Handshakes never go well for me. Because of my visual impairment, I find it all too easy to miss an outstretched hand and sully a first impression. Throughout my adolescence, this was a serious source of social anxiety, until I finally realized that first impressions are overrated, and if the person I’m meeting is genuinely cool they’ll be able to handle a bit of awkward hand flailing. This revelation helped me get out of my head and meet some truly rad individuals, including my wife, Becca. Her immediate, frank interest in my visual impairment surprised and attracted me, but at the time of our first meeting, I was just starting college, while she was a full grown teacher living in an Inupiaq village north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska. I initially thought I’d never see her again, but it turns out age differences and distance are just as overblown as first impressions.

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Becca and I quickly realized that we were compatibly kooky. We shared a quixotic determination to experience the richness and breadth of life while helping others to do the same. We became close friends, started dating, and then got married as soon as humanly possible, and we haven’t stopped wandering since. We finished school in South America, backpacked around Europe, North Africa and Central America, and then got jobs in Palestine. Now we live in a tent and travel the U.S. fulltime as outdoor educators. We’ve been called hippies, idealists, luddites and hedonists (we prefer the term epicureans), but to be honest, we’ve only just begun leaning in to our eccentricity. The world feels vast, and we want to experience more of it. If all goes well, one day we’ll disappear into some anonymous cloud forest where we’ll befriend a few goats and live off organic veggies and homegrown mushrooms. That’s the dream anyway.

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For now though, we’ll keep exploring and seeking abundance in unlikely places. We invite you to read along, even if you aren’t a tree-huggin’ nomad. We love variety. Even though our idea of flourishing is definitely not universal, we believe that a life of contentment should be attainable for everyone. Instead of settling, we’re finding our peace, and we hope our stories will inspire you to do the same.