Welcome!

Hello and Welcome to our Travel Blog!

My name is Jade and my (soon to be) husband's name is Josh. We are two millennial honeymooners who decided to travel across the United States by train and are excited to share our journey with you! We have always wanted to travel and explore more but never really found the motivation and time to do so. Now that we are getting married, we decided that it is a perfect time to take the time off to enjoy the beautiful and expansive country we call home. I am not an advanced blogger and will be putting posts together while traveling so please don't mind misinformation or formatting issues that might come with posts; I will try my best to revise everything once I get back home or have extra time. Until then, we are thrilled to have you follow along and hope you get great ideas for your upcoming cross-country trip!

About the trip...

We wanted to get the most out of our money and time by trying to visit as many places as possible. Having lived majority of our lives in Hawai'i, we weren't immediately drawn to tropical honeymoon destinations like the Bahamas or Mexico and we knew that a European honeymoon experience could get pretty pricey because of plane tickets and exchange rates. Before getting engaged, I knew about the Amtrak train that could get us up and down the California coast and one of my coworkers had told me about her vacation riding from the Great Lakes through the Rocky Mountains into Washington state; it was then that I got the idea of looking into the Amtrak experience for our next vacation.

A little more about us...

We began dating just after high school in June of 2010 and have been together ever since. We were both born and raised on Maui, Hawai'i and moved to the Bay Area, California in Winter of 2011 to pursue our career and educational aspirations. Growing up on a tiny, beautiful island that attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over the world taught us that we were truly lucky to live Hawai'i, but also, that there was much more world out there to experience. Josh did some travelling with his parents when he was young visiting domestic states, like Washington, Florida, and Tennessee, and some European countries, including Germany and the UK. I had never left the State of Hawai'i until moving to California at 18 years old, so travelling anywhere and everywhere was always something that I had only dreamed of. We had talked about doing the train trip a few times before we got engaged but we never got around to it. As time continued to grow our relationship, I knew that Josh was the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, and on Feburary 29th, 2016, I proposed to him in the parking lot of our local In-N-Out Burger with the help of a couple of girlfriends. Like the modern man he is, he accepted without hesitation and we were finally ENGAGED! We knew that we wanted the wedding to take place after I finished my undergraduate degree and would take place sometime in 2018. Once we began planning our wedding, we revisited the cross country vacation idea and decided it would be the perfect way to begin our marriage and push the boundaries of our 8 year relationship. We are thoroughly excited to be on our way but there is still a great deal of planning yet to do! It is now less than 6 weeks until our wedding and honeymoon so we are in deep planning mode while still trying to manage our normal day to day. Our hope for this blog is to inspire and encourage more people in the US to travel and experience new, exhilarating places you never thought you could go by train! We hope you enjoy the ride!