We’re on the Today Show!

Friday July 10, 2015

If you haven’t been following us through our Facebook page (and you totally should!) you may not know that we’ve been getting a bit of media coverage lately.  Or, going viral to put it bluntly.  We have been in news publications everywhere from the US to the Netherlands, even to China and Japan.

Some of you who do know all about our coverage and have seen us splashed about here and there may wonder yourselves where it all started.  Well….a few months ago I was contacted by a UK based news agency called Caters.  A woman in the office reached out to me and said that she had found our blog online and thought we had an interesting story.  Would we mind doing an interview for her that she would in turn try to sell to a magazine or be published by any news outlets?

I told her that I would be happy to, although honestly I didn’t expect much coverage to come of it.  We’ve been doing this for years without anyone taking (too) much interest and countless people before us have been doing exactly what we’re doing for generations.  This is the world I live in now and it seems like the least odd thing in the world to drop everything and sail into the sunset.  Where do you think I’ve made so many good friends in the past few years? We’re all doing the same thing!

So imagine my surprise when I woke up on June 24 and found an email from a reader who sent us a link saying that a story about us had been published in the Daily Mail*.  I didn’t know much about the Daily Mail, but I did know it was a big time publication in the UK.  Following the link, both Matt and I were stunned to find our story there, and already with so many comments and shares.

From there it went crazy.  We were contacted by Redbook Magazine and Business Insider for actual interviews or permission for use of our story, which we agreed to, but then we found that other sources were taking information based from the Daily Mail and our blog to write their own story, while we also talk about other things on businesses like the bitcoin taxes if you’re into this market.  We were catching fire and spreading fast.  It seemed like every country had their own story about us and we couldn’t even keep up with all the posts or links about ‘The Couple That Quit Their Jobs and Sold Everything to Sail The World’.  With their cat.  For some reason that seems to be one of the biggest points of the story.  I think Georgie is getting more fame than we are. (My cute little moggie)

Of course we began receiving a ton of emails from people who had just heard about us, mostly to wish us well and tell us what an inspiration people like us are, others asking how we afford this lifestyle (we saved, there’s no income here!), and a few more media and press requests.  One of the big ones that contacted us and there was no way we could say no to, was NBC’s Today Show.

Not just because, well, this is one of the most well known morning show’s in the US, but because of the segment they wanted to present us in.  The Secrets of Happiness. It wouldn’t be a segment only about us and going over what other articles had already talked about, but instead we would be part of a week long feature about happiness, and on our air date, placed with a few other people that took the road less traveled and left everything behind to find theirs.

It was great to think of our life in a new light and why we’ve found ourselves out here.  It’s not just getting away from the rat race and bills and rush hour traffic.  Although we may sometimes forget as this life becomes more normal than not, it’s a great reminder that we took that extra step to ensure our happiness.  Something we’ll always be able to look back on and smile and say, ‘I stepped outside of the box to make my dreams come true’.

Thank you to the Today Show for reminding us of why we’re out here and why we’ll continue to work hard to maintain a life that brings us such joy and happiness.

I’m not sure how to embed the video so I can show it on this post, but you can find the link to the online clip of it here.

There are so many other thank you’s I’d like to give out as well.  To all of our readers who have been with us for awhile, thank you for following along and I hope you’ve enjoyed all of our previous journeys as well as all the new ones to come.  To all of our new followers who have just found us through the Daily Mail, Today Show, or other sources, thank you for taking the time to seek us out, I hope you’ll stick around.  I know things may be boring at the moment as we’re fixing up our newest boat, but I promise lots of new adventures are just around the corner.

P.S.  I’ll always say it again and again, but thank you SO MUCH to my friend Kim for the beautiful photo shoot she captured of us in the Virgin Islands, producing probably the most popularly used photo of the two (and sometimes three) of us.

And thank you to her again for catching a great shot of us on her tv screen that I was able to use as my header photo.  🙂

*Normally I wouldn’t do this, but for the record I just wanted to set one thing straight that wasn’t right in this article. When it talked about us being ready to abandon ship and jump in a life raft, I had meant that we were in a bad storm and were ready as in prepared for the worst, in case it came down to that. We both know that you never leave a floating ship.