Hi! We're Alia and Shawn,

We're the husband-and-wife team behind Roaming In The Know. We're both professional photographers and published writers, and this blog is where we put everything we've learned from four years of full-time travel across 50+ countries.

How This Blog Started

This all started on Instagram. We began sharing more and more in-depth information with our followers, and pretty quickly, the pretty pictures and aesthetic reels weren't cutting it anymore. We wanted to share the real information people actually needed to get out and see the world for themselves. We tried cramming it all into voiceover reels and increasingly long captions, but eventually we realized captions weren't built for the amount of detail we wanted to give people. A blog was.

Travel has fundamentally changed our lives in ways we never expected, and that's really the whole point of this blog: to share that experience with as many people as possible, in a way that's actually useful when you're the one planning the trip.

Where It All Began

Back in 2019, we were finishing up university, getting married, and generally getting our adult lives together. Once we'd graduated and tied the knot, we decided our next big priorities would be building our careers and travelling. Then the pandemic hit, which was not a constructive time for either of those goals.

We spent lockdown in our Vancouver apartment binge-watching travel YouTube and researching an ever-growing list of destinations. We'd had a short trip to Europe planned before everything shut down, something fairly typical, London to Portugal to France and home, though the details barely matter since it never happened. Instead, through hours of "research" (i.e: YouTube), we found ourselves increasingly drawn to classic backpacking routes through Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Northern Africa.

By the time travel started looking possible again, our plans had changed completely. Before lockdown, our goals had been pretty modest: a few popular European destinations, maybe a beach vacation somewhere warm, Japan if we were feeling ambitious. Two years and a stack of notebooks later, we had a wish list that looked nothing like that.

Going All In

When we tried to fit our new, much bigger list into our existing budgets and standard PTO schedules, it was like trying to fit a planet-sized square peg into a circular pinhole. We had two options: shrink the wish list down to something reasonable, or make our lives a little less reasonable instead.

We went with our new motto, that delulu is the solulu, and just went for it. We picked Nicaragua to start, ended our lease, packed our lives into two bags, and bought a pair of one-way tickets.

From Nicaragua we worked our way south, mostly by bus and train, through Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, and Peru. From there, we closed out our Latin America chapter and flew to the UK to start the European leg of the trip.

Figuring It Out As We Went

When we first set out, we didn't know much of anything. How much travel would actually cost. How much we could earn on the road. How fast we could move before burning out. Whether our health, our careers, or our relationship would hold up. There was a lot we didn't know, but we did know we wanted to see the world, and full-time travel felt like the only real way to make that happen.

For the first 8 months, Shawn kept his job at the university and worked remotely, which kept us financially afloat while we found our footing. That ended when the university's remote work policy shifted, and he had to choose between resigning or moving back to Ontario. By that point we were 8 months in and completely hooked. Going back wasn‘t really on the table anymore.

We'd left with minimal savings and student loans still hanging over us, so the pressure was on to figure out our next move. We both started hunting for remote work, and eventually Shawn landed a remote software engineering role, actually with a solid pay bump, while Alia picked up flexible marketing work. And just like that, we were locked in as full-time digital nomads.

The Chaotic, Glorious Middle Years

With about a year of full-time travel behind us, a healthier budget, and a much better mindset, we started tackling some of the more expensive bucket-list destinations on our list. Weekends in Paris. Two months touring the Scottish Highlands in a friend's converted bus. A ski holiday in Bulgaria. Escaping the Schengen zone to wander Morocco for a month. Back to London to crash at a new friend's flat for a while. Zigzagging through the Balkans. Chasing sunshine in Italy then the Northern Lights in Finland.

We were all over the map, literally and emotionally. It was glorious. It was miserable. It was everything in between. Some mornings we'd wake up in our campervan overlooking the misty valleys of Glencoe, sipping coffee, completely unable to believe this was our life. Other nights, Alia would be trying to fall asleep through a hostel party raging outside our dorm, Shawn hunched over a laptop on a bunk bed writing code until 3am, then Alia up at 6am perched on the room's one chair, which technically counted as a desk, firing off work emails.

