Hi! I'm Bri

I started blogging about the same time I first lived abroad – 2013.

I lived in Lyon, France for 14 months, learning and soaking up the language and culture as much as I could alongside my partner Paul and traditional, country-side dwelling French family.

When the time came to go back home, my sister joined Paul and me in Europe for a very budget-friendly one-month backpacking trip. Going as far as our feet could take us (and our wallets) we stretched ourselves as thinly as possible to soak in the major sights of France, England, Amsterdam, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Italy, and Greece. July of 2014 finally arrived and I returned back home to North Carolina, where I finished up my senior year at the University of North Carolina Greensboro (Go Spartans!). At the end of May 2015, with a degree in French and International Global Studies in hand, I felt my feet itching to explore something new.

To pass time until my next (and at the time unknown) adventure, I served as a waitress in a French breakfast cafe. I wasn’t even there for two full weeks before I told them, “Sorry guys, I’m moving to Nepal?”

Indeed – within a few short weeks, I whisked myself – and my 1-year-old adopted cat – away to live and study and work in Kathmandu, Nepal for two years. Paul joined me one month later, and together we braced the culture shock of being in South Asia for the first time.

Fast-forward one chaotic year later through insane festivals, trekking the Himalayas, getting deathly sick, and meeting the most interesting people…

We left Nepal in April 2016 – our plans had been cut short – and so we went on a one-month backpacking trip through Southeast Asia – hitting up Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

I had enrolled in a new Master’s program (this time accredited) in Humanitarian Action that would take place in Europe – namely at my host university in Groningen, The Netherlands, and my specialization semester in Aix-en-Provence, France. Keep in mind during this time I continued to blog on Bucketlist Bri – which started with the name Sharing Wanderlust and since has seen transformations into Living With Wanderlust, Bits of Bri, and finally Bucketlist Bri.

After my two semesters in the Netherlands and France, I left for my program’s third semester. This time I would be living and studying high up in the mountainous capital of Colombia, South America, in the bustling city of Bogotá. For three months I lived and blogged and traveled. I skirted across the hot desert north of Colombia to indigenous Wayuu towns of Cabo de la Vela and Punta Gallinas, took part in my neighborhood’s volunteer community garden, and finally Paul (joining me at the very end of my stay) and I explored around the rich coffee plains in the Zona Cafetera.

I had one last task – well, two – in order to complete my master’s degree in humanitarian action. The last semester required an internship within a humanitarian-related organization – and I was accepted to intern at the European Commission for Humanitarian Aid & Civil Protection (DG ECHO) in Brussels, Belgium.

After Europe, we spent 2 weeks backpacking Rajasthan, India, before moving to Mexico for the first time. For two years, we lived in San Pancho in the Riviera Nayarit on the Pacific coast of Mexico.

In July of 2019, we bought a 1990 Roadtrek van and thus began our van life travels across the USA and Canada. After freezing our butts off, we decided to move back to Mexico for the second time and left our beloved Van Rouge in Vancouver. Little did we know at the time a global pandemic would strike the world and leave us to quarantine in Mexico. 

We spent the first and second half of 2020 in Mexico – first on the Riviera Nayarit and then in Tulum in the Riviera Maya. In December, we moved to the state of Chiapas, Mexico where we spent three months as digital nomads in San Cristóbal de Las Casas. 

Come spring 2021, it was time to leave Mexico as our 6-month visas ran out. So we decided to cross the Mexico-Guatemala border and spend two months in a tiny home on the slopes of San Pedro Volcano in Lake Atitlán. Now we are enjoying life in Antigua, Guatemala where we’ll stay until this summer!