Our Story

Hey there. We're Jesse and Karlee.

Long before this lifestyle had a name, we were chasing dirt roads. Weekends meant car camping through aspen groves, hiking red rock canyons, and driving into stretches of desert that felt endless. Somewhere in all those long highway conversations and quiet sunsets, we started to realize the miles were shaping us.

They felt natural, steady, like the life we wanted wasn't somewhere else. It was already unfolding in motion.

As rent climbed and the noise of ordinary life grew louder, we started asking better questions. Nothing dramatic, just honest.

Why are we waiting for permission to live the way we already know feels right?

So we bought a van.

We traded square footage for open road, certainty for flexibility, and a fixed address for something that could move as freely as we did.

It never felt like running away. It felt like the first thing we'd done that actually fit.

What began as a practical decision became a different way of living, one that values experience over accumulation and curiosity over autopilot.

And then it expanded.

The road trips stretched past state lines, then past borders. Home stopped being a location and became something we carried with us.

Before we built this life together, we each wandered independently. We both backpacked through Europe. Jesse spent time in South Africa. Karlee spent five seasons on the island of St. John. Travel shaped us individually long before it shaped us as a couple.

Together, it only went deeper. We've crisscrossed the continental United States, spent eight years living inside a van, and moved slowly through Southeast Asia for seven months, sleeping under more stars than streetlights. We've taken wrong turns, miscalculated budgets, adjusted plans, and learned to move with intention instead of impulse.

Travel has expanded our world, and partnership has steadied it.

Moments in the Miles is where it all connects.

This is a reflective travel and lifestyle blog, part lived journal and part practical guide. It's where we share the full picture: messy mornings in a cramped galley kitchen, backroads that led to better stories, the financial realities that make this sustainable, and the conviction it takes to choose mobility over convention.

We don't romanticize the road or pretend it's always easy.

But we do believe that when you slow down enough, your life starts to feel intentional again.

Travel, done thoughtfully, makes you more aware of privilege, of fragility, of how much comfort we assume and how little we actually need.

Van life started all of this. Travel is what it grew into.

We're not here to convince you to change your address. We just want to show how one brave decision can ripple outward into a different way of seeing your life.

There is more than one way to build something meaningful.

You're not behind, and you're not late. You're allowed to choose differently.

Welcome to Moments in the Miles.

XO,
Jesse & Karlee

My love of adventure didn't start with me. It was passed down.

I grew up in a small town in upstate New York, raised by a single mother, two houses down from my grandparents. I was an only child, and they were my constants. My grandmother was my second mother in every way that mattered. Short hair, glasses, usually with the Persian cats she raised or in the crafting room that took up half the house. Fierce and loving and completely unapologetic about both. My grandfather was quieter: scruffy, always working on a car or a motorcycle, not a man who needed many words. But his heart made up for every one he didn't say. I remember sitting on the kitchen table with him as a kid, the two of us eating ice cream straight out of the carton. No bowls, no occasion. Just us.

If they were going somewhere, I was going too. Cross-country road trips, weekend camping, long drives with no real destination. They showed me early that the world was bigger than our small town, and that movement was something to seek out, not fear.

They also had a plan. Work hard. Save carefully. Buy the camper. Travel the country. See the family in Colorado without it being a whole production. Finally have time to live.

Retirement was when life would begin.

My grandmother got sick before that chapter ever opened. She was misdiagnosed at first and treated for the wrong thing for months, and by the time anyone looked closer, the window had already closed. I was sixteen. I went to school, I went to work, and I went to her, because that was all I knew how to do. Just show up and be near her, because being near her had always been enough before.

She passed away before the camper ever happened. And after that, my grandfather was never quite the same.

I watched decades of careful planning fail to guarantee more time. The window closed quietly, without ceremony, and something in me changed for good.

There is no guarantee of later.

That truth didn't break me. It made things clear, and almost every important decision I've made since has passed through it.

In my mid-twenties, after a six-year relationship ended, I found myself stuck. Heartbroken in a small town, winter closing in, unsure of who I was without the life I had planned. The loss that doesn't announce itself, that just settles in and gets comfortable.

Then a friend called from St. John.

She had a job for me. Come stay. Just come.

It did feel reckless and dramatic. But I don't know what I was waiting for. I think I was just scared.

Then I thought about the camper, and the plan that was always going to start later, and my grandmother in that house two doors down, always mid-project, always present, gone before she got to go.

I stopped waiting.

I packed a carry-on, grabbed my dog Loki, and two days later I was on a plane.

I remember flying in low over the ocean toward St. Thomas, watching the water below me shift from deep navy to something almost unreal, a blue that doesn't have a name in ordinary life. I had no idea exactly where I was going. We crammed into the back of a truck that took us to the far end of the island for the ferry to St. John. The roads were narrow and hilly and completely indifferent to anyone's nerves. The humidity was heavy, wrapping around me before I'd even decided how I felt about it.

I took my welcome shot of rum at the ferry dock.

My friend picked us up on the other side. We dropped my things at the apartment, a blow up mattress in the corner of the living room with a view of the ocean from the window, and two hours later I was on shift at my first job, trying to figure out how to communicate with a kitchen that didn't speak my language.

