My first guest blogger!! {Welcome Liz!}

Hi everyone! I’m Liz from the blog Explore.Dream.Discover. I’m so excited to be guest posting for Desiree on her lovely blog. What a gorgeous and inspiring family she has! I dream of having a house full of boys myself someday… But probably not anytime soon as my husband and I are currently fulfilling a dream and living abroad in Amsterdam and traveling all around Europe!  Here’s the (shortened) story of us, and how we ended up living abroad:

Corey (my husband) and I met back in 2007, when I was a senior at the University of Oregon and he was four years out of college, living the big-boy life in Portland.  I don’t really believe in love at first sight, but this was pretty much love at first date.

The first 7 months of our relationship were long distance due to me being in school two hours away and him being in Portland. During these months there were a lot of phone calls, as you can imagine. And while being long distance in the very beginning of a relationship can sometimes suck big time, I do value all those deep phone conversations we had while living apart. One thing we learned about each other is we both had a strong desire to travel. I’d done a bit already (my parents are European so I went a couple times in high school), but Corey hadn’t really done any. We took our first trip out of the country together in 2009 to Costa Rica. Ever since then we’ve been major travel junkies. South America, Europe, all over the States. We couldn’t get enough. We often talked about moving abroad with the company we worked for (they have an office right outside of Amsterdam), but didn’t start seriously pursuing it until just after we got married. 

Corey was planning on getting his MBA in the next few years and the only worthy part-time program in Portland would take THREE years to complete. By then I knew I’d want a house and kids and our European dream would probably dwindle. So we came up with a genius plan: Study in Amsterdam. We can work for our company, he can get his MBA and we can travel to our heart’s content. And then in two or three years we’d move home and have babies. Perfection, right? While not everything in life goes as planned, luckily for us, this did. We’ve been living in Amsterdam for six months now and we’ve already traveled a lot. Here’s where we’ve been:

Paris:

The French Riviera (Nice, Cannes, Antibes):

London:

Dublin:

Berlin:

Our goal is to travel to at least one new place every month, and we already have the next six months of travels completely planned out! While there are plenty of hard things about living this far away from the comforts of home, I know this is an experience we will cherish for the rest of our lives. I can't wait to tell our kids and grandkids about it someday :) 

{Photos © Liz Denfeld Photography}