I don’t know that I could pinpoint the exact moment I felt the longing for a nomadic life. It was early, and later culminating with “a plan” to move to California after graduating high school that would never come to realization. Poor mental health, poor coping skills, and meandering aimlessly through jobs and taking the random course at the local community college, made it near impossible to formulate any kind of actual plan. I stuck around my hometown, miserable, wings self-clipped, and unsure of where to begin.

But life tends to find a way. Paths lead to places through obstacles, heartache, and pure emotional turmoil and delight. Some paths are travelled without guidance. They’re trekked endlessly up and down, seeking an exit; walked into dusty suffocating air. Sometimes the end of the path comes up rather randomly, and sometimes it’s been navigated cleverly. Sometimes the pull of another place, a distant place, and countless unknowns leads the way. And sometimes someone else’s path crosses with yours.

Then suddenly we’re where we are meant to be: our dreams of travel and adventure coming to fruition. Weighty decisions carrying us the farthest from home we’ve ever been; freeing us from the confines of a hometown…

So here I am, living a life that burned hot in my blood, that was insatiable on the soil of my birth – the fire burning inside now fueled by newness, by immersion into the unknown, being unafraid of it, unafraid of failure. I’ve grown immensely since we took that plane across the Atlantic and planted our roots into the rich Rhineland-Pfalz soil. We are wrapped up in the windmill cluttered hills; wrapped up in the dialects of new languages that aren’t so foreign anymore. We now call Germany home.

Here is our life abroad.