Balancing actual jobs, full-time travel, and building an online presence in real time was a constant, chaotic juggling act, and we were making it up as we went the entire way.

A Brief Return, And A Choice

In 2024, we came home for a short visit, mostly to restock supplies and see the people we'd missed. We didn't bother looking for an apartment, since we knew it wouldn't be for long. We picked up a few pet sits, stayed with family for a while, and started gearing up for our next chapter of full-time travel: Asia.

Then, just weeks before we were set to leave for Korea, Shawn's entire engineering team was laid off without warning.

We knew the reasonable thing to do. We were already home. We could find an apartment, look for a new job, and settle into the normal life we'd been putting off for two years.

But being unreasonable had worked out pretty well for us so far, so we went anyway.

Choosing This Life For Good

Shawn did go through a round of job searching for a while, and a clear career path back up the software engineering ladder started to reveal itself as a genuinely viable option. He was interviewing at companies he'd only dreamed of talking to back when he first graduated: remote-friendly, flexible, even travel-adjacent. On paper, it was the perfect next move.

Most of the interviews landed at strange hours, since we were in Korea by then, so he was either waking up at 4am to catch someone wrapping up their day on the east coast of Canada, or staying up until 1 or 2am waiting for a west coast team to come online.

But during the actual daylight hours, while everyone back home was asleep, we were out exploring Korea, filming, writing, and trying to share everything we were experiencing with anyone who wanted to follow along.

Alia had been carrying most of that work up to that point, but with more time on his hands, Shawn started working alongside her, and the day-to-day of building this blog started to feel a lot more like real life than the late-night interviews and coding challenges ever did.

That's when we decided to go all in on blogging and content creation for good. And that decision is exactly why this blog exists today.

Coming Home To BC

Somewhere in the middle of all that travel, something unexpected happened: we fell back in love with our own backyard. After years of chasing lochs in Scotland and sunsets in Morocco, we started looking at BC with completely different eyes. All that time spent researching, exploring, and figuring out how to actually experience a place properly, it turned out those same instincts worked just as well two hours from where we grew up as they did on the other side of the world.

So when we came back, we didn't just come back to visit. We came back with a plan. We spent a few months full-time pet sitting around the province, bouncing between houses and neighbourhoods, using it as a low-cost way to reacquaint ourselves with home while we figured out where we actually wanted to land. Eventually, we found our spot: an apartment in Squamish, right in the middle of the mountains, the lakes, and the stretch of coastline that we'd somehow taken for granted our whole lives.

Now our days split pretty evenly between two things: getting out and exploring BC, and sitting down to actually write about it properly. Some days that means hiking a new trail, scouting out a lake we've never swum in, or exploring a stretch of coastline we've only ever passed through.

Other days it means hours at the laptop, turning all that exploring into the kind of detailed, honest guides we wished we'd had ourselves when we were first starting out. We shoot reels, we write captions, but mostly, we pour everything into this blog, because that's still the best format we've found for giving people the real, useful details instead of just another pretty photo or trendy edit.

What's Next

There's something a little poetic about it, honestly. We spent years learning how to travel the world properly, learning how to appreciate the big and the small, and we brought that mindset back home to one of the most wild and varied destinations we've experienced in all of our travels.

So as much as we hope our blog helps you choose the right bus, prioritize the right trail, and plan the perfect road trip, we also hope it inspires you to think bigger, to believe in yourself, and to dare to be unreasonable. Because a string of ordinary decisions can't lead anywhere other than to an ordinary life. To get something special out of our brief time on this lovely rock, it requires a bit of risk, a touch of delusion, and a little bit of luck. We didn't have a plan when we started, just a one-way ticket and a refusal to let a small set of inherited assumptions make our decisions for us.

It all worked out better than we ever could have imagined. And from our experience, and from stories we've heard from all around the world, that's the way it always seems to go.