The Johnslingtons

Time spent away from home: 5 months, 2 days Continents visited: 5 Countries visited: 14 Principalities visited: 1 (Yay, Liechtenstein!) International traffic tickets received: 1 (Damn you, Liechtenstein!) Brand new countries/principalities visited: 4 (Yup, including Liechtenstein.) New passport stamps received in real countries: 8 New passport stamps paid for at the tourist office of a… Continue reading The Johnslington’s Big Trip, by the Numbers

Best Sunsets Ham Rankings (Note: We didn’t have any ham during our quick stop in Italy; otherwise they’d be on here.) Beer Rankings (Everywhere else basically just has light pilsner, which is fine, but rarely something to write home about.) Wine Rankings, by Value (Decent wine in Europe is so cheap it’s silly. Australian wine… Continue reading Around the World – A List of Lists

In looking back over the memories (and photos) from such a long trip, patterns start to emerge. Whether it was conscious or accidental (likely a little of both), certain experiences started to repeat themselves across our travels, leading to some fascinating and fun visual echos. Here are just a few of them:

No matter how carefully you plan, it’s pretty impossible to pack perfectly for a multi-month trip away from home. That said, we got pretty darn close (especially given how light we packed). And as we traveled, there were several items that, again and again, we found ourselves feeling incredibly grateful made the cut. Here’s our… Continue reading Around-the-World MVPs (a Julie/Dan collab)

No, I didn’t run around the world. But I did go for runs in lots of places as we circumnavigated, and I wanted to write about that a little bit. Bringing my running stuff was a relatively late decision, made a couple of weeks before we left. I’d never brought my gear with me on… Continue reading A Run ‘Round The World

While we would have preferred to travel the world largely by plane and train, there were quite a lot of places we wanted to see (and people we wanted to visit!) that required driving. And so we ended up renting a lot of cars (and one very memorable campervan). We tasked Fiona with naming them… Continue reading Car Me by Your Name

And then, both at long last and far too soon, exactly five months and one day after we left San Francisco for this crazy around-the-world adventure, we were packing up our bags and heading to Burlington airport for the final flight of our trip. We were going home. I felt a lot of feelings about… Continue reading The Home Stretch

New England in the late summer is a cornucopia of deliciousness! Here’s what we loved: New England, we (and our tummies) love you.

It’s no secret that I love hiking – it’s my favorite vacation activity, beats (for me) meditation, and is usually when Julie and I have our best conversations. We’d done a good number of hikes on this trip – up huge mountains, along bluffs, through rolling hills and country lanes… In Vermont we did one… Continue reading Long-Ago Memories on the Long Trail

My sister Merin moved to Vermont for grad school in 1999 and never (really) left. She meant to, but a few months shy of wrapping up her master’s at UVM and moving back to California like she planned, she met a sweet Irish guy in a bar downtown. They started dating, she graduated and moved… Continue reading The Greatest Hits of Greater Burlington, VT