The Dans behind Traveling Dans met in Arizona during the summer of 2016. I (Danielle) started a summer job at a local physical therapy clinic. As I was getting introduced to everyone, I spotted this cute guy housing his foot-long sub sandwich in the back of the clinic.

I walked over to him and said “Hi I am Danie, the new physical therapy tech.”

He replied, “That will be easy to remember, my name is also Danny – nice to meet you!”

I (in my head) decided I would go by my full name, Danielle, to make things less confusing, and little did I know – I set that precedent for the rest of our lives!

The summer of 2016 was more of a friendship stage for us – I was going back to my senior year of college in Washington and he was trying to get hired onto a fire department. With so many big changes ahead of us, we both were not looking for a relationship but despite that, we talked every single day via text or Facetime.

It did not take long for this friendship to develop into a relationship and we dated long distance for the rest of my senior year. I moved back to Arizona after I graduated, taking a gap year to build up my resume so I could apply for physical therapy school. During that year we went through quite a bit of family-related changes and losses – things couples don’t typically face so soon in a relationship. These challenges ultimately helped us form an amazing foundation.

At this time, we also started to get the travel bug. We got into hiking together and would frequently take weekend trips to northern Arizona and southern Utah. During that year between undergraduate and graduate school, I also traveled solo to New Zealand for a three-week backpacking trip before school took away some of my freedom again.

In 2018, I started my Doctorate of Physical Therapy program, Danny started working for a local fire department, and we moved in together. We are both HUGE dog people so shortly after we moved in together, we got our first dog Lanai. The next three years were challenging as we were both trying to advance in our careers and in school. If you know or are with anyone in the fire service, you understand the schedules are unpredictable. Danny would be gone on shift for 24-72 hours and get home in the morning right when I was leaving to go to school all day. Despite our crazy schedules, we always made time for each other, even if that just meant a night spent on the couch binge-watching a show.

In 2020, I graduated with my doctorate, Danny became a paramedic within the fire department, and we got our second doodle, Dakota. Despite having a healthcare degree, I was a new grad applying for work in the middle of the pandemic. There were little to no jobs and those that were hiring were taking people with experience. At this time, Danny and I started playing with the idea of moving out of Arizona. Our families were the only things keeping us there and we were getting tired of the desert and disgustingly hot summers. This is when we made the decision to move to Oregon!

I was lucky enough to find a job as a physical therapist in Oregon and Danny totally changed his career path and got into mortgage. We immediately caught the adventure bug when we realized the PNW is endless when it comes to places to explore. Every weekend, it felt like we would travel somewhere new – various coastal towns, mountains in the Cascades, the Columbia River Gorge. During those first few months in Oregon, we relied heavily on blogs, YouTube, and social media to inspire our adventures and learn more about what the PNW had to offer. That is what sparked our eventual desire to create this blog and our other social media pages.

Once we settled in, we wanted a way to do more than just a day trip. Our goal was to pack up after work on Friday and head out for a full weekend of adventures. This is when we started to look into rooftop tents. You can find my full post on why we chose a rooftop tent here. We invested in our rooftop tent set up and started to really get into dispersed camping and overlanding towards the end of 2021.

The goal behind this post and our overall blog is to show you that even when working full-time jobs, there is always time for adventure no matter how big or small. Whether you are looking for inspiration, guidance, advice – we hope we can give you what we were so thankful for when we were starting out. Thank you for following along with our journey – there are many more adventures to come!