Our Story
It’s March of 2022 in Antigua, Guatemala.
Joanna was leading a group of remote workers on a year long journey together and their stop that month was Antigua, Guatemala. Kelsey joined that group for a month as a member. Kelsey and Joanna discovered they both had a love for hiking and the outdoors, and they talked about how they both really wanted to do the overnight hike to Acatenango and Fuego volcanoes, and convinced a majority of their group to sign up for it. They knew it wasn’t going to be an easy hike, and required renting gear such as hiking poles, jackets, hats, gloves etc, but they knew it would be worth it! And getting 15 of your friends to do it with you would make it that much better.
The hike was extremely challenging, with lots of elevation, environmental changes from warm to colder, to switchbacks, to loose ash and gravel, but achieving that hike was also extremely rewarding.
To experience an active volcano so up close and know that you trekked with all of your gear, 6 liters of water and food was an amazing accomplishment to celebrate. That trip has been etched into their memories as one of their favorite experiences so far.
Joanna and Kelsey remained close friends after that month and even met up on future journeys in Valencia, Spain; Istanbul Turkey, and Warsaw, Poland (Joanna’s home!) It was there in Poland, when Joanna and Kelsey were sitting in a cafe and catching up about life, that they both agreed how they found it really difficult to find a community of other travelers and digital nomads that wanted to prioritize physical activity and their health while traveling, and wanted to seek out adventures that are beyond the big cities and the “typical” tourist spots. Adventures like hiking volcanoes, or walking across Liechtenstein or the Camino de Santiago, and plenty more. They found most of the adventure and outdoor groups were either geographically fixed or lacked a strong community following a trip. As they were discussing this, they finally just said to each other:
