About us
site purpose
Primarily, this site is a digital scrapbook. We want to record our adventures much in the way our parents recorded theirs in a photo album.
An easy-to-read method of gathering pictures, blog posts, maps, and videos to tell a story doesn’t seem to exist- so we built our own!
Who is this site for?
Primarily, this site is for us. It does a number of things- forces us to organize photos, write down memories, plan future adventures, and save all of those things in a way that is easy to save and back up. As long as we pay our hosting fee and regularly back the site up offline, this “digital scrapbook” will be around as long as we want it to.
If you enjoy reading our posts, great! Just remember that this is really a digital diary/scrapbook, and not an attempt to get a social media following.
Who are we?
We are an ordinary couple- we have no special skills, inheritance, or occupation. We save money aggressively to achieve our goals- we seldom go out to eat, we fix our own vehicles, do our own home repair, and try to live as cheaply as possible.
Robert
I grew up in Anchorage, Alaska. My father was a teacher and my mother homeschooled me and my four brothers. I went to college in Laramie, Wyoming and graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. After graduating, I moved back to Alaska and worked in minerals exploration for a summer. That winter, I got a job as a mechanical engineer where I did a lot of engineering work in the isolated villages of Alaska. After four years of that, I moved to a different company where I designed pipelines and facilities for the oilfields of Alaska’s North Slope.
Each set of my grandparents lived in Colorado, and since my father was a teacher and my mom could take her work with her, we would spend about a month in Colorado visiting family each summer. This is where I developed my love of the mountains- from the age of 4 or 5 all the way through 18, I explored Rocky Mountain National Park every summer.
I did not really enjoy road trips until I could drive- the first big one that I remember enjoying was the first time I drove the AlCan, after my senior year of of high school. I didn’t learn anything about fixing vehicles until I bought my Jeep Cherokee XJ at the end of my sophomore year of college. I quickly learned that paying someone else to fix things was prohibitively expensive, and that I would have to learn to do it myself. After hundreds of hours of reading forums and YouTubing, as well as time spent fixing and modifying my XJ and Jeep TJ, I consider myself to be an accomplished mechanic. I didn’t have any family members that were interested in cars, and I take a great deal of pride in having learned to fix vehicles without a mentor.
Back to road trips- during college, I found that road trips were my absolute favorite thing in the world. I drove the AlCan every year of college, and every spring break or thanksgiving break, I would do some sort of trip, usually to Utah. This is where I got into offroading- I did every trail that I could with my stock little XJ. I found a unique joy in driving a vehicle for hundreds of miles on the highway, doing some pretty gnarly trails, and hopping back on the highway. No trailer, no truck, and I could camp along the way! I like to think that I was “overlanding” before it was cool.
That love of road trips and offroading has stuck with me, and it remains my favorite thing in the world.
If you enjoy reading our posts, great! Just remember that this is really a digital diary/scrapbook, and not an attempt to get a social media following.
Delaney
I was born in Minnesota and raised in Wyoming. We had over 600 acres to play on as my dad lived out his dream of being a farmer and Mom kept us steady working as an accountant. I wouldn’t trade that childhood for anything, and one day I hope to share a similar love of the countryside with our own kids.
I studied Chemical Engineering at the University of Wyoming where I met some incredible life-long friends and, unknowingly, my future sweetheart. After graduating I joined the US Peace Corps and moved 13 time zones away to the African country of Malawi – specifically the village of Malembo. Nine months into service came March 2020 and a worldwide pandemic where I was repatriated and landed in a camper back in Minnesota. That spring I reconnected with Robert on a 7-day backpacking trip, road tripped across the country with my best friends, then decided to move to Alaska where my younger brother joined me shortly thereafter.
While in the last frontier, I worked as an Environmental Engineer remediating contaminated sites all across the state. It’s taken me to a lot of crazy cool places! Places I wouldn’t have been able to afford to see otherwise.
While working hard, one must play hard. A mantra that’s taken me through my adult life. I’ve adventured as much as possible in my time off and discovered a love for the mountains, the desert, the forests, and the long highways stretching in-between. While I always knew I enjoyed being outdoors, I hadn’t realized how much I needed it.
Thank you to my adventure buddies and cheers to the times we had and the times yet to come.