It’s finally here! Right now, while you’re reading this post, we are (hopefully!) in Beijing and making our way through stop #1 in a three-week backpacking adventure through China and Thailand.

Several months ago, when planning where we wanted to go in this year’s off-season, Asia came up and we both agreed, “now is the time.” A dream of ours is to travel to six out of the seven contents (sorry Antarctica, you’re out) and we are so excited to work towards making this dream a reality in our lifetime.

When we first got married, Caleb read a book about setting financial goals as a couple and one of the first things the book recommended was to sit down and discuss your values. What do you, as a couple, value in life? The book gave a list of main values that one can hold and recommended choosing your top 2-3 as a couple. This practice will help you, in the long run, determine how you will allocate and spend your money together.

One of our top values is “experience” and we both feel strongly about investing in experiences over the entire course of our lives, not just “later” or “when we’re retired.” Those things may never come and we want to be continually sharing moments and experiences together as a family every single year. These experiences could be big and they could be small! We’ve personally discussed what “experiences” mean to us as a couple and one of them is traveling together.

The goal of this trip is to be more of a cultural experience and so we plan on visiting a lot of different cities over the course of our three-week trip. We will be staying in Air BnB’s and (hopefully) getting to know more of the local population! We feel thankful for some connections that we have in the different cities we’re traveling to and are just so excited for what’s to come!! We will be in Beijing, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Pai, Phuket, and the Phi Phi Islands. We plan to rest, unplug, and really be present in the moments we get to experience, so I will not be blogging during this trip! I will be posting on Instagram (to assure mom and dad that we are safe and sound ; )), so if you want to follow along on our adventures, be sure to follow us @maisonmeredith : ) Here we go!!!