Full disclosure: before we nailed this adorable picture, I attempted to jump on Jeremy and knocked both of us straight to the ground, like a giant flying squirrel. So graceful! If you look real close, you can see ground shmutz all over my butt.
Hi there! We’re so flattered that you care enough about who we are to click on our self-absorbed page all about us. We won’t let you down: we absolutely love talking about ourselves.
By the end of this page, you’ll probably feel like you know us really well. In fact, let’s make it official and connect on social media! Then you can tweet sassy one-liners at us and laugh at us with us as we publish embarrassing failure stories about our travel adventures.
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Meet Lia
Lia is originally from Louisville, Kentucky. She grew up on an actual farm, with horses and everything. Despite this, she has – for no good reason – always had a Californian accent. The working theory is too many hours spent watching Clueless at a young, impressionable age.
At any rate, after getting her degree in fashion design & apparel merchandising from Indiana University (Go Hoosiers!) and spending one incredible semester working at Walt Disney World, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. There, she spent several years hopping around various corporate merchandising roles until becoming a Business Systems Analyst, which we’re pretty sure has something to do with computers. She did a lot of important sounding things like optimizing business processes and designing business solutions and stuff that sounds kinda boring unless you happen to do it yourself in which case it’s actually quite fun.
This all took 5 very long years. And during these 5 long years, Lia was hatching a plan. For 5 years she’d been sitting behind her corporate desk dreaming of A Very Big Adventure. Weekend trips, hiking and camping weren’t cutting it – she wanted to travel even more. She wanted a once in a lifetime opportunity to say f*** it and travel. For like, a LONG time. She was a afraid that if she didn’t do it while she was still young, she’d regret it for the rest of her life. So she saved, and she planned, and she dreamed, and she met someone who was down to come along.
And finally, the day had come. She quit her job to go travel. And it was nothing like what she expected.
Lots of people talk about how they "find themselves" when they travel. Lia was fully prepared to find herself. She figured she'd probably find herself doing things like waking up at dawn, doing yoga on the beach, drinking acai juice and probably meditating for a while, then maybe journalling or possibly thoughtfully reading, and then going on a casual 10 mile afternoon hike or maybe some light skydiving, and then turning in at a reasonable hour.
Instead, she found the exact same person that she'd always been: clumsy, disaster-prone, very slow at hiking, terrified of most adventure sports, prone to late-night Netflix binges, and totally in love with the world despite literally always being lost in it. That's not a metaphor: Lia could get lost in her own house. She has no idea how to read a map.
Reality didn't hit her all at once, though. It took a year of reality slapping her on the face and yelling WAKE UP!! HOW ARE YOU STILL ASLEEP!? IT'S NOON. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!?!?! but after a while, she finally accepted that she was exactly who she always was. And she made her peace with it - and with all of her many, many, many, many flaws.
After her year long honeymoon ended, Lia fully expected to return to the workplace. After all, her travels hadn't changed her into becoming a new and different person, or showed her a side of herself that she wasn't already completely familiar with.
But it had done one life-changing thing: it had given her a full year to rabidly obsess over the little blog she'd started for fun just before leaving. And obsess she did. Since founding her first e-commerce site and blog at age 16, Lia had spent years denying her inner spreadsheet-loving, website-building geek. But to her delight, the year-long honeymoon allowed her to fully dive straight into the nerdiest parts of running a blog. And a full year of dedicating well over 40 hours a week to her new favorite hobby had grown it from a tiny baby blog into a hefty, self-sustaining teenaged blog, with like, angst, and ennui, and ... bad taste in music ... OK, this metaphor is getting out of hand.
And so, when she got back, she sat down at yet another desk in yet another corporate fashion retailer ... and suddenly it hit her. What if she just like, blogged for a living? Is that a thing?!
She wasn't totally sure, but she's giving it a try anyway.
3 Words to Describe Lia's Personality
- Logical, analytical,
a complete nerd,brutally and innappropriately honest, pragmatic
Lia's Favorite Things
- Crafting (sewing, cardmaking, scrapbooking, knitting, jewelry making, all of it)
- Snobby coffee and overpriced artisanal boujie food
- Making fancy lists in cute little notebooks with specific pens
- Feminism, social responsibility, and political activism
- Makeup, but in a feminist kind of way
- Wearing scarves (Fact: owns a scarf in every color)
- Spreadsheets
- Karaoke (Faves to sing: CHVRCHES, Shakira, NSYNC, Regina Spektor, everything from the Dirty Dancing soundtrack.)
