Brian & Erin in Freiburg

Welcome to our blog!

We’re excited you’re here with us, reading about our “wildly ordinary” lives.

In August of 2013, we quit our jobs, put all of our furniture in storage, packed up some clothes, and headed across the pond to settle in Freiburg, Germany. It was the beginning of an adventure of a lifetime, and while we have since returned to the US, the adventure hasn’t stopped.

We want to see the world, but if you ask us, whirlwind 6- to 12-month ’round-the-world trips aren’t the way to do it. We’ve talked to enough RTW trippers to know that’s a good way to forget most of what you saw. Instead, we prefer to travel somewhere new for a long time.

And in the case of Freiburg, a really long time. We lived there for a full year while teaching English, giving walking tours, and really immersing ourselves in German life. That last one was really driven home when Germany won the World Cup – what an experience!

Now we’re back in the US, but we couldn’t just simply return to our old jobs like nothing ever happened. We learned something about ourselves in Germany that can’t be ignored – we value our freedom and independence more than we ever knew. So this blog, which started as way for us to document our European adventures, is now a way for us to document our attempt to create a real, permanent wildly ordinary life. We’re each setting out to start our own businesses, be our own boss, and earn a living on our terms.

To us, Wildly Ordinary means the best of two worlds. We’re mostly stationary, able to maintain friendships, see our families, play on dodgeball teams (oh, how we missed dodgeball while in Germany) – things that can’t be done when you travel all the time. But we also have the freedom to leave for a while and continue our work from anywhere in the world – and our list of “places we’d like to spend at least one month” is quite long.

Thanks for reading!