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Zermatt, Switzerland - January 2026

The last post on this site is dated July 4, 2025.

We know. We have looked at that date more times than we want to admit, usually late at night, usually with the same thought: we should really write something.

So here it is. The something.

What actually happened

Nothing dramatic. That's the boring truth of it. No crisis, no burnout, no grand reevaluation of what we were doing here. Just work. Tim's schedule with the Holston Conference filled every space that a blog post might have occupied, and Brandy's calendar at the credit union has never been the kind of thing you casually clear an evening from. A week went by. Then a month. Then it had been long enough that starting again felt like it required an explanation, which made it easier to keep not starting.

If you have ever let a project sit, you know exactly how that works.

Here's the part that stings a little: we kept traveling the whole time. The trips did not stop. The stories just stopped getting written down, which is a strange thing for two people who built a site around the idea that memories deserve better than a forgotten folder on a phone.

Since that July 4 post: Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlán, and Cabo San Lucas. San Juan, Grand Turk, St. Thomas, St. John, and the Bahamas. Myrtle Beach in June, which for us is never really just a beach trip. And London, and then Zermatt.

Tim and Brandy at the Matterhorn

Zermatt is the one we keep coming back to in conversation. It's a fairytale village, and we do not use that phrase lightly, and waking up to the Matterhorn looming over you is mesmerizing in a way that photos keep failing to explain. One of the most magical places we have ever been, and we have not written a single word about it until this sentence.

That post is coming.

Why now

Two things changed.

The first is practical. Tim has moved to part-time work with the Holston Conference, which means for the first time in a long while there is actual room in the week. Not a lot of it. But enough to write, and enough to plan, and enough to stop treating this site like something we would get to eventually.

The second is harder to put a name on. We missed it. Not the traffic or the analytics, which we barely look at anyway. We missed the writing. There is something that happens when you sit down and try to describe a place, some sorting process where you figure out what actually mattered about a trip and what was just noise. Photos do not do that. Photos hold the picture. Writing holds the reason you took it.

We have four trips and a dozen destinations worth of that sorting to catch up on.

About the YouTube channel

We should talk about this, because we said it out loud in 2025 and then it never happened.

The plan was to launch a channel around the back-to-back Carnival Celebration cruise. Eight sea days, tropical stops, plenty of footage. We shot some of it. And then two problems showed up.

The first was the obvious one: editing video takes time we did not have, and we could not settle on what we were even making. Full vlogs? Short practical videos? Just shorts? Every answer meant a different amount of work and a different kind of trip.

Which leads to the second problem, and this is the one that actually decided it. Filming a trip properly means working the trip. It means thinking about coverage while you're standing in front of the Matterhorn, framing a shot of a meal instead of eating it warm, asking your wife to walk back down the street so you can get the entrance again. At some point we had to ask ourselves whether we wanted to spend our travel time producing content or whether we wanted to spend it traveling.

We chose traveling. We would choose it again.

But the calculation has changed, because the schedule has changed, and Brandy and I have started having real conversations about what we want Echoes of Adventures to become. Not whether to launch a channel by a certain date. Something bigger than that. There might be a YouTube channel. There might be a podcast. There might be both, eventually, and there might be a version of this where video works because it's built around trips we take anyway rather than trips we produce.

For now, the answer is writing. That's what we're committing to, because it's what we can do well without turning a vacation into a shoot.

What we are not going to do is announce a date. We did that once. The future is open, and we are comfortable saying that out loud. What we know for certain is the part that has not changed since the beginning: we want to share the stories.

What to expect

Weekly posts. That's the commitment, and we picked it because it's the one we think we can actually keep.

Some of those will be the stories, the ones from the last year that never got written and the older ones we still owe you. Some will be the practical side, because a good story about Florence does not help you much when you are trying to figure out how many nights to book there. And the itinerary planning is still open and still ours, still built the way we travel: two or three anchors a day, room to sit down, no sprinting.

That last part is not a scheduling preference. It's the whole point. We are the people who planned to travel as empty nesters back before we were married, who timed our kids so that our forties would be free for exactly this. We did not wait this long to rush.

The echo

Here's what struck us about this past year. We stood in Zermatt with the Matterhorn over our heads, and a few months later we were back in Myrtle Beach, which is where both of our families took us as kids, long before we knew each other. Same twelve months. Two places that could not be less alike, both of them ours.

That's the whole thing, really. Christmas 2022 in the Dolomites was less than four years ago and it was the first time either of us set foot in Europe. Everything on this site grew out of a trip we took to see our daughter. A year is a long time to be quiet and not very long at all in the life of a marriage, or a habit of going places together.

The site went quiet. We didn't.

Thanks for still being here. Next post is one week out.

If you want to follow along: new posts land weekly, and you can find us on Instagram at @echoesofadventures in between. And if you have a trip you've been circling for a year without booking, our itinerary planning page is where that usually stops being a someday.