“The little bit of traveling turned into three years full-time,” adds Gee, who has just released a travel guidebook, The Bucket List Family Travel, in partnership with National Geographic. They had initially planned to spend a few months traveling, visiting Thailand, Singapore, New Zealand and Australia, as well as Pacific islands Fiji and Tonga, but after briefly returning to the US, they decided that they wanted to keep going. “Now I just do it with my own life.”Īfter putting the acquisition money into savings, they sold their furniture and most of their belongings, raising around $45,000, and headed off around the world with Dorothy and Manilla – Callihan was born while they were on the move – in August 2015. “Honestly, I do think we kind of had this perfect storm of Garrett’s creative skills, and my background in marketing,” Gee says, explaining that she studied product placement in college. They soon began planning an extended trip to Southeast Asia and decided to launch an Instagram page, The Bucket List Family, to collate their adventures. “We still felt so young and naive,” adds Gee. The couple, who’ve been married since 2009, were keen to experience different cultures and “just learn a little bit.” So we decided that we were going to set that all aside, and see what’s out in the world.” “We were sitting on some new wealth, and we didn’t know what to do.

“We were in a weird situation that maybe not a lot of twenty-something-year-olds are put in,” Gee admits. Jessica and Garrett met in Russia and have been married for almost 15 years.

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