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

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)

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

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

After the disappointment of Plymouth, we hoped to brighten our spirits with the next destination on our New England journey: Amherst. But first! A stop for lunch at the Framingham home of Dan’s high-school-marching-band buddy Erin. We spent several thoroughly enjoyable hours there catching up with Erin, a talented author, teacher and all-around lovely person,… Continue reading A Mellow Mini-Break in Amherst

I met Lindsay six years ago in prenatal yoga, where we bonded over our relatively low-key approach to pregnancy and both having husbands named Dan. In the time since our daughters were born three weeks apart, she’s become one of my favorite friends. Fiona and Rylan play almost miraculously well together, and our families always… Continue reading All up in New England

After spending such a long time abroad, it was perhaps inevitable that re-entry into our home country would be a little rocky. But “a little rocky” is a generous term for the absolute disaster that was our travel day from Ponta Delgada to Boston. Now, right up front here, I’m going to accept some responsibility… Continue reading Coming to America

Fiona’s last stop in Europe was a country we’d already been to on this trip—Portugal! But this time, we explored two new destinations: the capital city, Lisbon, and an archipelago (group of islands) called the Azores. Lisbon is a really cool city that’s actually a lot like San Francisco. It’s on the water, it’s super… Continue reading Where in the World is Fiona? Portugal! (Again!)