Gretchen & Gustavo

I’m Gretchen, and I’ll be doing most of the writing you’ll find here on Escape Visa. (Gustavo focuses more on the photography and videography!)

Let me tell you a little of our story: we met online in December 2016, when I was just about ready to give up on online dating. He lived in Texas, and I lived in California, so our story was full of travel from the very beginning.

I drove the 22 hours to Texas to meet him, and the rest is history. Our biggest struggle was always knowing that Gustavo, who comes from Brazil, would need to leave the US when his student visa expired in the summer of 2017.

When that time came, we knew we didn’t want to break up. However, we also knew that we couldn’t live together anywhere in the world — not the US (since his visa was expiring), not Brazil (since I’m not a citizen), nor anywhere else. The longest we could be together was the length of a tourist visa.

Instead of either calling it quits or suffering through a VERY long-distance relationship, we decided to string those tourist visas together by traveling full-time. And that brings us to where we are now!

We’ve been traveling full-time for over two years across four continents and 20 countries (21 if you count half an hour in Vatican City!). We’re so deeply in love with traveling that we even got married in a country we had never visited before.

We spend around a month in each location, because we prefer to get a real sense for places rather than just skim through snapping pictures of famous attractions. (But sometimes we’ll stop somewhere for a several-day layover between longer stays!)

Come along for the journey! We’ll talk about food around the world, our favorite things to do in each country, planning and budgeting, and much more.

Oh, and have I mentioned that we’re kind of obsessed with food? We’ve eaten everywhere from sketchy street food stalls to Michelin-starred world-class restaurants, so count on hearing a LOT about food here at Escape Visa.