Jeff Kirby • Travel Writer

Documenting adventures to share and simply remember

In any number of similar parallel universes, there’s a good chance I never left the Pacific Northwest. But in this one, I fell in love with a scientist who was offered a job in Germany, and she managed to pry me out of my comfort cave and drag me across the world to expand my horizons. Something we learned quickly living in Europe is that it’s significantly cheaper to travel here, and the work-life balance expected by employers is infinitely more reasonable than in the states. So, we traveled. A lot. Not always long trips: it was particularly easy and affordable to get away for long weekends every month or two. Before we knew it, we had visited almost every country in Europe. 

Creating a travel blog seemed like a good idea for several reasons. First, it was an ideal solution for documenting and collecting our adventures in a way that was easily sharable with friends and family back home. Second, it forced us to actually go through the mountain of pictures we took on these trips, select the best ones, and edit and compile them. Similarly, writing about the experiences as soon as we got home ensured that there was a reliable document of the trip that we could come back to later. When you travel a lot, it’s easy to forget a surprising amount of what you saw and enjoyed, and the small details tend to blur together. Once our trips have been properly documented, it always brings us joy to learn that readers have sent our posts to traveling friends because we’ve already figured out the good things to eat and cool things to see in the cities they are visiting. We’re happy that others can see what we’re up to, get useful tips, and live vicariously through our travels, but honestly, one of the main reasons we created our blog is simply so we can look back and relive these trips for ourselves.

Here are some of our favorite excerpts from canwepetyourdog.com