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If life is a funny thing, then love is just plain hilarious. In the case of my love life, it felt like a long-running joke that everyone got except for me. I grew up on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, then moved across the nation to Washington, D.C. to attend acting school and after graduation crossed the continent again to pursue my acting career in L.A. In every place I lived I dipped into the dating pool and always came out more hurt and jaded than before. Add that to the pressure to make it in a business that literally rips your self-esteem apart, in a city where everyone and their mom is trying to do the same and it wasn't a surprise when I found myself extremely depressed and accepting I'd be forever alone. So when my roommate announced that she was moving into a new apartment with her boyfriend I was left with a big decision; continue to stay in a city that was slowly killing my spirit and had taken the joy out of one of the major passions in my life, or do something for me for once. Packing my life into a suitcase and moving somewhere completely unknown on a whim wasn't anything new for me, but I had always only stayed in the comfort of my home country. Except for the one time I visited New Zealand because I had been what you might call a Lord of the Rings fanatic in high school. Suddenly I knew where I must go. I traveled for 6 months alone in New Zealand on a Working Holiday Visa but didn't work a single day. I did, however, experience a whole new way of living and by the end of my time there I knew that I couldn't go back to my life in the States. I decided to try to earn some now much-needed money in Australia where I had heard it was easier to find jobs. This time I (naively) felt like I was a seasoned traveler and was eager to continue my solo adventure in the Outback. The very last thing I ever expected to find in the world's dirtiest working hostel in a tiny country town outside of Melbourne was the man who would become my husband. I've always been a sucker for accents, but if you asked me which was the sexiest my answer certainly would not have been German. And yet, somehow this sweet, adorable guy with a thick Bavarian accent who called feet, "feets-es", grew to become the love of my life. We started off as friends, which morphed into romance and before I knew it he was asking me to go with him on a road trip up the east coast of Australia. If you ever want to test if your relationship is built to last I suggest traveling in a foreign country while living out of a car 24/7 with your significant other whose native language is not the same as yours. We learned A LOT about each other that trip, most importantly how to survive as a couple. Everything from choosing where we were going to camp for the night to dealing with several people who tried to take advantage of us. After our time in Australia we knew we could make it through anything. We then traveled through South East Asia doing various volunteer work, like teaching refugee children in Malaysia and caring for disabled rescue dogs in Thailand. But we soon encountered the frustrating hassles of traveling the world with two different passports where some countries afforded one more rights/time/visas but not the other. We found ourselves constantly having to make sacrifices to stay together and it was taking a toll. By then we knew that we wanted to be together forever so we decided to get married in Germany. We realized though that we weren't meant to stay in one place and that marriage wasn't the end to our travels, it was only the beginning. So we packed up our bags again and have been on the road ever since. We found each other the first trip, let's see what we find this time!