- Lord of the Rings... & Harry Potter
Jeremy eating ice cream next to the world's most chill rooster while crossing the border from Ecuador into Peru. 5 minutes later, the rooster would be casually sitting next to us in the van as it careened through the mountains like this was its normal everyday commute.
Meet Jeremy
Jeremy is originally from Morro Bay, California, and thus has the same Californian Valley Girl accent as Lia... except that his actually makes sense. He grew up on the Central Coast with a high school that was literally ON the beach. Literally. ON THE BEACH. Lia likes to describe it as the high school from The O.C.
Jeremy moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to attend art school. He graduated with a film degree, a passion for writing and directing, and a baller portfolio, which everyone knows is the perfect formula for making cash hand over fist and becoming instantly famous. Spoilers: it's not, though.
Still, his degree came in handy when he became a high school teacher teaching filmmaking and digital media art. He still writes in his "spare time" and Lia is fully expecting to pay off all that student loan debt with one of his scripts.
Luckily for Jeremy, it turns out that teaching is actually something he is as passionate about as sharing meaningful stories through writing and film. He has happily spent the last few years teaching at an urban high school in Oakland.
Anyway, in between moving to San Francisco and becoming a teacher, he met Lia. It was love at first sight, bla bla bla - more on that below - and at a creepily early point in their relationship (2nd date) Lia asked whether he'd be interested in joining her on A Very Big Adventure,. He was like, "sure, that sounds fun!"
Usually when people say that kind of thing, they aren't dead serious. Lia was dead serious.
Before Lia, Jeremy had never even left the time zone, much less the country. But a couple of years later, he found himself on a one-way flight to Colombia, thrilled and terrified and excited and terrified.
During their year-long honeymoon, Jeremy learned to love travel, and his extreme anxiety eventually gave way into a low-level constant panic. He was responsible for navigation, including the time he navigated a BMW right into a medieval castle in France on a disastrous road trip. He made a lot of animal friends, ate a lot of ice cream, hit his giant head on a lot of stuff (bless him, he tries) and had a great time.
Unlike Lia, who skipped gleefully away from corporate life like she'd just been freed from jail, Jeremy was heartbroken to leave his job and his students. He spent an embarrassing amount of time during the trip doing lame teacher things like lesson planning and designing curriculum.
So, as soon as he returned to Oakland, he resumed teaching at the same school, where he's been saying things like "that is so lit, fam" and making students cringe ever since.
3 Words to Describe Jeremy's Personality
- Sassy, anxious,
gingerbeardy,a walking California stereotype, considerate
Jeremy's Favorite Things
- Irritating youths
- Telling awful dad jokes (usually to youths)
- Dogs. Just, all of them.
- Being the adventurous one
- Rock climbing
- Snobby/douchey/boujie coffee, beer, whisky, food, etc
- Feminism, social responsibility, and political activism
- Karaoke (Faves to Sing: The Black Keys, Creed in an obnoxious voice, Alt J, Macklemore, Johnny Cash)
- Writing "Make To-Do list" at the top of every To-Do list
- Making animal friends
- Eating ice cream
- Reading Harry Potter or anything by Chuck Palahniuk or Stephen King (that balances out somehow)
Meet Liaremy
Yes, they combined their names. Don't you kinda hate these guys??
Lia and Jeremy met on the internet about a year and a half before meeting in person. Not Tinder, though - this was in P.T.E, the Pre-Tinder Era. And because apps and notifications weren't a thing, Lia kept forgetting to log in and check her messages, which meant that it took over a year to have their first conversation. Oops.
Anyway, when they did eventually meet up, it was sickening puppy love at first sight. They were inseparable from a disgustingly early point, and soon began aggressively one-upping each other in over-the-top displays of romantic affection.
