2 weeks from today, we’ll be boarding a plane out of Boston for our first leg of what we hope will be an amazing journey.  This has been in the works for a couple of years.  Even with all the planning, it still feels unreal, terrifying and exciting, but with each passing day (and each passing purchase from REI and Amazon), we feel more ready.

Many have asked us about our trip: how did we decide to do this, how did we make it happen, etc.  The big thing is…we just decided to do it.  We didn’t wait until everything felt safe or we felt ready.  We dreamed about it together and decided to do it – over 2 years ago.  The other big reason why we’re doing it is that we told everyone we were going to, so we couldn’t back out of it.  I’m only partly joking.  I don’t think we ever seriously considered not making it happen, but there was always a small voice in the back of my mind that told me we better follow through, since everyone was expecting us to go.  After the decision, it was all about making it a priority.  Since that first day, everything we’ve done has been with this plan in our minds – professionally and financially, we made decisions that allowed us to pack up and go in early 2015.

So what’s the goal of this trip?  Depending which one of us you ask and when you ask, you’ll get a different answer.  The most popular answer, however, is that it’s an opportunity to see the world, meet people from other places, and understand a bit more about who they are, what their culture is, how they live.  To see someone in their own home, neighborhood, or culture is very different from reading about them or even meeting them in our culture.  We’ve had many people come through our home over the past year from all over the world and we are excited to be on the other side of that.  We believe it’s important to expose ourselves and to integrate ourselves in places that are uncomfortable and unfamiliar.  We moved to Dorchester 6 years ago, partly because we wanted to make sure that we were not segregated from people who don’t fit the same profile as us.  By traveling and staying for longer than a few days in each place, we hope that on a small scale we will be able to experience a type of integration in each of the cultures we visit.

Through this experience, we expect to be more comfortable with the uncomfortable, to be more confident, to be more compassionate and to better understand others around the world.

That’s a little snapshot in to why we are packing up our condo, quitting our jobs and saying good-bye to the city we’ve called home for a collective 19 years.  We hope that you’ll join us for this adventure and we’ll try to keep you updated about where we go, what we see and what we learn.  To quote one of Danielle’s favorite lyrics, “Someday just began.”