I hate the mundane (also, hi…I’m Mary Beth). Whether it’s 5,000 miles away or 5 minutes from home, I want to travel somewhere or experience something or devour cuisine outside the norm.
It’s been like this for a while. When I was five years old and everyone else was watching cartoons, I was watching Discovery Channel. I dreamt of the day I would cage dive (thanks for that, Shark Week), traipse through the wilds of Africa on safari, and generally travel the world seeing and doing really cool stuff.
Luckily, I’ve been able to. No, I haven’t cage dived or been to Africa yet (still in the works…I’m a late bloomer, ‘kay?), but I studied abroad during both my undergraduate and graduate degrees, tacking on several months after instruction ended to explore Australia, Fiji, Samoa, England, and 10 countries in eastern and western Europe. Damn, were my parents in debt after that…sorry, guys!
From the pre-DSLR age… this is called “film,” y’all (haha – I know… I can hardly remember using it)!
When I returned to the US after my post-graduate studies, wildlife biology masters degree in hand, I purposely took short-term, seasonal field positions just so I could move around frequently and see different parts of the country while I worked. It was FUN.
But after doing that a while, I moved to DC to try my hand at the policy side of wildlife management, and see if the whole steady-job-with-benefits thing was for me.
It wasn’t. Desk jobs = ick.
But it also was. Health insurance = avoiding financial ruin.
I’d contracted Lyme Disease from a tick bite somewhere along the way, so the health insurance that paid for all those random trips to the ER before my diagnosis finally came was pretty handy. It’s an ordeal that’s still an ordeal to this day, almost a decade later…
But back to DC. I lasted five years before I’d had enough. I packed up my stuff, let every contact I had in the world know that I was moving to the Gulf coast, and headed off to Pensacola.
Luckily, that strategy paid off. I scored another job that had me in the field – with health insurance and a healthy amount of vacay time. The best of all worlds! But (sadly) it didn’t last long, because (happily!) no sooner had I moved than I met, fell in love with, and married the badass and gentleman of my dreams.
Who is in the military.
Off I went again.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaand, this brings us to the blog. So much has gone down – from getting high in the back of an ambulance in Australia, to getting cussed out by an old Italian lady in Rome, to getting moo-ed at by a waiter in France, to getting drunk and knocked up (by the hubs, just to be clear) in San Diego, to gambling at casinos in Chile.
I needed a place to dump all these misadventures – and record new ones. Hopefully, y’all find them amusing! And…maybe even a little informative??
That’d be cool…
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