About

Welcome to our adventure blog!  We’re Ben and Laura from the lovely little city of Cedar Falls, Iowa.  Ben is a brass instrument repair technician and tuba player, and Laura is a yoga teacher and birth doula.  We’ve been married since June 2014.

We both dabbled in the outdoors growing up, but Ben began to really explore when he was in college, going on solo backpacking trips to Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks and a section of the John Muir trail.  When we started dating, Ben slowly introduced the idea to Laura and we finally went on our first week-long backpacking trip together in Rocky Mountain National Park — where we got engaged!  Somewhere between this trip, our honeymoon backpacking on Isle Royale, and our most recent trip into the Grand Canyon, Ben convinced Laura that we needed to do a big thru-hike before we “settle down” – i.e. buy a house, adopt a dog, have kids, etc.  And somewhere along the way, Laura wholeheartedly agreed!

So here we are, preparing for our first long-distance thru-hike in — just about the complete opposite side of the globe from Iowa — New Zealand!

And trying to blog about it!  (We’ll try really hard – we promise!)