About Bruce and Jen |
We are ESL teachers who have spent quite a long time living in other countries and recently moved back to the US.
After making this big move, we have decided to indulge in a little midlife crisis. Since sports cars are not really our thing, we’ve decided to take a year off from teaching and travel the US. Although we’ve had the great fortune to do a bit of traveling in other countries, we’re sadly ill traveled in our own US of A, and we’ve grown tired of answering “No, really! We’ve never been there,” to questions about places in the US. We’ve purchased a truck (hereafter known as “Truckasaurus,” due to both its size and its tendency to burn fossil fuels at a prodigious rate) and a travel trailer (yet to be named). After explaining these plans to our cat, Princess, she has agreed that she would be up for some adventures, so she’ll be coming along, too. |
The extended version
We're both originally from Western Washington - Shelton for Jen, Forks and Olympia for Bruce. We have lived and worked in various places over the years. Jen spent a year in La Rochelle, France in high school, where she learned French pretty well, but otherwise was basically up to no good. After we met at the University of Washington where we both lived in the dorms as freshmen (so cute, right?), we both majored in International Studies.
We spent a year abroad (again for Jen, first time for Bruce) in Montpellier, France, where we mostly went to class when we were supposed to, but also spent a lot of time getting to know the culture (OK, drinking wine), watching badly dubbed TV American TV shows, and traveling. After graduating from college, we spun our wheels for a couple of years in Seattle and eventually were talked into pursuing TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificates in Prague (thanks, Bridget!). We taught EFL in Prague for a year, loved it, but couldn't take the cold winter, and decided to move somewhere warmer. Oaxaca, Mexico was our next stop, and we taught EFL (and French!) for a year before we ran out of money and decided we needed to go to grad school if we wanted to be REAL English teachers.
We did an MA TESOL program at Cal State Sacramento and worked as teachers full time while getting our degrees. Before the ink was dry on our diplomas, we accepted jobs at a university in Dubai - after checking Google Maps for the location of Dubai. We lived and worked there for almost 9 years. One of our favorite parts of living there was going camping in the desert - some pretty serious off the grid territory, like no humans for miles. It was also a great travel base, and we went a lot of neat places. We moved back to the US last year and worked as high school English teachers in Pasco, WA for a year. The people were really great, but we had some pretty serious re-entry/reverse culture shock after so many years abroad. We felt like we needed to reconnect with our country a bit, so here we are, camping across the US...
We're both originally from Western Washington - Shelton for Jen, Forks and Olympia for Bruce. We have lived and worked in various places over the years. Jen spent a year in La Rochelle, France in high school, where she learned French pretty well, but otherwise was basically up to no good. After we met at the University of Washington where we both lived in the dorms as freshmen (so cute, right?), we both majored in International Studies.
We spent a year abroad (again for Jen, first time for Bruce) in Montpellier, France, where we mostly went to class when we were supposed to, but also spent a lot of time getting to know the culture (OK, drinking wine), watching badly dubbed TV American TV shows, and traveling. After graduating from college, we spun our wheels for a couple of years in Seattle and eventually were talked into pursuing TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificates in Prague (thanks, Bridget!). We taught EFL in Prague for a year, loved it, but couldn't take the cold winter, and decided to move somewhere warmer. Oaxaca, Mexico was our next stop, and we taught EFL (and French!) for a year before we ran out of money and decided we needed to go to grad school if we wanted to be REAL English teachers.
We did an MA TESOL program at Cal State Sacramento and worked as teachers full time while getting our degrees. Before the ink was dry on our diplomas, we accepted jobs at a university in Dubai - after checking Google Maps for the location of Dubai. We lived and worked there for almost 9 years. One of our favorite parts of living there was going camping in the desert - some pretty serious off the grid territory, like no humans for miles. It was also a great travel base, and we went a lot of neat places. We moved back to the US last year and worked as high school English teachers in Pasco, WA for a year. The people were really great, but we had some pretty serious re-entry/reverse culture shock after so many years abroad. We felt like we needed to reconnect with our country a bit, so here we are, camping across the US...