trav-el: To go from one place to another, as on a trip; journey.
We are Mandy and Adam. We started this at the end of 2009, mostly to catch up on trips we had already taken — the very first post is an apology that the Greece stories were still sitting in a scrapbook and a pile of handwritten notes.
The name is literal. There are four of us now, and we are usually getting somewhere by air. Not always — plenty of the best days here happened on a train, in a rental car, or on foot until somebody small went limp and had to be carried.
Everything has been written the same way, then and now: whenever we got round to it, in our own words.
We created this website to document our “goings and doings” and to share our perspective on the wonderful things, people and places that make up this wide wide world. — from the original About page, 2012
That still holds, though the goings and doings have changed shape. The busiest years were 2011 through 2014 — 51 stories in 2011 alone — and then the posts thin out, and in June 2019 they stop altogether.
As we put it when we finally came back: a baby, a global pandemic, a cross country move, and a 5 year hiatus of international travel almost to the day. We picked it up again in Porto in June 2024, four of us by then, re-learning the highs and lows of stepping outside our comfort zone.
So the archive reads like two blogs stacked on top of each other: two people with backpacks and a camera, and then the same two people with two kids, a stroller, and considerably stronger opinions about nap schedules.
Three ways in: