Our Story

We met in Barcelona and started moving south. The plan was always loose — a few nights in Málaga, a few in Tarifa, then across. But you don't really understand what you're doing until you're on the boat and Africa is getting closer and your old life is getting smaller behind you.

We both left our jobs for this. The strait felt like the physical version of that decision.

Tangier landed on us like a wall of sensation — the smell, the noise, the light. Nothing prepares you for your first African city. We explored, we got lost, we found our footing.

Chefchaouen was blue and quiet. Asilah had walls painted by artists and a stillness that Tangier didn't have. Essaouira we stayed for a week and barely moved.

Two days on the way to Thailand. The Cheonggyecheon stream at night, the whole city lit up around us. Seoul is the kind of place that makes you feel like you're in the future.

We rented a house and stopped moving. Two months in Chiang Mai was the part of the sabbatical nobody talks about — not the glamorous city-hopping version, but the version where you build routines. We trained every morning. Lifting, yoga, pilates, muay thai, ice baths. We shopped in local markets. We sat in coffee shops and read.

This is the period that changed us more than any border crossing.

A week in the mountains. Slower. Greener. Eating on bamboo platforms by the river. The kind of week that doesn't photograph well but that you remember for years.

The elephant sanctuary was supposed to be a day trip. It became something else entirely — the kind of experience that recalibrates things. Standing between two elephants while they look at you like you're the interesting one.

We have professional photos from this day that I will never stop looking at.

Back to Portugal first — Évora, with its Roman ruins and the kind of sky that looks painted. Then north to Helsinki in the dark. Then Budapest at night, the Parliament lit up across the Danube, both of us bundled against the cold.

The sabbatical was winding toward its end. We weren't ready.

Madeira keeps calling us back. This time, for New Year's Eve with the community we'd been making there. Funchal does fireworks like nowhere else on earth — launched from the mountains, filling the whole sky at once.

We were on a rooftop. The whole city was exploding around us. We looked at each other and I thought: we actually did it.

Back to New York. But a different New York. I started my own firm so we can keep doing this — building a life that has room for six months away, for Chiang Mai training blocks, for Madeira in December, for whatever comes next.

The sabbatical ended. The life we were building it toward is just beginning.