I got home that night and curled up with Loki on that mattress.

Everything was different and strange, but I had him. And outside the window, the ocean was still there, exactly where I'd left it.

I didn't regret a single bit of it.

St. John is eight square miles. The locals call it Love City, and after five seasons there I understand why.

I arrived a broken girl. I left a woman who knew her worth.

The island didn't fix me, but it gave me the space to stop performing. There was no one to impress, no role to fill, no version of myself I was expected to maintain. I did what I wanted, when I wanted, how I wanted. I stopped asking for permission I never needed to ask for in the first place. I stopped shrinking.

I learned something there that I've carried everywhere since:

Sometimes the best way to figure out who you are is to get to the place where you don't have to be anything else.

I left with a calm I hadn't known before, a certainty about what I was capable of, and a refusal to settle for a life that didn't feel alive.

That decision didn't make me fearless, but it made me intentional.

Before St. John, I had already wandered. I backpacked Europe in my early twenties, figuring things out, collecting the experiences that shape you before you know they're doing it. But St. John was where I found myself.

Every adventure that followed traces back to that phone call from a friend and that ferry dock. The van. Forty-eight states. Seven months across Southeast Asia. Everything that comes next. All of it grew from the same root: a woman who stopped waiting for permission and started building a life that felt alive.

I don't travel to escape my life. I travel to make it bigger. I've seen what happens when you wait, and I refuse to wait.

If something in your life has been sitting in a cage, whether it's a dream, a decision, or a version of yourself you haven't let out yet, you're in the right place.

The door is already open. You just have to walk through it.

XO, Karlee

I grew up in Lakewood, Colorado, with the mountains right there.

Suburbs backed by foothills, trails everywhere, winters that actually felt like winter. I was outside constantly: wrestling, baseball, whatever kept me moving.

I was also the kid who wanted to know what was on the other side of the world. Asia especially. I couldn't have told you why. I just knew there were places out there that ran completely differently from anything I'd seen, and I wanted to stand in them.

My first real shot came in 2008: a month in South Africa with a girlfriend and her family (her mother had grown up there). Krugersdorp, Johannesburg, Cape Town. I came home different, and I knew there was no going back to the old version of me.

The travel bug never let go.

My twenties went in a few directions. I got a real estate license and found out fast that I am not built for pushing people toward a decision they're not ready for. I was an assistant researcher at a supplement company for a while, which was honestly interesting work. In between: restaurants, construction, bartending, seasonal jobs. Work a season, save, go.

I'm also a perfectionist. I will turn a decision over until I have seen every side of it, which is great for building things and terrible for deciding things.

The van was the biggest decision I ever overthought. Karlee and I were renting, the lease was coming up, and paying rent just didn't make sense anymore. I made the honest pros and cons list, the real one, and my gut still said yes. So we bought a ProMaster. Empty. Bare metal. And I built the whole thing myself.

I didn't even finish before we left on the first trip. We threw a futon on the floor and drove to Yellowstone anyway.

That was eight years ago. Since then: all 48 states, seven months across Southeast Asia (finally, Asia), and a few moments I still can't quite believe.

A fox at Jenny Lake that wanted to play fetch. An alligator at Silver Springs that rested its head on the side of my kayak, and the scream I let out that a whole tour boat heard. A dark shape at Santa Rosa Beach, sliding toward me through clear water while I was treading a football field out, that turned out to be a shark. At about five feet it turned, its tail broke the surface, and it was gone. Just typing that makes the hair on my arms stand up.

Van life gave me freedom, and it gave me a clearer picture of who I am: what I need, what I can let go of, and what matters when everything you own fits in a vehicle.

The kid who was curious about the world turned out to be right. It is every bit as interesting as I hoped. You just have to go.

If you're sitting on a decision right now, write the honest pros and cons. If your gut still says yes after that, trust it. Being scared doesn't mean no. Usually it means you're about to do something worth doing.

Jesse

Some stories begin with grand gestures. Ours began with a walk in a park.

We matched on an app, talked long enough to realize we were after the same things, and decided to find out in person. A park in Colorado, late afternoon, two people just walking and talking and seeing how it felt. The conversation came easily. So did the second location: a small brewery across the street, cold beers, something to share, nowhere else to be.

Karlee had not long returned from five seasons on St. John. Jesse was working as a research assistant and still figuring out what came next. Both of us were between chapters, not lost exactly, just not settled yet.

Gradually, that changed.

We started spending weekends outdoors: hiking, camping, road trips with no real agenda except to keep moving. It was the tent-and-campfire version of the life we'd eventually build together, before we had a van, back when it was just two people who liked the same kind of morning.

Van life gave it a name. When we decided to trade a lease for open road and build something together, we understood, without having to say much, that we were pointed in exactly the same direction.

Two people in limbo, one park, one brewery, and a lifetime of miles since.

We don't take for granted how unlikely it is to find someone who wants the same kind of life you do, who feels at home in motion, who sees a long road and leans in instead of pulling back.

We found that in each other. Everything else grew from there.