Our Story
Learn how we got our start from a long-distance couple to the travel bloggers and photographers who built this website.
When we met, we never could have guessed that we’d be writing this blog you’re reading right now! So much has happened between the night we met, and today. Read on to find out about our story.
2015
One night in the West Village of Manhattan, Dan and I met at a craft beer bar. It was the first day of winter, December 21st, but it was warm out! We talked about a bunch of things that night as we got to know each other a little bit, and would you have ever guessed? Travel came up as something we were both interested in.
2016
2016 came around very quickly, and Dan went on a trip to Cartagena for his first time to Colombia. Ironically, I was in the planning stages of a trip to Cartagena also, and I went there a month later. We were able to share tips!
We met up a few more times on dates, and it was in February of 2016 that Dan decided to travel for a year with a remote work-travel program called Remote Year. We didn’t expect to stay together during this year, but at the last minute in May 2016, we decided to give it a try. We’re so glad we did!
During Dan’s journey of working remotely and traveling, we decided to date long-distance. Dan traveled first to Iceland on his own before starting his Remote Year experience in the Czech Republic.
We hadn’t seen each other in months! Luckily, I was able to take time off from work and head out to Portugal to spend a week with Dan. We had an amazing road trip through villages Portugal, and we still recount it as one of the best trips we ever took. As the scenery was gorgeous, Dan took a ton of photos of beaches in Portugal that we use all throughout our website.
A few months into Dan’s trip, I had an idea to start an Instagram account together. In this account, we would share our photos from where we both were, and put them together to make one photo. It was a way for us to stay connected to each other, while we were very far apart.
This was our first photo in October, 2016. I made it from both our coffees, with mine in Manhattan and Dan’s in England. For this “half-half photo,” we planned the whole thing, down to the angle from which we’d take our photos, and everything. It was a big hit with our friends.
Toward the end of 2016, Dan traveled and worked remotely in Spain, Morocco and Bogota, Colombia. 2017 would bring more great things for us!
2017
We knew we were onto something and really liked the idea of having this project that gave us a way to connect and stay creative while Dan was across the sea.
We posted nine photos strategically, and stuck to one rule: During Dan’s time away, we would always use one photo from “me” and one photo from Dan. Each side might not have had too much sentimental significance, but we wish that we picked a left side for one of us and a right side for one of us. In any case, our photos were unique (or at least we thought so), and soon, the people of the Internet thought so as well.
After these nine photos, Dan reached out to an editor from PetaPixel. Come January 2017, we had an article about us featured on their site. See the article on PetaPixel.
This new world of social media stardom was new to us. We both had had our personal Instagram accounts since about 2011, but almost exclusively shared personal photos. We didn’t expect to become public figures or ‘go viral’ with this type of creativity.
We received a lot of press that started to snowball from this one article. Some of our favorite press mentions were being in print, in Oprah magazine and being covered through the Business Insider network.
As we started to realize that @halfhalftravel could eventually turn into a business, we decided to quickly create a web domain to which we could point these news articles when they asked to link us. We didn’t want to only be available on Instagram, as sticking to one ‘platform’ is risky.
Our initial website wasn’t very good, in hindsight. It had a bit of text about us, with some Instagram photos. It made no sense, because people already knew about our Instagram photos. Here’s a preview of our first website.
In parallel, I had already put together a Google Drive full of travel guides from places that I visited in previous years. Whenever one of my friends was going anywhere, they would reach out, and I would have a guide ready to send. Among these places were China, Hong Kong, South Africa, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Japan, Thailand, Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala and more.
To top this off, Dan had a year’s worth of travel photos, and I was ready to write out my travel guides for the world. This meant one thing: we’d be the perfect team to start a travel website.
In October 2017, Dan started building our website. If you’re interested in how our website is built, check out this guide that Dan put together. It’ll explain why our website looks unique, how it has the images added and how Dan built it.
During this phase of our building out the website, we continued to grow on Instagram and work on growing our community. We were able to work with some amazing brands that you can see in our case studies, and share experiences with people all around the world.
Dan came back to New York City in June of 2017. We had discussed ending our Instagram project at this time because our long-distance phase was over, but I insisted that what we had grown was too good to ‘throw away.’ We decided to continue our journey!
We would continue to share photos from each of our perspectives, but we’d get a bit more liberal with how our photos were taken and put together.
While we were living in NYC full-time at this point, we were able to travel to Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Colombia and Mexico in 2017 alone. It was great that our travel didn’t have to stop, and even though we had office jobs in the city, travel was our main goal.
Through our trips, and through exploring NYC as usual, we were able to create new content for our Instagram and get our feet wet with content writing ideas for our website, as we’d finally get to this in March 2018.
2018
We didn’t really have a good formula for content writing at the time, still in 2018. We were figuring it out as we went along and hadn’t read too many other travel blogs. We also didn’t know too many bloggers at all. It was a new space for us.
