About Us
After many years hopelessly trying to suppress our explorer genes, we finally gave in to their demands and became fully nomadic in 2018. No more “too short”, one or two week excursions here or there, we now carry our homes on our backs. We spent years planning and saving for the leap to become fully nomadic, achieve financial independence, and to slow travel… home-free. The Explorer Genes blog is the story of our unique journey, with quirky snapshots of our life slowmading the globe on a $45 (combined) budget per day. We love to geek out and write about all the fun insights and facts we uncover, make history not boring, and share obscure or off-beat discoveries as we go. We are also culture hounds, avid hikers and walkers, and try to seek out adventure on a budget whenever and wherever possible. We truly believe that travel isn’t simply what you read in guidebooks, or is something found only in “must do”, “must see”, or “top ten” lists. Instead, we create a by-the-seat-of-our-pants itinerary that comes from slow travel, meeting and living with locals, and finding wondrous and off-beat travel opportunities when we can.
chase your passion... not your pension.
Meet the Explorer Genes Mandy and Greg
We live with the motto that, one can choose to be blind to the world, or to be an adventurer in search of its treasure.
Our story together fittingly began in a foreign land… in Prague, Czech Republic (now Czechia) in 2007 where we met each other while living as expats, and teaching English. We carved out new lives for ourselves in our adopted homeland, and had joyfully rich travel lives with Europe and Czechia as our backyard. Then, in 2008, our Explorer Genes helped propel us out of Czechia and to a new home in Portland, Oregon, USA. Portland quickly morphed into the perfect home base for us, where we embarked upon endless side trips and explorations across the Pacific Northwest US. In Portland, Mandy found a career as an event coordinator that was a perfect fit for her inner planning nerd at the Multnomah Athletic Club. And Greg settled into an office job which was where he belonged, outside, as a park ranger.
We found a home in Portland that we truly loved, while also coincidentally being very fortunate to pick up new skills and experience by becoming property managers at the lovely Irvington Court Apartments in the beautifully historic Irvington neighborhood. In 2015, we stumbled onto the idea of housesitting and petsitting as a clever addition to our travel repertoire, also a perfect fit because we really missed animals and weren’t able to have them in our apartment building. Life was wonderful, and we were busy, but we did not let our explorer genes lay dormant just because we settled down in one place for awhile. We spent 10 years loving on Portland and crisscrossing every nook and cranny of what quickly became our favorite US state… Oregon! Not to mention the journeys to US national parks and roadside explorations by embarking on numerous roadtrips. It wasn’t all US travel, we still journeyed internationally to Belize, Thailand, South Korea, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Canada, Mexico and Nicaragua whenever we could squeeze them into our allotted employer mandated two week smash-and-grab travel timetables.
Then, as our friends turned to kids and houses for goals and purpose…we didn’t. We chose travel and independence instead. Ready for a big change, and ready to stop deferring our dreams, or… genes. As the saying goes, ‘where there is a will, there is a way’. In the years, before we officially set off in 2018 we strove to live frugally, and minimistically, in order to prepare, and to really educate ourselves towards achieving indefinite travel starting on July 11, 2018. Today, as we begin 2022, we are elated to admit that we are still nomadic, still traveling, still finding lots of adventures on a budget, and absolutely still chasing our passion and not our pension.
It was 1989 when I first realized I may have the explorer gene lying somewhere in my gene code. My parents piled my sisters and I into the family Truckster transporting us from our humble Hoosier home in Evansville, Indiana to our magnificent nation’s capital, Washington D.C. It was there I had a chance encounter with an older (probably sixty) and tired looking woman wearing a tattered gray scarf covering her head and a purple flowing dress. She approached us not saying a word, but simply smiled and held out her knobby hand to give me something. Cautiously, with my parents’ approval, I accepted her gift… what turned out to be a stack of picture postcards from a place I’d never seen nor heard of. I remember being hypnotized with what I saw in those pictures of snow, fields of berries, farmers, and rather plain looking houses. Something so familiar yet so utterly foreign. I was mesmerized by those postcards yet, the real discovery for me came when I turned a postcard over to reveal something undecipherable scrawled on the back… stopping me in my tracks. My postcards were from Russia!
