tiny roamers-beginnings

Hi, I’m Alexis. Normally I like to update instagram with my ramblings, but this week it’s probably better if I remain site unseen. My nose is currently raw and red from all the tissue needed to clear it every five minutes and my voice sounds like a drag queen ready for her sixth performance tonight.  

But are drag queens fabulous (all the time) and so am I (sometimes)? Yes. So it seems like the perfect time to start writing. 

Team U.S.A. 

There’s a long story and a short story, but I’ll try to aim somewhere in between. 

Born, raised, and schooled in the U.S.A, in 2012 I found myself alone in the Canadian Rockies. I spent summers canoeing, cliff jumping, and hiking. Autumns watching the beauty of a new season descending upon the national park where I lived, while riding past the animals coming out for one last stretch before it was too cold, and winters dog sledding, snowboarding and engaging in midnight sledding and ice skating with my friends from Germany, U.K., Netherlands and Australia. If it sounds idillic, it was, but it was all by accident. 

I had originally gone to Alberta, Canada due to a relationship in which it quickly became apparent that our summertime romance should have remained in the summer and we were bringing out the worst in each other. So I found a ride share and headed off to Vancouver in British Columbia for what was supposed to be a 10 day trip to clear my head and figure out what to do. 

It was during this trip, staying in a hostel for the first time, I discovered a community of world travelers, exploring while living and working their way from country to country. Until that point, I had only known travel as a vacation, a summer, or semester abroad. It hadn’t occurred to me you could get work visas and actually live and travel abroad for the long term.

It was also during this trip I discovered an independence and strength I hadn’t known, and I came to a very important conclusion. The relationship with myself and who I could be, was much more important than forcing a relationship in which the bad times outnumbered the good. And so 10 days away turned from temporary to everlasting, and became the start of a new life.

Now also in 2012 a man-boy, five years older than me, but also born in the U.S.A., was making a move from California to Singapore. He too was supposed to be gone for only a short amount of time on his journey, but he too would not return. 

tiny roamers

Now let’s fast forward to four years later, to the beginning of 2016. After many years of traveling and working around the world, I was working in Australia at the Langham Sydney on Kent Street and said man-boy at the same time was living a 15 minute walk away in the Mantra on Kent Street. And although it wasn’t our time to meet quite yet, the universe was already placing us in the same orbit. 

It would in October 2016 that our worlds finally collided in New Zealand. Both weary of other Americans as it had been years since either one of us had interacted with someone from our own country on the daily, we still went on the date. 

Like peanut butter and jelly, butter and popcorn, Marmite and toast, we fit together, instantly feeling like home to one another, filling a void we hadn’t realized was empty. 

And so we…did not get married! Alas, we made the other lifelong commitment to one another, we decided to have kids together. So two separate world travelers quickly became three together in a family, and then four, and as of 2020, five. 

Our children are U.S. citizens, but only two out of three have been to the U.S., living most of their lives in New Zealand, followed by Singapore, and Bali. 

Where we go from here and if we ever return to the U.S.A., is really unknown to either of us. But wherever we go, whatever adventure is beyond the horizon, we now have our team of tiny roamers to join us.