The purpose of this site is two-fold: (1) to allow me and others like me (semi-fanatic and/or fully obsessive travelers) to do some travel writing and (2) create a source of information for members of the traveling community who are currently under served by mainstream travel publications.
When I was living in France I tried to write about my travels, but I spent so much time on the road that my entries were rushed and more about my itinerary. Now I am working full-time in Alaska and have time to reflect.
Not only that, but there are books for shoestring travelers, but very little to be found for solo or female travelers. There are notes in mainstream books for LGBT travelers, but not real in-depth information. There are politically correct descriptions of destinations where westerners, women or LGBT folks might want to exercise greater caution, but no honest accounts of where these travelers might run into real trouble and the aftermath of that trouble. My website will, hopefully, help to fill in these gaps. I want to provide written accounts of personal experiences, mine and others’, the positive and the negative. In addition, I want to provide tested itineraries and suggested itineraries for those seeking information along with the fun stuff like photos and reviews. In the end it would be great to turn this into some kind of gig, but for now I’m happy to treat it like a living, breathing art and culture project.
About Me:
In January of 2006 I married LF, my long-time girlfriend and partner in crime, in Toronto. At the time I was finishing undergrad and LF was finishing graduate school in Virginia. In May of that year we moved to New York with our cat Juneau and our rat Beatrice (now deceased) so I could attend law school. In 2009 we traveled around Europe while I worked as an English Assistant at a French public school near Antibes. Following my teaching contract we moved to Anchorage, Alaska where I now work as an attorney and LF works for an accounting firm.
So far LF and I have spent a good deal of our lives together moving to different cities and traveling. Being flexible and somewhat transient allows us to pursue our dreams and live our lives to the fullest. For now we are very happy living in Alaska, but still enjoy planning little escapes and major trips. In the future we hope to live abroad again and possibly elsewhere in the United States. For now these ideas are completely speculative, just how we like it!
I am EM, a young attorney from the United States who would happily take the opportunity to live and work outside the United States. Currently, I live in Alaska and work for the state government. My loves include my spouse, my cat, learning languages and about languages and culture, and food. In the past I have lived in several cities and states and, for a brief while, I lived and worked in France. In addition, I have traveled to 49 states (I’m still missing Mississippi!), Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Morocco, and a great portion of Western Europe. Yet I still feel that I have only scratched the surface, so I look forward to a long life filled with future escapes.  |
| Solo trip to Berlin, April 2010 |
My parents met in the Coast Guard, so I grew up away from grandparents, aunts and uncles. Needless to say, we traveled around the U.S. lot. My parents sent me to the UK and Ireland with a student group when I was fourteen. It was the most life-changing gift anyone has ever given me. Then, as a teenager, I had a lot of freedom to go pretty much anywhere my rickety 1985 Toyota pickup truck could take me. When I was 18 and on my own I started taking trips with my girlfriend, who is now my spouse. That’s when things started to spiral a bit out of control. Soon we had lived in different cities for summers and school, visited Mexico for Christmas and eventually I took a job teaching English in France for seven months. During those seven months I traveled to various countries every six weeks at a minimum. It was the drug user’s equivalent to having nearly unlimited access to heroin for half a year. I will never be the same.
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| Our cat Juneau during our move from New York to Alaska. |
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| A very cold but wonderful Christmas Day in Paris, 2009. |
