated for a while until one day Mandy brought it back up to me.  “Why aren’t we doing this?  You seemed so excited.”   I didn’t have a good answer, but I had a ton of excuses.  We don’t have enough money saved!  We have jobs!  We have cars!  We have stuff! What will we do with all our stuff?!

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