Like, Lia spent far too much time than is reasonable on a scavenger hunt for Valentine's Day ... before they were even official. Jeremy once hand-made a lamp shade that spelled out a sweet message backwards and could only be read by turning on the lamp and looking at the wall, which he presented along with a video compilation of all her friends and family wishing her Happy Birthday from all over the world. Not to be outdone, Lia made a playlist filled with romantic songs and then created a scrapbook visually interpreting tying all of the lyrics to their relationship - and then hand-bound it in leather. These are truly the most extra people ever to walk the earth.
Oddly enough, the pair said "I Love You" in the least romantic ways ever: Lia blurted it out on accident and then LITERALLY ran away, and Jeremy was drunkenly half-dressed in a Batman Onesie while camping on a mountain. Figures.
There were a few moments in the early stages of their relationship that probably can only be described as GIANT FLASHING WARNING SIGNS. Like when they took their very first camping trip together and Jeremy totaled Lia's car in the mountains, 10 hours away from civilization (here's that fun story). Or when Jeremy attempted to teach Lia how to surf and she nearly got murdered by a zillion jellyfish (here's that one, too). Or when the pair tried to go backpacking with a fully loaded pack to prepare for their year-long honeymoon, only to find themselves panic-hiking after dark (enjoy).
And yet, somehow, despite clear signals from the Universe that maybe they should just stay inside and stop trying to be so adventurous, each new catastrophe only brought them closer and closer. By the time they got married, it felt like they'd been together for eons, both for them and for their many unfortunate third wheels (kidding, their friends adore them and don't hate them at all for how mushy they are. Right, guys?!? Right?!?!?).
Their wedding was in May 2016, with a ceremony in the California redwoods complete with handmade Mad Libs speeches and a karaoke reception.
A month later they sold all their stuff, quit their jobs, started Practical Wanderlust, and took off on a year-long adventure. They've been obnoxiously inseparable ever since.
3 Words Phrases to Describe Liaremy
- Sickeningly cute, the kind of couple that makes you believe in true love and also throw up in your mouth a little at the same time, tall and clumsy (like a baby giraffe)
Liaremy's Favorite Things
- Travelling
- Enabling each other's sugar addictions
- Stroopwafel (see previous point)
- Making obnoxious observations about snobby stuff like tasting notes in fancy coffee/beer/wine/food (mmm yes, this coffee is QUITE fruit forward, I'm getting notes of birch tree and Art Deco)
- Feminism, social justice, and political activism
- Karaoke (Fave duets to sing: Home is Whenever I'm with You, I've Had the Time of My Life, I'll Never Tell ... like, from Buffy)
- Accidentally wearing matching clothing ...again
- Powerlifting and bro-ing out at the gym (complete with grunting noises, flexing selfies, and aggressive curls)
- Taking roughly 3x longer to complete a hike than expected
- Travel fails. This isn't so much a favorite as just a curse that they've grown to accept.
Being disgustingly adorable after our failed Machu Picchu hike in Peru.
How can you get more of Lia & Jeremy in your life?!
This is a question we get asked ALL THE TIME. Just kidding! But we're going to be optimistic and assume this is what you're currently asking yourself, since you just spent a good 30 minutes of your valuable time reading alllllll about us. Hey, you're rad, by the way.
Anyway, we DO have a few ideas. We've got about a zillion blog posts that you could read, but we recommend starting with the summary of our year-long-honeymoon; that way you can read through it semi-chronologically. Here's a fancy, enticing button that you're going to want to click.
The Story of our Year-Long Honeymoon
Here's another idea: how about signing up for our newsletter? We promise to only send you content that doesn't suck. We'll send you some posts that we think you'll like, and then you'll hear from us about once a month. It's very low-commitment, we promise. Here's a fancy, enticing form that you're going to want to fill out.
We have one last extremely exciting idea for you that will keep us in your life EVERY SINGLE DAY. Social media. Yup, that's right: it's a thing, and we're doing it. You can follow us on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram. But if we had to choose just one, we'd say Instagram, because we post silly Instagram stories every day and it's pretty much a platform for us to amuse ourselves. Sometimes other people think they're funny, too! Here's a big, adorable photo of us that will make it super easy for you to follow us on the 'gram.
Hopefully we'll see you around! Until next time,
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