Benvenuti!

Welcome to WanderLustin’! This blog feels a bit like a historical archive now. Since we did this big adventure in 2010, we are definitely no longer newlyweds (13 years and counting!), we’ve added two humans (and one spoiled cockapoo) to our family, and we no longer resemble the skinny, wrinkle-free humans in the photos on this blog. 😂 

It was during this adventure in 2010 that we first came up with the idea of doing another big year of travel with our (then purely hypothetical) kids. That nascent idea will finally become reality in August 2023 when we’re moving to Bologna, Italy with our kids Maddie (age 7) & Dylan (age 10), and our 17-year-old cat Nutmeg and 2-year-old dog Annabelle for the next year or two. We’re chronicling that adventure over on Instagram — our handle @wanderlustinitalia is our way of connecting our Italian move with this trip and travel blog. 

If you’re just coming to this blog for the first time, the best place to start is the Itinerary and Photos page. We organized and captioned the thousands of photos we took during the year by country and then into albums from specific locations within each country… it’s a quick way to get a high level sense of where we traveled. 

As for blog posts, there are many — but we’ve pulled out a few of our favorites below.

It’s strange to think of how different travel was when did this trip. WiFi was hard to come by in most of the places we stayed, and when we found it, it was often very slowwwww and very expensive. We didn’t travel with our smart phones (partly because there were no affordable international data plans at the time), which in hindsight was an incredible gift because it forced us to be (mostly) present during our travels, and to navigate and explore these countries with a kind of spontaneity that our Google Map-ruled lives now lack. And without smartphones in hand, we relied on a digital SLR camera to take all of our photos, and a little video camera called a “Flip Video” to record movies. A different era indeed.

In any event, thanks for visiting. Hope to see you over on Insta!

Laura & Dustin

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Favorite Blog Posts

There Will Be Blog — our first entry! 

Queen Charlotte & Lady Noeline — our first big trek of the trip in New Zealand, where we met a very special lady

 Travel Tech Talk — anyone who knows Dustin will not be surprised by this post :) 

“Um, Dustin, Where’s Laura?” — wherein Dustin shows his true feelings about his new wife 

Sweet As — the best and worst of New Zealand

Magnum Cum Laude — Dustin indulges in a sweet obsession

Island Time — the joys and frustrations of Vanuatu

The Diving Boys and the Shutterflies — (can you tell we like puns?) — witnessing the insane sport of “land diving” on Vanuatu’s Pentecost Island

The First 100(ish) Days - DF Edition — Dustin takes stock of the state of our traveling union

The First 100(ish) Days - LM Edition — and Laura’s turn

The Land of the Thunder Dragon — a rough start in magical Bhutan

Into Thin Air (Finally!) — trekking in the mountains of Bhutan 

Wedding Crashers! — a surprise detour back to the U.S. for the best reason

28 Things I Learned While Climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro — the titles says it all

Guest Bloggers: Israeli Sausage Toast — our besties’ take on what it’s like traveling with us in Israel

Behold, the Ferret Derby — a startling discovery in small town Wales

Guest Blogger: The Navigators — Laura’s mom Mary takes a turn at blogging about our travels together in Italy

Big Night — Laura’s uncles and cousins gather in Tuscany for an epic meal

Guest Blogger: The Steps of Positano — Dustin’s mom Donna writes about adventures in Sicily  

Nobody Expects the Spanish Appendectomy! — spoiler alert in the title :)  

Torres Stories — one of our favorite places from our entire year on the road

You Can Go Home Again — wrapping up an amazing year

You Can Go Home Again

Hard to believe, but I’m writing this update from our living room in San Francisco, with our cat Nutmeg purring next to me on the couch and the faint aroma of sport celebrity still lingering in the air. (Barry, if you’re out there, couldn’t you have at least left us a signed baseball or something?!?) After a series of delayed/cancelled flights out of Lima to Miami, we finally arrived in Florida a few days ago, where we enjoyed a relaxing visit with my family that included my parents’ amazing homemade lasagna, welcome home cupcakes & balloons, marinated elk steaks, and of course, a few heated political “discussions” with my Dad. (It’s nice to have Dustin around to fight the liberal fight with me after having to go it alone against Dad all these years!) :)

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Torres Stories

When I was 9-years-old, I bought a beta fish with my allowance money and set up a small aquarium for my new little friend in my bedroom. Since this was the first pet I was allowed to name by myself, I spent a long time trying to come up with the perfect name for him. I finally decided on “Patagonia,” a place I had probably heard about in my social studies class or possibly in an issue of National Geographic lying around the house. I didn’t actually know anything about Patagonia – I’m not even sure I knew it was in South America – but the word “Patagonia” conjured up all kinds of romantic images of faraway exotic places in my little third-grader brain, and that was reason enough to name a fish for me. Twenty-four years later, I finally got to see the place that had inspired the name of my wispy little fish friend. Partly because of my childhood fascination with Patagonia and, more recently, because of the stories our friends Tanya & Eric and Courtney & Patrick and had told us about their adventures there, Patagonia was one of the few places that Dustin and I had resolved we had to see on this trip. When Dustin’s appendicitis struck in Spain and we seriously considered coming home early, more than anything it was the prospect of missing out on Patagonia that spurred us to keep going.