I grew up, but I never lost that fascination and compelling need for travel and learning of foreign lands that got jumpstarted with that stack of postcards. I graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in Journalism & Mass Communications, and had many jobs in hospitality, club management, marketing, and events. Fast forward to 2007, where after the most difficult year of my life, I found myself accepting the delightful personal challenge of departing the US, and moving to Prague, Czech Republic to teach English. I continued living in Prague for one glorious year, eventually meeting the guy who would become my future husband and co-gene.
We moved to Portland, US, in 2008 and spent 10 years in a wonderful city I had long held a fascination for. In addition to our side gig as property managers, I settled into my career as Greg and I plotted our next travel endeavors until our magical “Great Escape” arrived in 2018.
And honestly, I’ve never looked back on my former 9-5 stressful American life. In the past years since beginning our nomadic life, I’ve gotten control of a plague that has haunted me since childhood…severe generalized anxiety…and become a certified yoga teacher, after spending some time in Goa, India in 2019. I’ve also kept up with the writing on this crazy blog, taught myself the Cyrillic alphabet, visited every US state, become a Spanish speaker, and a healthy and resourceful cook. Oh, and I have started a new travel buddy service called Explorer Dames for women who want to travel, but might need a wing-woman/co-pilot to lean on to make it happen. Please reach out if you’d be interested in creating an adventure with yours truly. 🙂
Greg
When I was 6, my inner explorer was awoken with a sudden move to a new home, which was very much not made in the USA. My new home was the faux Bavarian village town of Leavenworth, Washington. My only context, at the time, was to compare Leavenworth to living in a snow globe. I had not had any geography classes yet in school so this Leavenworth place came as a confusing shock to my sense of place. But, what I did know was that I liked it… a lot! Leavenworth felt totally foreign, and I got culture curious for the first time in my life! I was ruined.
At 14, thanks to my dad, I found my first love on my first international trip to the small and wonderfully authentic Baja California fishing village of Loreto, Mexico. It was exotic, seductive, storied, and so very different in almost every way than any place I had experienced before. I could not shake my experience of meeting Mexico, and my love affair continued with nearly annual visits, and several months’ long solo backpacking adventures from Tijuana to Mexico’s border with Belize, and dozens of points between. By 20, my feet had become perpetually itchy. My explorer gene was insuppressible as the years ticked by, and I bussed my way south, through Central America, and across 17 countries in Europe.
Naturally, I got tired of constantly buying return air tickets to the US. So, I immigrated… to Prague, Czechia in 2001. I carved out a new home for myself in Prague, working as an English teacher at Charles University, in yet another snow globe, for 7 incredible years. Crisscrossing my new adopted Czech homeland; I joyfully discovered countless new corners and explored other parts of Europe every time I could scrape enough money together to buy a train or bus ticket. Eventually, in 2007 my path crossed with Mandy, and well…our genes got spliced.
In 2008, Mandy and I moved to Portland, Oregon. A return trip for me, since Portland is close to my birthplace home. Portland was a natural fit for us, surrounded by natural beauty and a vibrant, fun Euro-centric city where “young people did go to retire.” I found work in hotels, and accounting before finding my way back to school at Portland State University graduating with a Masters in Public Administration in 2013. During this time, I also discovered a great passion and gift for making beer at home. Beer brewing for me started as a cheap and convenient way to replicate the beers that I had so loved and missed dearly from my days living in Czechia. But this “hobby” quickly developed into a full blown obsession, and very nearly into a profession. Opening a nano brewery somewhere, someday, is still very much a possibility and I hope to find opportunities to brew some beer somewhere, somehow as we travel. Consuming exotic and obscure varieties of craft beer, will of course continue to be a mainstay of my explorations wherever we are. Brewing beer unfortunately didn’t pay the bills, however, or for brewing ingredients to feed my obsession. So I fell into working in the public sector, to giving back to the parks and natural areas I treasured, eventually landing a position as a Park Ranger for Metro.
We write honest portrayals of our travels and experiences being nomadic. We try our best not to make our writing gimmicky; and we really dislike click-bait, so we definitely will not be writing those types of articles either. Nor will Mandy be posing like a perfectly placed fashionista for the camera in front of some temple or ruin. We do seek out those tired and true “bucket list” items, but we are also beyond addicted to maps, it’s in our genes, ( we love Mapy.cz !) to find the unpolished, unhyped, or under appreciated corners of our world. We hope to inspire others to travel, to activate their own explorer genes, and to get out there and find their own treasures. If you like what we write and want to receive updates on new content sign up for an email updates subscription.
