I have read that routine has a certain familiar efficiency about it. Your body begins to almost instinctively know what to do with little mental input. Efficient. A path to productivity. Ford and his famous assembly line. I found that, when I lifted my head up in those rare moments of self reflection, this efficiency had a cost. It appeared to me that, while looking back at a period of time cycling through the familiar pattern of; wake, work, eat, rest then rinse and repeat, something was being lost. We started asking aloud how we were able to distinguish today from another day during that same period of time.

We wanted something different. We liked our work, but didn’t want to be defined by our professional work. We wanted memories. We wanted something else by which we might define ourselves.

Not so long ago, Denise had an incredibly interesting job opportunity which would have put us in the heart of the Argentinian wine country. It required a lot of working hours, the work was largely the same as she’d been doing but in a new location. A wake-up without any real shake-up. Same relative level of comfort in a new place. It sounded great actually. Sadly her mother had just fallen ill, and was unable to recover after struggling for three years. But out of this black cloud Denise fell onto the idea of rather than staying put for two or more years in a different place, why not take half that time and just try a bunch of places. So we started down this path. Slowly at first with one step followed by another until those steps started landing in earnest.