About

Who are you?

We are Ashley and Justin, a couple in our early 30’s who decided to shake it up a bit, quit our jobs, and embark on an adventure around the world.  We took off in November 2011 and landed back in the USA in February 2013.  Even though our long-term travel is finished (temporarily!) we’ll still be keeping up with our photo Friday posts and putting all the articles we didn’t have time to write on the road!  We traveled frequently before this trip and will continue to do so for the rest of our lives, so we’ll have plenty of new content here.

I mean really, you lived in NEW YORK CITY, so why would you leave???

People are often shocked, appalled even that we would leave our very stable lives and jobs in New York City for, well, the relative instability of long term travel.  The things is, living in New York was completely manic and as it turns out, that’s not really how we want to live our lives.  We had both been wanting something different for a few years and initially we just made the decision to leave and move elsewhere.  That decision eventually snowballed into plan for a grand trip around the world.

Click here for  the long version about the process of deciding to take this leap, and here for our post about the heart of why we made the decision.

How did you fund your trip and what was your budget on the road?

Ashley is crazy frugal.  Seriously.  We made a super water-tight budget that allowed us to save a pretty large percentage of our very small salaries, and we stuck to it.  For nearly two years.  Ashley will write a post about how we did this this at some point.

If you want to check out our budget on the road, take a look at our Roundups, which is a breakdown of costs in each country we visited.

What did you bring with you?

Check out our Things We Carry page for the details of what we brought with us.

Where did you go?

See our ‘Where Are We?‘ page.  We ultimately visited 16 countries and 6 continents on our journey, the map will pinpoint all the details.

How can I keep updated with you guys?

Well, you can do a lot of things:

Check back here often!

Like us on Facebook

Check out our Flikr photos

Email us at theparallellife@gmail.com

But, who are you really?

Ashley was a NYC public school teacher for 6 years.  She’s always been interested in photography, travel and great food.  She grew up in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and has a large sense of wanderlust.

Justin grew up in Texas and moved to NYC to get a taste of the real city.  He has a love of history, meeting new people and…….great food!  He is one of those people who can get along with just about anyone.