Some Background On Our Travels
This section contains (or rather, will contain) photo galleries of all of our overseas travels since we met back in 1989. We also hope eventually to add some photos of our international travels from our respective childhoods (or in my case, my first one), which may shed some light on where our love of travel originates. Speaking of which...
Some people have hobbies like woodworking, needlepoint, golf, mechanics, philately or coin collecting. In that regard, i think we must be pretty dull people because outside of horticulture (Michelle) and puzzles (me), our hobbies are pretty much travel and photography. We are self-professed travel nuts and shutterbugs. So, how did we get this way?
Well, Michelle and i have had the very good fortune of traveling overseas since we were both in grade school. My first international trip was to Mexico in 1968 with my parents and younger brother. We lived in Mexico City for several months while my father was doing volunteer medical work in the "bush" near the Yucatan peninsula. We then subsequently lived in Nigeria in 1972 and Ethiopia in 1974-75 while i was in grade school, and bookending each of those stints were trips through Western Europe, the Middle East and other parts of Africa. We also traveled throughout the continental U.S. and Canada while i was growing up – i've been to all 50 states except Alaska, i think. So, before i had even reached puberty i had been to around 20 countries (not including California, which is really on a planet all its own). After high school, i went to Mexico then Europe twice more before my career as an English teacher took me to Japan in 1989.
Meanwhile, Michelle's family lived in Japan for 3 years at the U.S. air base in Misawa, in northern Honshu, when she was in 4th-6th grades, an experience which inspired her to study Japanese in college and led her to return to northern Japan as a student in 1987 and again as a teacher after she graduated in 1989 (when we met).
After our teaching contracts in Japan ended in summer 1991, we traveled through SE Asia and the Pacific together – a trek which will be chronicled here in the near future. We then returned to Japan after finishing grad school in 1994 for another three-year stint, during which time we also visited Australia and the Philippines.
Since our return to the States in 1997, we've mainly travelled domestically, but have gone to the Caribbean and, just this summer, to Europe – Michelle's first visit there ever, surprisingly enough. Even though we've done quite a lot of traveling in the U.S. in the past five years, we are starting to get the overseas travel bug again, although this time around there are kids of our own involved, so it may be a while before we venture off with them in tow.
Anyway, on the pages of this section are photo galleries of our various trips, beginning with the most recent (
Europe) and going back in time. Some pages offer some journal entries or anecdotes about the sights, but mostly they're just photos and captions. Enjoy.