M&M for Matt & Maider

This is the story of a French-American couple who decided to travel around the world for a year.

Together for about 7 years and married for a little over 4 years, we have an unconventional story:

– Matt was born in the US from French parents and moved to France when he was 8 years old. Since then it has been a childhood dream to someday go back and live in the US.

– Maider is French, from the Basque country, and always wanted to discover the world. Since little she heard stories about her mother’s and grandfather’s travels. After different internships in Europe and South Africa, and a semester in China, only one dream was left: America.

CHICAGO, the city where we met! Both interns at the time, we had to go back to France to finish our studies. But we already had a common dream: come back to the US one day.

3 years later ; studies are over, freshly married and with a job offer for Maider, we decided to finally go back and settle in Chicago.

Chicago is the city we met in but it’s also the beginning of our married life and incredible professional opportunities (Maider as an Event Planner and Matt in Supply Chain). An American dream come true for Matt and Maider.

It is also here that we made the decision to leave for this crazy adventure.

The decision? We will always remember: November 8^th 2016… An important day here in the US… The decision to make this happen no matter what was made then and there. Traveling the world like this has always been in the back of our minds. Turns out, after both dreaming to live in the US, we had another dream in common: backpacking around the world.

The reason? Bring some change in our day to day life and learn more about the world around us. We love discovering new places and new cultures.

When to leave? If it were up to Matt, we would have left only 6 months after making up our minds…

Thankfully after doing a little research, Maider was able to bring him back to his feet…

Traveling around the world for a year needs some preparation but more importantly requires MONEY… After a few calculations (thanks Matt), the departure date is set to June 2018.

I am sure some of you are thinking “in November 2016 you already knew you would be leaving in June 2018?”. To set the record straight, the answer is no. We went back and forth a lot and had to account for a few different variables: when does our lease end, what should the budget be, what is the best time to visit the countries we chose… Let’s say that by the summer of 2017 we had a pretty good idea.

Maider is an Event Planner and Matt is in forecasting, so planning isn’t something that scares us!

Choosing the countries? Probably the most difficult part of the process. I think that our first list had way over 20 countries… We had to choose, so first we kept our go-to’s: Peru, Australia and Vietnam for Maider. Argentina, Chile and New Zealand for Matt. Then we started reading blogs, watching travel shows and asking around and finally settled on 10 countries.

“Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, New Zealand, Australia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam”

Here is the complete list, in order of travel : Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, New Zealand, Australia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. That leaves us a little over a month in each country, hopefully enough to see what we want and soak in a little of every culture.

Why write a blog? First and foremost to share our adventures with our friends and family. But also for us to be able to keep a record of all the experiences we are about to live. And finally, because the first thing people ask us when we tell them about our project is : “Will you guys have a blog?”

We hope you will enjoy reading us 🙂

Matt & Maider