About Us

 

Bobbie Joy is originally from the Central Valley California and grew up on an almond farm in the small town of Ripon, CA. After graduating from UC Santa Barbara as a biology major, she worked a variety of jobs, including volunteering with the Peace Corps in Nicaragua, lecturing aboard cruise ships in the South Pacific, and conducting sea turtle research in the Virgin Islands. A contract to develop a youth environmental education program brought her to D.C. in 2013, shortly after which Bobbie decided to make a career change and returned to school to get her Master’s in education. Bobbie taught in DC Public Schools for 7 years before leaving at the end of the 2022 school year to start preparing for the year abroad. In the last few months before the trip, she was working remotely in online curriculum design and teacher education. 

Johnny comes from outside of Philadelphia and has lived in the DC area since 2009. After graduating with a Management Information Systems degree from UNC Willmington, he became a software engineer and has worked for the same tech development company for the past 12+ years. He will be taking a sabbatical to pursue his "mid-life crisis that came early".  

Johnny and Bobbie met at an orienteering training event on the 4th of July, 2014 outside of Charlottesville, VA. When they realized they were both in the DC area, they decided to meet up to be training buddies. After a few track days running sprints, it became apparent that they were NOT at the same training level, but they struck up a friendship.  After a couple months as friends, Bobbie "caught feelings" that were not immediately reciprocated, but as the friendship grew, Johnny eventually came to his senses and they moved from just friends to Facebook official (we old)  in October of 2014. 

In their time together, they are often out with friends, on bike paths or running trails (preferably in the woods), or hanging out with water views (preferably in Ocean City, MD). And although they still orienteer together from time to time, they now spend much of their time taking trips and having adventures. They started talking about this trip over a year before it happened with the hopes of a grand adventure before returning to Arlington, VA to start a family.

The name of our blog is a reference to a Carl Sagan quote describing how Earth appeared in a photo taken by the Voyager 1 satellite in 1990 as it moved further away from our home and deeper into interstellar space. You can check it out the full story of our name in our first blog post here.