What it is to be human

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What it is to be Human

After lurking around on Travel Blog for years, I have come to realize that I love reading blogs with colorful introductions to the adventurers whose lives I am hacking through by means of reading their blogs.

With this being said, how about a little introduction blog for the first go around? For the purpose of time and avoiding exhausting myself, we will begin mid-life in a little "city" called Lancaster in the state of Pennsylvania. I moved out to Lancaster after graduating High School when I was 18 to attend Millersville University. Not a crazy adventure in and of itself as it is only one hour away from where I grew up, but the first of many to come nonetheless.

While it is most common for many young people of that age to live on campus and enjoy the campus party life, I was not at all thrilled nor willing to even entertain the idea of permanently living with someone I could potentially dislike strongly and engaging in immature activities of getting trashed every night where the most intelligent conversation one could encounter was, "So, like, do you want to make out?" Don't get me wrong, I loved to have fun, but in the comfort of my own home-like surroundings with friends I had already known and where the chance of getting date raped was significantly less. I opted to rent an apartment in the city with two of my best guy friends.

The next four years were the ones in which I came to understand who I am and what I want out of life. During these years I went to Italy and fell in love, with Italy that is, and took time off from school to independently travel to Spain for four months. I had picked up the hobby of checking volunteer options abroad, browsing couch surfing networks, checking out new WWOOF hosts, and my favorite, reading others Travel Blogs on a daily basis. I was enthralled with the idea of traveling anywhere and everywhere. I later made plans of being an au pair in Sweden for a year and then gallivanting around the globe for a while when the unexpected happened....

I met a boy. Not just any boy, but a boy who could enthusiastically speak about and had read Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, and Chekhov.

I forgot to mention that I LOVE Russian literature. That was it, I was head over heals in love with a boy who told me the very first time that we hungout that he was going to marry me.... Fast forward almost four years and.... We actually got hitched!!

With all of the excitement of falling in love and finding true happiness, I had put aside my current travel plans and decided to simply enjoy the whirlwind of intoxicating love. However, as I am sure many of you know, the want, love for, and aching, longing, thirsting need for exploring new places and cultures (I am guilty of holding a useless degree in Anthropology after all), is not something that just goes away. I had pleaded with Lee (my husband) to quit his job and travel the world with me, but he said that he was content with just taking "vacations" and did not understand why I had to go away for a whole year. His whole idea was, "Why not take a bunch of small trips?" Ugh, my answer was always, "I just can't, that's not the point."

For a while I was able to fulfill my longing for travel with short trips around the States and two weeks spent in the UK. But I longed for longer stays with more interactions and experiences. I started leaving around itineraries and trying to prove to Lee that it is something tangible and quite affordable. It was all to my dismay. Four years of trying to make someone have the same life dream as you is useless.

And then it hit me, just as I cannot understand how someone would not want to quit their job (in the middle of a rescission and leave their family behind to travel the world only to come home to no money and no job), it is just as hard for Lee to understand why I would want to do just that. I had realized that I could never actually force or would want him to do something that he would not be happy doing... it's just that I was convinced that he would be happy doing it. (I would never try to convince Lee to do something that I didn't think he would actually end up loving or not get anything out of. He has expressed his uncertainty about what to do with his life and I truly believe that through travel you will find all of the answers you seek.)

Now for the good part.... after coming to the aforementioned realization, and being told countless times by Lee that he will forever wait for me if I go abroad solo, I stopped pestering him. I started planning out trips that would last a couple of months that I would make solo. Then it happened. A text about no longer being happy with his job, which was his main reason for not wanting to travel long-term, and then the phrase that sparked my actions of finally creating my very own Travel Blog, "Let's start saving."

So here begins our story of Goose and Squid falling in love and setting off on adventures. Unfortunately we will have to continue our every day lives and jobs to save enough money to begin, but I believe that it all should be included in our documentation (this blog). So it may be a bit boring around these parts for the next nine months or so as the planning stages are set into motion.

And now for my formal introduction...

My name is Jennafer and I finally am going to have the two things in life I have come to know I need to be happy, my life long partner in crime and the opportunity to see the world.

And this is what it is to be human... To find what makes you happy in life and your attempts to achieve said happiness.

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