Hey! We are Mike and Stephanie, just two independent travel bloggers trying to make it work.

Mike left his corporate job in May 2009 to backpack around the world. He has since visited huge chunks of Asia, Australia and South America, and spent a year teaching English in Xi’an, China. He speaks English, Spanish and (some) Chinese and is the technical mind behind this website. Mike started Art of Backpacking to share the backpacking experience through new media. Recently he also founded a sister site Art of Travel Blogging, as a forum for other bloggers.

Stephanie graduated with a degree in English in 2007 and has either been traveling or planning to travel ever since. She started Twenty-Something Travel in 2009 to extol the benefits of long-term travel for young adults. In September 2010 she quit her day job to travel and write full time. She has a preoccupation with good novels, London, England and is trying her hardest to learn Spanish before heading down south.

After months of online banter Stephanie and Mike finally met in June 2010 at the Travel Blogger Exchange Conference (TBEX) in New York City. It was pretty much love at first site. In addition to a shared fondness for iCarly and peanut butter and chocolate ice cream, we were both thrilled to meet someone with the same ideas about life, travel and working. We pride ourselves on having one of the nerdiest love stories ever.

Now we travel the world together, and document our adventures on a variety of sites. We both love being self-employed and have been known to happily lock ourselves in a room with our laptop for days on end. At the same time we love having the freedom to travel and see the world. We owe a lot to internet technology for giving us the freedom to work around the globe.