We converted some of my original guides into travel guides and added some of Dan’s travel photos as well! It was satisfying for both of us to see hard work pay off and provide value for our viewers.
Some of the first guides we wrote started to get popular, as we covered things that we searched for, like hidden photo spots in Hong Kong and How to get to Guatape from Medellin, a helpful guide for backpacking in Colombia. These were based on our travels from ‘way back’ in 2017 already.
New articles only came from our trips. We had to carefully balance enjoying our vacation, while taking notes and photos of things that we wanted to incorporate into our blog. We covered reviews of hostels, like Abraham Hostel, Tel Aviv and travel tips, like How to Beat the Crowds at Chichén Itzá.
Our main goal in the first half of 2018 was to teach people the things that we learned through our trips around the world.
We watched as our traffic slowly increased. The emphasis here is on ‘slowly,’ but we were patient and patted ourselves on the back for every milestone.
We would see exciting spikes of traffic when some of our press articles resurfaced. SEO was new to us. We learned how to interpret our analytics, leverage our press backlinks and continued to write travel articles.
We started to branch out from our travel guides and realized that we had learned a lot of different travel tips that have helped us travel seamlessly around the world. These would be evergreen articles that could help people plan trips and succeed in traveling, even if destinations went in and out of style.
Our travel advice articles started by covering things like how to get a visa. Now, we don’t post to this section as frequently, but we’re always brainstorming new and exciting topics to cover. Some of these have been repeatedly very helpful for viewers, having stemmed from questions that friends asked us. An example of this is, “Foreign Currency Tips and Tricks Before Traveling Abroad”.
In June in 2018, we decided to travel full-time long-term again. But instead of being apart, we did this together! We went through places in Europe, like Prague, Lisbon and Amsterdam. We spent a bit of time up in Estonia and then to Latvia. We went to Ireland and Tenerife in the Canary Islands, with a quick stop in Madrid.
In the Canary Islands, we got an opportunity to contract for Remote Year.
I would work on content writing and promote Remote Year through social media. Dan would help produce photo and video content. It was a role perfect for the both of us.
Our contract would last four months and would take us to familiar places, like Colombia, Mexico and Peru. It was nice to meet up with old connections and experience the cities together. Dan had been to all of these destinations before on his first year of travel. We both had been to Medellin and were really excited to be there for a month, together.
During these four months, we went to a lot of cafes. We started interviewing cafe owners and creating reviews on our site. One of our favorite guides that we put together was the best cafes in Mexico City. We learned so much about taking photos in cafes that we put together an article to help you do this like a pro.
We learned a lot about the business of social media. It was a perfect opportunity for us, as we also spent some time growing our blog, making SEO improvements and trying new things. Because of our roles in the Remote Year content creation team, we were also able to hang out with social media managers and other bloggers, thereby trading tips and seeing how one another worked.
2019
After the four Remote Year months were over, 2018 had ended and we were still traveling full-time. For our next destinations, we wanted to focus on exploring Asia, where I had spent two and a half years living abroad in my early 20s. It was Dan’s first real time experiencing Asia and I was really familiar with the culture and landscape about what to expect.
This was a good ‘flip’ for us, as Dan had spent his former Remote Year program living for one month each in Medellin, Bogota, Mexico City and Lima, and now, he had lived in each city twice!
We went to Vietnam and Taiwan. I had been to Vietnam previously in 2011 for 12 days, and I had been to Taiwan for 5 days in 2012. Both trips did not do these places justice, so I was stoked to go back!
In March of 2019, we decided to come home for the wedding of two friends who ironically had also traveled long-term during the prior year, and to spend some time with family. Dan got an opportunity to contract for an agency in New York City. Without any types of alternate plans, we decided to stay home long-term and move back to New York City.
We started a new section in our blog in which we interviewed some of our friends who we’ve met through the years. We got this idea after we were on our first podcast with Cyd and Marc.
When we came home in March, we were able to meet them in person! The story goes that Cyd found us online and had interviewed us on her podcast about long-term travel and the remote work and travel lifestyle as a couple. We talked about our trip to Vietnam, only to learn that they were planning to move there as expats, for Marc’s new job! You can learn more about their journey there with Cyd.
In October 2019, we traveled to Myanmar and had a great time visiting a new country that we both had never been to before. Myanmar is absolutely enchanting and we were engrossed with learning about the lesser-known culture.
We also spent a good number of nights sleeping on buses, as part of our signature way of saving money when we travel so that the trip lasts longer on the same budget. Travel should be about exploring ALL the available methods of transportation, right? We believe that what’s important is both the destination, and the journey involved in getting there.
2020
2020 was off to a good start. We went to the Dominican Republic for both our first times in late January through early February. It was great! We had lots of experiences with sizable insects and wildlife, and planned out our destination content for the DR.
In the beginning of 2020, we had planned to go to Italy and Israel for two weddings in the summer. We were planning on traveling in Eastern Europe, maybe Ukraine, or the Caucasus region (Georgia? Azerbaijan?), for a month in between both of these weddings.
