How We Got Here

Sarah and I have always loved traveling. I grew up in central Texas and relished any opportunities to escape the unrelenting hot summers by going to the Rockies. Hanging out in Cloud Croft and breathing in the crisp mountain air was the first time I realized that that world might have more to offer to me. I also made a few trips to Mexico with my grandparents and got a little taste of being immersed in another culture. Other than that, the traveling I did growing up was around Texas and the US. Sarah here - I was always fascinated with traveling and other cultures ever since I was a kid. I had the privilege of being able to see new places growing up either during a family vacation or visiting family members. Since my parents are not from Texas, as a kid we visited family in Minnesota and Maryland. Although I wasn’t nearly as grateful then as I am now, I am thankful for those visits and the camping trips we had in Colorado and elsewhere. From grasping the idea of farm life in MN to learning how to eat crabs in Baltimore, our family trips were pretty different from our life in Dallas/Fort Worth. To this day, I remember our hikes in Colorado and believe that ignited my love for the mountains. Growing up in a fairly diverse area in DFW, I was fortunate to learn about other religions and cultures. I think this helped me grow up with less fear and more appreciation of people who are different from me. It would be a pretty boring world if we all ate and believed in the same thing :) My older sisters are also travel enthusiasts, and I was always inspired by their stories and trips abroad. In high school, I had the opportunity to travel to Europe thanks to my German teacher who arranged these trips with EF Tours. I got to visit Germany, Italy, Austria, France, and Switzerland (during the 2006 World Cup, it was wild). Needless to say, it was kickass (to summarize eloquently), and I knew that I wanted travel to be a part of my life. At age 22 I visited India for a month which was unlike anywhere else I visited at that point in time. I was primarily in New Delhi and hope to visit southern India in the future.

Sarah in Jaipur, the “Pink City,” in Rajasthan (Feb 2013

Jeff again - I was also involved in Boy Scouts growing up and stuck around long enough to earn the rank of eagle. In scouting, we would go on monthly local campouts and yearly big camps or hikes. This also added fuel to the fire of my love for the mountains. Don’t get me wrong, I loved living in Houston, TX and all, but hiking around a swamp doesn’t quite compare making it to the summit of a snow capped mountain. Sarah also loves the mountains, so it didn’t take much convincing to plan backpacking trips just before COVID started. During the first lockdown periods of COVID, we were able to come up with plans to backpack in places that were high on our “cool places to visit” list. The first place we backpacked together was Yosemite National Park. Unfortunately, this was not quite the magical experience we had anticipated thanks to a record heat wave, yellow jackets, and a very hungry and unfriendly bear (I plan on giving y’all the details in a future blog post). Our next journey that year was to the Sawtooth National Forest in Idaho. This trip could not have gone better; there was perfect weather, no bugs, and no bears. It went so well that it gave us the confidence we could start planning a much larger and grander trip.

Jeff’s second ever backpacking trip (July 2005) in the Philmont, NM with his dad

We loved everything about our trip in New Zealand, and if it was not for our pets, we might have stayed there permanently. Even while we were sitting in the airport about to head home, we were already plotting ways we could be in New Zealand long term and possibly do the Te Araroa Trail. After floating several ideas about the trip and a few years went by, we finally decided to lock in a time we could take off work for a much longer period and hike the trail. And then COVID hit. The path we were planning to do on the Te Araroa was on the South Island northbound, and the window of time to start this portion to ensure decent weather is December through February. New Zealand (understandably so) had one of the strictest immigration policies thanks to COVID; you essentially could not get into the country unless you were a citizen or working in the medical field. For some reason backpacking through their country was not essential enough to allow us in :) We ended up with the options of gambling by hoping New Zealand would open their borders by the end of February 2022 or wait out an extra year and start the hike early 2023. Luckily, I am married to a public health scientist who could fully understand the trends of the pandemic and could talk with her colleagues to have a full picture of the situation. Sarah would tell you that she is far from being an epidemiologist and that we did not have a full picture of the situation. Regardless, we realized that February 2022 was not a realistic option, so we decided that we could actually get the best out of both situations by working for an additional six months to take an entire year off. We still could not start the hike until early 2023, so we needed to come up with a plan for the first six months of the sabbatical.

COVID brought another unexpected piece of this puzzle. For over a year I was working from home and barely took any time off. My PTO was stacking pretty high, and if I did not spend it by the end of 2022, I would lose it. Sarah was in a different boat. She had just graduated with a master’s degree in public health and started a new job, so we did not have quite the same amount of PTO. So I did what any good husband would do; I took a trip to Europe with my friends and explored Paris, Amsterdam, and Bruges. We had a great time (if Sarah asks, it was just okay and I missed her dearly every hour of every day). I had such a good time that it got me thinking, what if we just spent the first part of the trip here? I proposed this plan to Sarah over the phone while I was there, and her reaction was, “DONE!” When I got back to the States, we started crunching the numbers and educating ourselves on the various European visa policies. We came to find out that if we are disciplined, we could actually hangout in Europe more economically than traveling in the U.S. Once that and my job situation were settled, we went into overdrive and started planning out the trip in detail. We also plan on including the planning process in a future blog post.

The idea for this grand trip was sparked by a perfect mixing of random circumstances. Back in 2015, Sarah and I were engaged and trying to knock out all of the details of our upcoming wedding, our living situation (we were building our first house together), and our honeymoon. I was also traveling a lot for work, and during one of these trips, I had finished a book I was reading. To occupy my mind during the next leg of my trip, I picked up a magazine with the headline, “Grand Hikes of the World.” As I was flipping through it, I learned about the Te Araroa Trail in New Zealand. The pictures were truly breathtaking, and the firsthand reviews of the trail seemed almost too good to be true. Needless to say, I was sold. As soon as I got home, I pitched the idea of New Zealand to Sarah for our honeymoon. We obviously knew we could not do even a short section of the trail thanks to our abbreviated American paid time off, but we still wanted to see as much of the country as we could and day hike wherever we could fit one in. We managed to schedule the trip in January of 2018, and, wow, it truly blew away all of our expectations! We visited both islands in two weeks, stayed in AirBnBs and rented a car on each island to get around. You can check out some of the pics from our journey here: https://www.adventuresofjeffandsarah.com/new-zealand. We plan on posting a blog about the trip including how to plan for a two week trip sometime in the near future.

Christchurch, NZ (Jan 2018)

Yosemite (Aug 2020)

The last piece of the puzzle was our work situations. I cannot go into too many details with this, but I had a great boss and got very lucky the company I worked for was bought out. This led to a work timeline that fell right in line with our sabbatical dreams. Sarah was also in a great work situation that appreciated her and understood that she could not turn down this opportunity to see the world. The other loose ends we have been tying up for the last year or so by selling our house (thanks Micheal), selling our Jeep (we have been a one car family for over a year, thanks Elsie and Scott), and finding people to watch our pets (thanks Jon, Bree, Rachel, and Chris!).

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