About us
May 2014, We went to Bonaire to meet friends not long after I Released myself prematurely from the hospital' Our first day of shore diving, Bruce was trying to help me and broke his foot exiting while carrying both sets of our gear. He ended up benched with a broken foot and our friends had to take care of both of us. they still tolerate us and we had many trips together since then in the last year.
We are a married couple who, until quite recently, were firmly rooted in southern NH by family, a business, careers, a house and neighborhood we never imagined giving up. We are about to take a leap of faith, embrace financial uncertainty, chaos in general and force ourselves to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Numerous people have mistakenly assumed we are doing this because we can afford to when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. At best we hope to find low wage jobs in different parts of the world in order to allow us extended stays. The primary reason we are giving up our house, its contents and our cars is to cut our living expenses and to fund dive certifications, time in limbo and room for error. This is the least intelligent plan we could come up with financially speaking but our priority is to have a meaningful life not a comfortable one.
This blog will be a bit schizophrenic in terms of themes because we have many interests. I promise to break every written and unwritten rule of blog etiquette because I am a rule breaker in general but specifically because we are both interested in so many seemingly unrelated, topics like: scuba diving (I would guess at least half our posts will be dive related but hope to appeal to our non diving friends and family), ocean Conservation, life transitions and trying to make a nomadic life possible, photography (underwater and macro), immersion travel, our love of the natural world, Cluster Headaches and how to kick their ass, adoption, and the perilous, humorous, painful and rewarding search for biological family and other strange adventures. If you are still interested in knowing more about us or need help falling asleep I have elaborated below. You can also view our individual and 'unprofessional' bios in the drop down menu.
More About Us
I (Francesca the wordy one) was blessed to be born into a family that loved to travel so growing up my sister I were lucky enough to spend a few months living on a boat in the British Virgin Islands where my appetite for the ocean became ravenous. I have spent at least 2 years cumulatively in Europe (most of that time in Italy or France) been to dozens of other islands in some cases over and over and was guilty of being spoiled with travel before I met my husband at age 23. Unfortunately once I became married and employed full time 2 weeks was usually the maximum amount of time off we could devote to an individual trip but knowing a place, people, culture well has always been a priority for both Bruce and I so we prefer quality time and repeat visits to the same destination versus having a checklist of as many destinations as possible. If we like a location we will go back over and over and now we will be able to think about staying in terms of months, rather than weeks.
It was only after a series of miserable events that we finally acquired the ability to make the distinction between what is important and everything else. Having that super power enabled us to completely shut down our current way of life, thumb our noses at the status quo and to shamelessly pursue what makes us happy. We won’t dwell on how we got here but until May of 2014, we were basically average people pursuing a normal life. We bought our house when we were engaged 16 years ago and never imagined selling it, let alone the idea of giving up on home-ownership, but now it and its contents are up for sale. We both have publicly available LinkedIn Profiles documenting our careers, volunteer work, board positions etc. that can readily establish who we were and to what an extent we have changed course.
You can't appreciate profoundly beautiful experiences or know pure joy without also having spent some time getting to know misfortune (really well). We needed some of that to get us here but could not possibly realize that till we were able to look back. While its not been easy letting go of everything and ignoring the occasional doubts/worries we have about having zero savings or missing our house, it is a cakewalk relatively speaking. The good news is we are well past the stage of wanting to share or vent about the past. We might glaze over it as we transition but hopefully it will only be referenced with levity and a sense of humor.
We decided to blog for various reasons including the hope that by sharing our love of the ocean, scuba diving and photography with others that our passion will inspire those who have yet to look below the surface, to want to protect the unseen life underwater. We have seen, in only a few decades, vibrant reefs turn into fields of dead coral (see our coral bleaching video in St. John) and the number and diversity of species decline so the Ocean is in desperate need of more supporters. We hope that by sharing what we are doing it will additionally help motivate us to stay unafraid of the unknown. Even if only our friends and family pay attention, this is a great way to force us to follow through with our ambition to live spontaneously and avoid anything even remotely pedestrian.
We enjoy photography and filming so much that my Instagram, Flickr, Twitter, Youtube and other social media accounts are primarily used to share photos and videos of various land and sea life. I don't have time to be a prolific poster so if you follow me, subscribe etc I can promise there won't be a large volume of sharing but I am keenly aware that the length of my posts is downright obnoxious. I am working on that but at least they are infrequent.