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Project Statement:

Growing up in Kentucky, my childhood travels were spent visiting family members who lived in different states (we mostly went to Washington D.C. every spring) – and a very homesick week spent at a 4-H summer camp two hours away from home. My mom made me attend the camp for three or four years in a row, despite the fact that I would call home every Wednesday – every year – begging her to come get me. While she would come visit my homesick self, she would never take me home – until camp ended, and everyone’s parents picked their children up. My first trip abroad was a two-week language exchange in Paris and Dijon, France in high school. An insatiable curiosity to see the world replaced any hint of the chronic homesickness I once suffered. In college, I took out extra student loans to study abroad in both France and Italy and graduated in four years with a degree and the goal to live abroad for one whole year.

Two countries and roughly six years later, sitting on a sidewalk in Yangon, Burma, I asked my then travel partner-extraordinaire (husband as of the summer of 2017) if he would ever consider traveling around the world for one whole year. When he said “Sure,” I made a list of countries I wanted to visit, upgraded my camera system, and told myself the trip would be good for my travel photography portfolio. 443 Days Around the World is the documentation of this one whole year (and then some – from September 4, 2012 to November 20, 2013) trip as we made our way through 30+ countries around the world. Through daily one-minute videos, photography essays, journal entries, and even budget reports, the project as a whole explores the concept of 'identity' as we navigated in and out of cultures vastly different from our own, ‘home’ as we found ourselves without one – unless you counted our backpacks, and ‘connection’ as we fostered our relationship to one another, as well as friends and strangers we met while traveling.

While my intentions with this trip (and corresponding project) were to see the world - to do as much as I could from standing in front of the Taj Mahal to climbing up Machu Picchu - not every day was as adventure filled. This project documented the mundane (entire days spent in bed sick with 'Deli-belly') as much as the exciting ones. 

What follows below are direct links to the Day 1 as well as the days after landing back in the United States as well as links to some of my favorite days, and a search field for anything that may not show up in the monthly archive list or tag cloud. 

Archive:

Reoccurring themes: