Hi, I'm Dayna. (:
Jake and I met in 2012 at a college in the middle of nowhere. After a month of me “chasing” this shy redhead, we started dating! Three days later I told him I loved him and after that, we were pretty much (and still are) inseparable.
We both moved abroad after that and for two years we wrote each other love letters from opposite sides of the globe: me in Chile and him in the Philippines. By the time we got home, we both had binders overflowing with letters and we were ready to be together again!
We got engaged a year later and actually ended up proposing to each other on the same weekend! (I knew he was going to propose, but I really wanted him to wear his ring before the wedding so I asked him to marry me by having Little Caesar’s spell it out in pepperoni! Picture for proof below!)
Anyways, after our wedding we only had a few months left of college and we both realized that we were not ready to buy a house, have kids, settle down, etc. So many people had told us that when we get married, that meant that late nights and travel were behind us… but we wanted to prove them wrong!
So Jake and I started traveling right after we graduated college! We had sold all of our belongings including 2 cars, a lot of Target furniture, our new mattress, and at least 10 full garbage bags of old clothes.
We were nervous, but had our first destination in sight: DUBAI! We didn’t have much planned after that, but we both turned down job offers knowing that we weren’t quite ready to be tied down to one place.
Our first trip, we planned everything ourselves (Kinda! Lol) We bought a package through Expedia that we thought was a great deal and then cooked most of our meals in our hotel kitchen when we got there.
We did so much wrong and could have saved way more money, which is the main reason we started this blog! We spent much more than we normally do now, we took pictures of almost everything, and we barely ate any local food. However, at the end of the trip, we were definitely far from done.
After Dubai, Jake had the idea of going to Europe! We didn’t have jobs and not a ton of savings, but we planned it all out meticulously (and I even wrote an ebook afterward!) and we pulled off $35 per person/per day!
WAY cheaper than our Dubai trip. We were getting the hang of this travel thing and we wanted to go for even longer this time…
So when we came home and bought two one-way tickets to Bali! We had never stepped foot there, but we knew it was what we wanted to do. I applied for VIPKid (a super awesome online English teaching job that can be done anywhere!) and we hopped on the plane! (Well it wasn’t that easy, we needed a visa, but that’s for another post!)
Luckily, things worked out for us! Jake applied for VIPKID as well and we traveled around Bali and Indonesia for 6 months!
I don't teach VIPKID anymore, but Jake does full-time, while building his YouTube running channel on the side! I'm freelancing, so now I do a little bit of everything, while also trying to write and move forward personal projects.
Before France, we lived in Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand while working online. I've lived in Nice since 2020: I was here in 2020 for COVID, left for a year to try life in Mexico, nearer to a sick family member, then we moved back to Nice at the end of 2021. Still renewing my visa every year, although plans are in place to switch visas eventually.
The blog used to be about constantly traveling, but as life would have it, I've become quite the homebody and I love building a life in France. The blog will now be about what that's like, and how you can do it too if it's your dream.
Instead, I'm thinking that travel can be more like your FYP on TikTok, let's do just what we want. I want to build travel tools that help me travel better, so you can, too. In this new AI world, without relying on AI for your advice. Instead, you should rely on your own data, likes and preferences, and your travel personality. Also, these things change over time, have fun discovering your travel self!
So come Happily Ever Travel with us!