Known to family and friends as Pat, Ali, Ouest, and Lowe. We travel, we blog, we annoy people, we inspire people. We try to live life a bit out of the ordinary. We have our babies in Mexico. We haven’t owned a phone or television in eight years. We read memoirs because real life stories are what interest us. We reply to every e-mail we receive because Ali is Minnesota nice. We lived in a VW Bus for two years. We want to raise our kids to live the life that pleases them, not the one that pleases others. We want to go on doing what we do for as long as we’re happy doing it. This is the story of our ongoing adventure. We grew up in St. Paul, dated in high school, married, and moved to Chicago. We lived a pretty normal life. We both worked. Ali as a secretary, and me as a commodities trader. We spent Friday nights on the couch watching movies, Saturday nights at Lou Malnati's eating pizza and drinking beer, and Sundays in bed reading the paper until two. We lived below our means, saved a lot of money, and had a pretty good idea of where our lives were taking us. Slowly, inexorably, towards the suburbs and kids. We were N-O-R-M-A-L. That is until one day, almost on a lark, we bought a boat and set off to sail around the world. We undertook the trip with about as much preparation as we would have a walk to the corner store and yet four years later we had circled the globe. We didn't become great sailors, but we did learn a lot about ourselves and the world around us. A world which we still felt we hadn't scratched the surface of. So then we took off in a 1958 VW bus and spent two years visiting twenty-eight countries. What all of this travel has done for us is to instill a love of other cultures and of living an independent, debt free, cluster free, who cares what others think, lifestyle. During the VW trip Ali became pregnant. We sold the bus in Europe, flew back to the States, loaded our 1965 Porsche up with all of our worldly belongings and cruised down to Mexico. Our daughter, Ouest Lill (Ouest is French for West, and pronounced the same), was born in Puerto Vallarta on December 13, 2009. Six months later we bought another boat. And six months after that we found out we'd be having another baby. Lowe Bleu was born August 13, 2011 in Puerto Vallarta. We're not sure where exactly this life, or this boat will take us as a family, but we're looking forward to finding out. What the internet armchair critics have to say about us and our adventures:
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