We’re Todd and Mairin, a married couple from Oregon who left the US in 2016 to take a sabbatical year. Eight years later, we’re still on the go. This is how that happened, and how a vague plan turned into the life we have now.
We left with two backpacks and a one-way ticket. The plan was a year off. We’re not experts, and we won’t pretend to be. We’re just two people who found a slower way to see the world.
A normal ten-day vacation to Mexico in early 2016 is what did it. We came home and realized that getting away every few years wasn’t what we wanted anymore. So we paid off the house, made our lists of where we wanted to go, and left on Election Day in November of 2016.
We landed in Manila with no real idea what we were doing. Eight years later we’re still out here, and we’ve never once regretted the leap.
For years the idea of long-term travel sat in the back of our minds. We’d honeymooned in South America, road-tripped the Pacific Northwest, and kept coming back to the same question: what if we just went?
So we did. We each wrote down the countries we most wanted to see, sold what we could, and flew out while we still had the means and the legs for it. First stop was a wine weekend in Sonoma. Then we got on a plane and didn’t look back.
We spent the first eight months backpacking Southeast Asia: the Philippines, Thailand, Myanmar, and Vietnam, with a side trip to South Korea. We learned to slow down the hard way, and to pack a lot lighter.
Then we jumped to Europe, bought a Fiat Ducato campervan, and put 14,000 km on it over seven months of vanlife, including the Wild Atlantic Way in Ireland. When we still weren’t ready to go home, we taught English in Thailand and Vietnam for most of 2018.
Going fast taught us to go slow. We started staying at least four days in a place, then a week, then longer. We wandered neighborhoods with no plan, lingered over long lunches, and learned a little of the language and a lot of the history.
Then we moved our English teaching online, which set us free to roam, and started international housesitting. We’ve now cared for homes and pets in eight countries, from Bangkok to Brooklyn to the south of Spain. Mairin is, for the record, a cat whisperer.
“We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us.”
After a year living in Albania and a long stretch of housesits, we settled into a home base in Málaga. We love the late dinners, the whitewashed villages a short drive away, and the slow rhythm of the south.
We still travel constantly, just slower than ever. We cook our way through new places, hunt down the local history, take the gentle hike instead of the hard one, and get gloriously lost on purpose. We write all of it down here, for fellow travelers who want depth over speed.
After eight years on the road, these are the rules we actually keep.
Stay longer, plan less, and let a place show you who it really is.
We pick fewer places and dig deeper. You can't just go, go, go.
We get to know a place through its markets, its meals, and its history.
We travel lightly, learn the customs, and try to leave it better.
Our short, practical guide to planning a slower trip — how to pick a base, how long to stay, and how to travel deeper without the overwhelm.
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