Hello folks!

Welcome to Jalamundo, a blog documenting the travels of Javier and Laura del Castillo.

We recently left our jobs and life in San Francisco to travel the U.S. and the world. Our posts will cover various aspects of our Grand Adventure, including places we visit, libations we consume, history we learn, and culture we immerse ourselves in. And given that we both worked as environmental advocates, Javi as a coastal planner and Laura as a conservation lawyer, we hope to touch on some environmental issues every so often.

The name Jalamundo grew out of a hashtag we created for our wedding in San Pancho, Mexico in May 2016. The hashtag was #Jalasapa: JAvier LAura SAn PAncho. Very clever right? The hashtag turned out to be a hit and so we wanted to continue the good name vibes. Turns out a jalamundo is also a kind of pepper, which suits us well because we love spicy food.

Our Grand Adventure really started in early 2016 when we made the final decision to travel full time. We were focusing mostly on the wedding, or “Inception”,  but had started to formulate our plan for our new life of travel. We had already been saving money for a while with a vague idea of travel but no solid plans.

After the wedding, but before we left SF we were fortunate enough to go on a couple of major trips with family. Although these trips weren’t technically part of Jalamundo, we wanted to include them here because they, along with our wedding, were really the beginning of this adventure and totally solidified our commitment to full time travel and convinced us that that was the right path for us.

It took us forever to get everything together, but we finally left our jobs in September 2016, sold all our furniture, and moved out of our apartment. As we said goodbye to our empty apartment, we built out a little camper for our U.S. travels, stuffed it with the few belongings we kept, and set off.

We hope you enjoy Jalamundo and the tales and photos of our adventures!

Javi and Laura

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