Hello!
We are Jess and Rich, we are both 27 year old brits and we have been together for 8 years since meeting each other at the University of Manchester (Rich offered to carry my shopping bags in the first week and what can I say? I was smitten!). Neither if us have travelled extensively before and to be honest long term travel together was not exactly something we ever seriously planned to do… So what happened?!
So basically, two years ago I began to fret that I was getting older and hadn’t been on enough adventures. In response to this ridiculousness Rich got me the most amazing Christmas gift- a trip to the Ice Hotel in Sweden (yes I’m a spoilt brat!). So off we flew in March and it seriously was the most amazing adventure I’ve ever been on. The night we checked in to our Ice Room, Rich proposed to me and of course I said yes! (I mean he still carries my shopping for goodness sake!).
So anyway, I ramble on! You’re probably thinking, so if you got engaged two years ago, why aren’t you married?! Well, as it turns out, we seemed completely unable to save for our wedding, or even remotely start to think about such things as colour schemes and seat covers (shudder!). Our families eventually gave up asking if we’d picked a date and settled in for a long wait! Despite having no money, weirdly we did manage to squeeze out trips to New york during thanksgiving, a road trip through Croatia, skiing in Bulgaria, a surf camp in Portugal, a tour of Morocco and a visit to Barcelona… and suddenly our lack of savings seems to make sense!
Rich is an aerospace engineer, and I’m a grasshopper, by which I mean I’ve had a fair few jobs, the latest of which had been a Medical Rep. Rich’s ability to maintain a steady income has fortunately allowed me to flit around a bit! However, just before Christmas 2015, a lack of projects in the aerospace pipeline meant that Rich was going to be made redundant… and this lead to us having a serious think about our priorities. I’d sometimes dreamed of sacking it all in and going away for a long gone time, but up until then, Rich had always wanted the security of coming back to his job so we had never really settled on anything. With Rich’s redundancy, it seemed like we had been given an opportunity – we clearly were in no rush to get married and we were lucky enough to have a bit of money tucked away in our mortgage (we had bought our flat using a deposit that Rich had inherited and in the two years we had owned it, the property market in our little suburb of Didsbury had boomed). We talked about doing a 4 month trip to Australia, New Zealand and South East Asia and started planning. Then one day, after a rough day at work, Rich came home and said “F**ck it, let’s go for a YEAR!”… and so that’s what we decided!
I (Jess) am writing this blog mostly for our friends and family to keep track of us as we travel, but also for anyone out there who’s thinking about ditching everything to do a spot of travelling. Hopefully the experiences we share here will be helpful to you when planning your own journey.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading about our adventures. As you can probably tell, I’m no professional writer (my background is biological) so please excuse any poor grammar you may see here. I also do the occasional doodle in my moleskine sketchbook so they may also get posted from time to time. For more pictures, feel free to follow my instagram account @jesskdoyle.
Happy adventuring!
Jess & Rich