Starting in about March 2020, our travel plans were canceled and travel never looked so different. Because of the pandemic, we chose to stay in New York City and limit our exposure to people. We know that the travel industry is changing and we’re taking time to adjust to what the new normal is (we’re writing this at the end of September, 2020).
During this time spent indoors and somewhat quarantined, we started building out our Remote Work section. Because we were mostly working from home, we had learned a lot of new tips and tricks to become more productive and efficient.
Articles we wrote about topics like how to stay connected when you work from home took off effortlessly, as did how to Set Up A Home Office in a Small Apartment. We started building authority for remote work content, and our site grew in this capacity, rather than with travel content. It was pretty fitting for the current state the world was in.
Also, we got married!
2021
In 2021, we realized we had traction with this blog, from all our hard work in 2020 writing about remote work. Even though we both were working full-time at companies based in NYC, we chose to build out the freelance section of the website.
We put more work into the home and lifestyle section as well, writing about living in NYC, running, furniture and decluttering topics. And as of 2024, we migrated this to its own website!
As for travel, COVID-19 was still inhibiting us leaving the US early in the year. We chose to take two weeks and sublet an apartment in Center City, Philadelphia, where Dan worked on a redesign for HalfHalfTravel, and I took a ton of photos!
By summer, we landed a sponsored trip to Montauk, and wrote about how to travel in Montauk on a budget. That was the weekend we sat in the worst traffic of our life, leaving Manhattan on a Friday afternoon to go drop our car back in New Jersey!
Our friends were getting married in LA that summer, and we took a two-week trip out to California, where we were able to work remotely (and on Eastern time, which involved some really early wake-ups). After Los Angeles, we went to the Catskills in the fall, writing most of the content you see in this Catskills travel guide. We put together one of our favorite photo experiences, the photo gallery of Saugerties Lighthouse.
Autumn brought us to Chicago for another friend’s wedding, and even though we barely saw the sun, we were able to put together a list of the best photo spots in Chicago!.
Travel-wise, we had not left the US since our trip to the Dominican Republic in the weeks leading up to COVID and the world shutting down. Some time in November, we went all-in to a three-week trip to Merida, Mexico, where one of Dan’s old Remote Year friends lived. So just like that, 2021 ended for us with leaving the US on December 29th.
2022
Our three-week trip to Merida turned out to be a four-week trip, as we couldn’t quite get enough of the 85-degree sunny weather every day, as opposed to frigid and snowy NYC! While in Merida, we were able to take a great amount of photos and put together guides about safety in Merida, where we coworked at Conexion60, where to stay in Merida and how to take a trip to the Uxmal ruins.
By the end of nearly a month abroad, we felt like we had gotten our digital nomad badges back, and had learned a lot about a new city that we hope to go back to!
In March, we split up for some travels: I went to Antigua, Guatemala and Dan went to a corporate retreat in Puerto Rico.
Back in NYC, we planned our next getaway to Mexico City for May. It was our first time back since 2018! This time, I researched new places to take photos in CDMX as well as the best places to stay in Mexico City.
We spent a very sunny summer in NYC, biking and running, taking a cruise around Manhattan at sunset with friends and starting to work more on our gear section of the website. This meant that we started to make more connections with apparel brands and this was new for us.
To conclude the year, we took a week-long road trip up to New England, where we worked on a social media campaign for the city of Pittsfield. It was our first time in the Berkshires together, and we got to see some of the top natural spots and forests, as well as pretty towns like Lenox, Massachusetts.
At the end of 2022, I gave birth to our daughter, who is becoming a part of our travel story!
2023
Having a baby was new for us in 2023, so we slowly started to come out of our parenting shell and start to take trips as a family of three. Learning how to work remotely with a baby was an adjustment, for sure
Our first experience going up to the Catskills with a baby was to Livingston Manor, and we had so much fun staying at Antrim Streamside.
Two months later, we were invited to Litchfield, CT. We had never been to the Litchfield Hills before, and we were delighted to see that it was a great place to go with a family. We tried some nature walks, fun places for coffee and ice cream and nice cafes in pretty towns.
So far, the best trip we’ve had this year was to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and working with Air Canada and Discover Halifax to make it happen. While up in NS, we took some picturesque day trips out of Halifax and stayed at the gorgeous Muir Hotel.
As for the rest of 2023, we don’t have any plans! We’re going to focus on growing the blog in a big way and we hope you’ll join us in reading.
What the future holds for us
We hope that we’ve inspired you to be creative, get out of your comfort zone and try something new! If you’d like to get in touch with us, feel free to contact us.
❤️, Becca & Dan
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![A man and woman standing on a wooden walkway in the forest.]()
We’re Becca & Dan! We’re adventurers, creatives, wanderers and remote work enthusiasts. We’ve each spent time living and working abroad, both separately and apart. We build and write this site completely on our own, to share our love of travel, photography and working remotely with the world.
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![Man and women working at a shared desk in a coworking space in Medellin]()
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