Full Disclosure: This page took us longer than any other! We hope what we’ve included below gives you a good idea of who we are, but if there’s more you want to know please connect with us.
Introductions
Lezlie
Born in Little Rock and raised in the Dallas area, Lezlie grew up traveling between the two. She was an active band member in middle and high school, and attended college for Music Education – first at Oklahoma State then Northern Kentucky University, where she met Andy.
Though Music Ed didn’t work out for Lezlie, she eventually found success in College Career Services. When her campus closed after a buyout, she decided (after a lot of convincing from Andy) to go into business for herself.
Andy
Originally from West Michigan, Andy grew up in Northern Kentucky and spent his summers traveling back up north to visit family. Like Lezlie, he was fond of school band, and his passion led him to earn a degree in Music Education and spend 5 successful years as a Band Director.
Eventually, the stress of the job began to outweigh the joy, so when it became clear that income from Lezlie’s business was going to be stable enough to support them both, it made sense for him to take the leap.
Our Partnership
We started our relationship as friends, and quickly grew to BFF status, turning to each other for just about everything.
After 5 years of friendship (and increasingly more questions from friends and family about our relationship), we decided to try becoming more. Since then, we’ve grown into life partners. Our personal views line up in all the right places, we complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and (most importantly) we’re 100% committed to each other.
Though we are decidedly very different people, we have a lot of the most important things in common. While we are happily partnered and wear rings, we’ve chosen not to get married. We’ve also chosen not to have children, and we choose not to follow any organized religions.
Since a few of our life choices tend to be on the controversial side, we rarely share these details with others. However, as a monogom-ish, sex-positive couple, we both believe in representation and we believe that personal differences don’t have to stand in the way of the connections we make with other people and/or what we can learn from one another.
Neither of us ever really planned to go the ‘Unknown Normal’ route. But one thing we’ve always known is that so long as we have each other, we’ll be alright.
Next Steps
Life led us to Texas in 2012, where Andy continued his teaching career and Lezlie transferred into a better career services position.
2014 marked the start of Lezlie’s entrepreneurship, while Andy continued to teach and ‘bring home the bacon’.
Also in 2014, we added our dog Jax to the family.
Our Travels
We decided in 2015 that it was time to leave Texas, but we didn’t know where we wanted to go. We had been planning for years to move to Colorado after Texas, but after some more in-depth research, we decided against it.
It was around this time that we began talking about adding Andy to the business, which had grown and was becoming more than a one-person operation.
Early in 2016, we started coming across people our age traveling full-time while running businesses from the road. This started to sound like a really good idea since we wanted to go, but had no place in mind.
Consideration turned into planning, and we are now full-time travelers!
More on Why We Travel and Buying Our Unknown Normal Home.
Or, jump right in and check out our first blog entry: The 19 Things That Went Wrong in Our First Month of Full Time Travel.