The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.

St. Agustine

Many people would say we’ve already lived adventurous lives. Jason served on active duty for 29 years in the Army, was deployed five times to combat zones, was stationed in Germany twice, traveled in many countries, and has lived in five states. Jennifer has lived in Germany, lived in four states, and has solo-traveled to many, many countries. We used to attribute all the moving around to our careers, but now that our lives are in our own hands, we realize we still want to wander! So, today marks the first day of what we hope will be a year of wandering the world.

We are not unique in our desire to travel and to wander. We have met many people on our past travels who are like us. Either military and retired, child-free, remote workers, or travel lovers. But we also acknowledge that we have many resources others might not. A life of selfless service to our country and hard work have earned us some benefits that take others a lifetime to achieve: affordable, lifetime health insurance coverage; a comfortable pension at an early age; college educations; supportive families; and generous employers who allow us to work remotely. 

This blog serves several purposes: a way for our family and friends to keep up with us, a place to chronicle our thoughts and locations, and a resource to those who might need some practical advice, or some play-by-play, on the logistics of traveling. 

This blog should be interesting. Anyone who knows us knows that we are VERY different from each other and have VERY different perspectives. So, this blog is an attempt to capture both sides of the story with SHE SAID and HE SAID commentary. We’ll try to be as transparent as possible to be helpful—without sounding like Archie and Edith. 

To know you are hearing Jen’s thoughts, the font will be purple.

To know you are hearing Jason’s thoughts, the font will be blue.

So, our hope is to travel for one-year to “live” in as many places as possible. We say live, but what we mean is that we intend to use AirBnBs and live like locals for at least three weeks. Eating out will be minimum, laundry must be done, use of public transportation rather than rental cars or taxis, and finding the grocery store is priority rather than the closest cocktail bar. We plan to do a culture/history walk at each new location and to learn as much about the location as possible during our stay. 

Our first trip is to Italy, where we have rented a flat in a small Tuscan town called Figline Valdarno. Italy was and is on our future plans. Part of this trip will be to look at some long term apartments. One possibility is to move to Italy as our home base for this year of living abroad because it makes trips so much cheap and easier for transportation. 

For the next blog, we thought we’d post and answer some of the questions our friends and family have asked us.

Obviously, Jason has had a hand in the planning of this potential year of wandering, otherwise there would be no answers for these questions because I would have dropped everything and said: We’ll figure it out as we go!We’ll figure it out as we go. Let’s GO!

Most of these are answered by me because Jason has no friends. Just kidding!

Fine by me.

**Please note that this blog began on March 8, 2020—the day before we left Louisville for a Space A flight from Dover, DE to Spangdahlem, Germany. After landing in Germany on March 10, 2020, we learned that Italy had instituted a lockdown due to the spread of the coronavirus.