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Patagonia, Or How Lustin Got Their (Exercise) Groove Back

After a month of full English breakfasts in the UK, nearly two months of eating mostly pasta, pizzas (SO many pizzas), wine, and gelato in Italy, a month in Spain downing pinxtos and tapas left and right (they were so small!, but none of them seemed to incorporate anything resembling greens), and my unexpected hiatus from exercise due to a pesky appendectomy, Laura and I were starting to feel a bit soft in early December. Actually, that’s an understatement; we were starting to feel like the Pillsbury Doughboy, aka Poppin’ Fresh (which would be a great name for a rapper, by the way) and his portly but adorable wife (Mary Poppin’ Fresh?). Anyway, my point is: we needed some exercise, and we needed it bad. Atacama in northern Chile wasn’t the most active start to our two months in South America, and a week of wine tasting in Mendoza – which shockingly also involved some serious consumption of red meat – didn’t exactly scream “back on the exercise wagon”. It was time for some serious outdoor inspiration: hello, Patagonia!

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Flashback: Diving the Red Sea

Before diving in (sorry) to the story of the week we spent scuba diving in Sharm el-Sheikh, we just wanted to say how thrilled we are for the people of Egypt now that Mubarak has officially stepped down. There was a strong sense of resignation and apathy when we were there – a feeling of “What’s the point?” that pervaded the few political conversations we had with locals. I remember our guide Mohammed saying that things were never going to change because the corrupt government made all the rules. The contrast behind that defeatism and the images and stories we’re seeing out of Cairo today could not be more stark. We wish them all the best.

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Flashback: Jewels of the Nile

Given the current political unrest there, Egypt seems like an appropriate place to begin writing about some of the places we didn’t have time to cover during our world tour last year. As we learned during our travels there, and as we’re now reading in the news on a daily basis, Egypt (and the Middle East in general) is filled with complexity, contradiction, corruption, and confusion. It’s a difficult place to wrap your head around, especially as a westerner, and we left feeling like we never got a true sense of what the day-to-day life of the average Egyptian is really like. We did, however, see some of the most impressive, ancient monuments and art we’ve seen anywhere in the world, and we got to share the experience with my big brother Dirk, which made the trip all the more memorable.

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A Banner Year

Crazy as it may seem, we’re still actively working on posts and photos from the parts of our trip we didn’t get a chance to blog about from the road, and we still want to write some closing thoughts on what it was like traveling around the world for an entire year. Blog entries and photos from Patagonia will be up this week, but in the mean time, we wanted to collect and share all of the banner photos we created and used at the top of this website throughout the year. When we started our trip, our goal was to create a new banner photo for each country we visited. We didn’t quite manage that – noticeably absent are banners from Thailand, Jordan, Israel, and Spain – but we came pretty close to having a banner for each country. The new Banners page captures all of the images we created and makes for a concise overview of our year on the road. Enjoy!

New Years 2011: A Tango Odyssey

Hi folks! Another quick update as we head off on our final adventure before heading home (!) in less than two weeks. We’re in Guayaquil, Ecuador right now, and tomorrow we’ll be heading out to the Galapagos Islands for eight days (that is, assuming Laura’s appendix doesn’t stage a last-minute coup as mine did right before we were originally supposed to hit the Galapagos in November). We’ll be totally offline for the next week, but we’re planning to post a full report on our three amazing weeks in Patagonia as soon as we get back. With more than 1,800 photos to sort through (good lord) and so many great hikes and adventures to write about, it’s proving to be a slightly bigger job than we initially anticipated.

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Baby Got Malbec

As the glacier-chilled wind whips down from the spiky towers of Torres del Paine National Park and blasts against the “windows” of our geodesic dome here at EcoCamp, I must confess that our sun and wine-filled week in Mendoza a couple of weeks ago feels like a world away. But I’ll do my best to provide some highlights from our week in Argentina’s most famous wine country. Let me just open up this bottle of Malbec here and see if that helps to get the creative juices flowing. Mmmm. Yep, it’s all coming back to me…

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Feliz Navidad!

Feliz Navidad from Buenos Aires! It’s in the 90’s down here and there’s not a Christmas tree in sight, but we’re managing to make the most of our holiday away from home. I made my great-grandmother’s meatballs and homemade sauce for Christmas Eve dinner last night, and we invited Kate and James, two British friends we met in Torres del Paine, to join us for dinner in the apartment we’re staying in here in BA.

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