About Us

Welcome to About Live, Dream, Discover. Our goal is to inspire you to Live Well, Dream Big and Discover the World around you. We hope you will follow us as we explore this beautiful planet in search of tips, ideas, stories and resources that can help us all to live a well-balanced life and create amazing, memorable travel experiences.

Deep sea fishing in Puerto Vallarta
SARAH

We’re Sarah and Nathan, a couple who believe that balanced living is the key to happiness and well-being. Despite being full-time travelers, we strive to achieve that balance on a daily basis and we hope to help you to do the same.

Live, Dream, Discover was initially created to share our travel stories with friends and family but we soon realized that we wanted to grow it into something more.

As we traveled and immersed ourselves in different cultures we became more aware of how, at our core, we are really all the same. We all aspire to live a happy, healthy and meaningful life. What that looks like differs for each person, but the basic components are usually the same: a balance of work, play, wellness, love and contribution.

What will you find here?

While living our own dream of being travel writers and photographers we are always searching for places, ideas and inspiration that contribute to the balanced life we all want. To make it easier to share all of these findings with you we have created three sections.

Live well: Covers overall wellness of body, mind & spirit so it’s a pretty juicy section. This is where we share content on exercising, eating well, mindfulness, playtime, love and positive contribution. Really anything that we can do to contribute to healthy and happy living.

Dream big: Dreams are vital to a happy life because without them we lose interest, motivation and purpose. This section is where you will find inspirational quotes, stories and actionable ideas to help you follow your own dreams.

Discover the world: Travel is our passion and a huge part of our life, therefore it’s a big piece of our perfect balance. If you love to travel or are hoping to start, this section will be your resource of helpful tips, advice and stories for finding balance wherever you go. We hope to inspire you to discover the world for yourself!

Meet Sarah (LDD’s writer, relationship builder and co-creator)

Sarah at Vallarta Adventures Ziplining
Sarah & horse riding Dublin

After years of attempting to live a ‘normal’ life I am now living a life less ordinary.

Born in England but raised in Vancouver, my parents loved to travel and by the time I was twelve I had visited fourteen countries and had lived in three. Thanks to those experiences, and maybe also genetics, travel has always been my passion.

As a child I secretly wished to be a ‘hippy, gypsy, fairy princess’, which in my mind meant a life of simplicity, freedom and happiness. I was appalled when my Dad told me that I couldn’t simply roam the world living wherever I pleased. Apparently there were rules?

Despite recognizing my inner nomad early on, it took me over forty years to start living as I knew I was meant to. Sure I traveled as much as I could, but instead of taking the reins I just let life happen to me and what happened was marriage and several career trials ending in an interior design business. I wasn’t really unhappy and knew I was blessed with a pretty good life, but I was restless and plagued with a history of self sabotage and doubt. I knew I wasn’t living authentically.

As happens to many of us, it took immense loss to wake me up to the fact that time was running out. Within a period of two years I was faced with the end of my marriage, had lost my home, my dog, my job, my car, my mentor, my father and my step father and had learned that my mother had cancer. My life had become a bad country song. However my parents had given me more than wanderlust, they had also given me the strength and ability to keep going in search of that silver lining. If you’re interested in reading more about my journey to this point you can read it here.

In heartbreak I found the courage and the kick in the butt to make the long awaited leap. I started to see the possibility of the life I had always dreamed of. Then I met Nathan.

Meet Nathan (LDD’s co-founder, photographer, tech guy & social media guru)

Hiking the Pacaya Volcano Guatemala

Unlike me, Nathan never attempted to be ‘normal’ and is quite happy to be called unique.

Born and raised in the beautiful state of Washington, Nathan is the middle child of three brothers and grew up in an extremely tight knit and fun loving family. The large extended family are so close that he often preferred to spend his time with them over attending parties and events with friends. Adding to his unique mystique.

Always a lover of nature and adventure, he spent much of his time exploring the mountains, forests and lakes of the Pacific Northwest. Camping, hiking, climbing and kayaking were his favorite activities along with dreaming of moving to Alaska to become a mountain man.

Nathan ultimately decided against the mountain man life but has tried his hand at many other things. He has been in law enforcement and various sales jobs and has run his own businesses as a wedding DJ, a portrait photographer, and a personal trainer (which he still does at Fit Living Lifestyle). He also spent six years in the army including a deployment to Iraq for 18 months.

His varied interests are displayed in more than just job choices. He’s also known for randomly deciding on some new project or skill that he wants to conquer…to varying degrees of success. Some examples of this are MMA, Argentine Tango, Capoeira, fire dancing, surfing, rock climbing, wood pipe carving and playing the flute. Life with Nathan is never boring.

New Beginnings

To our surprise, despite our differences (age & nationality to name a couple) our casual, long distance relationship turned into a recognition of kindred spirits. We share an indifference to material things and a tendency towards being career and hobby testers. We both have a love of learning and exploring and are always in search of the next fun adventure. At the same time we also believe that balance is the key to a happy life. Perhaps the most important factor though is that we met at a time when we were both ready to make a big change. Timing is everything.

The big change came in 2013 when we cashed in and started slowly traveling around the world together. It didn’t take long for us to realize that this wasn’t just another stab at some new project, or a belated gap year but a larger shift in how we wanted to live our lives. Two professional flakes have found something that stuck: a lifestyle that doesn’t require an escape or a vacation, because we are fully living every day.

Since we met we have been checking things off our ever-growing Dream List and have no plans to stop. Some things were already on our bucketlist like Wine Tasting in Sonoma ValleyTaking a Road Trip through Ireland  or Snorkeling in Mexcio. However, our new life also opened doors to experiences we had never even dreamed of such as a Hot Air Balloon Ride in Cappadocia Turkey, exploring the Banaue Rice Terraces in the Philippines or getting a Sak Yant Tattoo from a monk in Thailand!

Of course there are challenges. The biggest of which is earning enough income with our online businesses and freelance jobs to continue our nomadic lifestyle, while still maintaining the balance we’ve worked so hard to achieve. What we can say without a doubt though is that the challenges are all well worth it!

Join us as we share our adventures and stories while we strive to Live well, Dream big and Discover this beautiful world and hopefully inspire you to create your own best life of balance…whatever that may be.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed in the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.” ~ Mark Twain

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