Welcome to our blog!  To chronicle our trip to South/Central America, we decided to create a blog. We call it infused exposures because we will be exposed to many new and diverse things on this continent and we would like to infuse those experiences with bits of photography, food and the cultures we learn about.  We hope to share some of our exposures & insight with you!

First, I will tell you a bit about our travel style. We are fond of slow travel (usually spending our maximum 90 day visas in each country). We aren’t the travelers you will see rushing off to tick certain sites off of our ‘list.’  Yes, there are things that we want to see that are very famous and therefore, very crowded, but we try to get off the beaten track a lot too.  We’ve worked hard at learning Spanish, so we try to communicate as much as we can with locals.  We’ve couchsurfed, hitchhiked & just met random people along the way.  We seek to learn as much as possible about each place we visit and are always open to spontaneous recommendations!  If you are a fan of slow travel, community-based travel and in general, like meeting locals & getting to know the foods of each country, you are in the right place!

The short story:

This blog will serve to not only record our trip and keep our friends/family back home updated but it will also include reviews for  things we eat. the places we stay, the activities we do and the photos we take. You will even get some travel advice in the form of food, general travel tips and reviews of where to eat, where to stay, etc.  If you are interested in photography, you can just view our gallery or Laurent’s photography page at   LLP

The long story:

We decided to keep a blog for many reasons.  First and foremost we want to document our travels.  It’s a record of what we experienced, so we can always refer back to it.

In the ‘Destinations‘ tab, you will find all of the countries we have visited.  When you choose a country, you will have a choice of what region you would like to learn more about.  Simply click on the region and you will find all of our posts from that place.  Laurent worked really hard on creating the icons for each country and region by using the flag and maps for each destination.  We hope you like it as much as we do!

This blog is also a place for our friends and family to follow along on our trip; to know we are safe and didn’t die along the way like plunging to our death riding a mountain bike over this.  Or getting lost at sea on a sailboat to Antarctica. We even hope to inspire vicarious travel!  Or better yet, we hope to get others traveling.  We do this through our ‘Stories & photo essays‘ tab.  Click there and you will come along with us on our adventures.

We both love to eat.  And I love to cook.  I love it so much that I attended culinary school 4 years ago and worked for a few years at a catering company in Brooklyn.  A large part of our book is about the foods in each region.  The typical, regional dishes are what attracts me most. I love learning about the local foods. But I also enjoy modern interpretations of these classics as well as gringo, comfort eats.  In the ‘Foods‘ tab, you will find all posts about the foods from each country. South America has wine growing regions in Chile, Argentina and Bolivia.  These will be included here as well.

In creating this blog, we decided that we would like to help other travelers.  Friends always ask me for travel advice and I really enjoy helping them out.  Both Laurent and I use other travel blogs to help us figure things out, so we would like to help others too.  Traveling can be fun but it can also be a royal pain figuring stuff out.  We hope this blog will be a good place for others to come to get some advice.  That’s why we created a ‘Recommendations‘ tab.  Here you will find all of our reviews for things we did, accommodations, places we ate at, etc.  We’ve also included some ‘travel tips’ for each country.  Insider tips that I want to share with you.  Things I had wished someone would have told me!

We love to take photos and hate when they sit on the desktop or the hardrive.  Instead, why not turn them into tangible books that you can hold in your hand.  Photos are much better collecting dust on the coffee table than hiding out in your microchips. We practiced making a book when we went to Patagonia but this was just a simple photo book. We’d like to incorporate not just our landscape photos but also information about the food and culture.  Many of the photos you will see on this site, we plan to fuse into our book. For a look at all of our photos, check out the ‘Gallery‘ tab on the menu.  I say ‘our photos’ but most of them are Laurent’s.  His photography has grown beautifully over the years.  You can find his work here on his photo page LLP (Laurent Lhomond Photography).

Lastly, in our ‘Trip facts & Figures‘ tab, you can follow our trip route.  A google map will show you exactly which destinations we visited.  Subsequently, Laurent has listed all of the dates/places.  We included this because we think it’s fun to see where we have been but also because it could be a useful tool for someone who is planning a trip to this continent.

So that’s really it.  Our blog.  Bienvenue, bienvenidos and welcome!