“To live is to travel, to love is to find romance in a new place”

-Antonio Smith

When I first met my wife, I quickly learned that she was a free-spirited adventurer at heart. A hippie trapped in the life of a “yuppie” (not the bad one). But she never had the opportunity to take advantage of this spirit God blessed her with. Then in 2012, she began to explore who she really was when she planned our first big trip. A vacation to Puerto Rico to celebrate my graduation. There, discussing life while looking at the stars in a hammock next to the ocean, we found a new way to love each other.

From then on, we decided that living was much more than the day-to-day of Michigan and we wanted to experience all that life had to offer… together. Dates are important in a marriage/relationship because they give you the opportunity to set everything aside and just focus on and learn more about each other. Traveling can be considered going on a multi-day date. A time for you and your significant other to explore something new together for the first time with no worries while learning new things about one another through experiences and conversations during extended walks.

That is what travel has become to us in our marriage. It’s wandering with no direction, getting lost in Italian alley ways where no one speaks English and working together to find your way home. It’s falling asleep on the beach in Jamaica and then laughing trying to figure out how it happened. It’s learning how you think differently by giving embarrassing answers to questions because you know you will never see these people again. It’s saying I love you over a glass of wine at 11 am. It’s planning special nights in a place you have never been in an effort to make her smile. It’s creating a life full of experiences that you can talk about at any time. It’s learning how to create happiness in new ways with just the two of you in an entirely new world. It’s the happiness you share while trying to decide where you’re going next and where you want to take your children in the future. And that’s when we fell in love… while traveling.