our journey so far…

Brian, born and bred in the USA, had lived in four American states by the time he did his undergraduate work at the tiny but picturesque Roanoke College in Virginia.

Dutch girl Dominiek (Roswitha van der Pal) had meanwhile crossed the big pond in order to be a high school exchange student in Suffolk, Virginia. Radford University, elsewhere in Virginia, enticed her with a full tennis scholarship to do her BBA there.

We met at Radford University in 1992 where Brian was studying for his M.Sc. and Dominiek was working on her Master of Business Administration [MBA].

By 1995 we’d both got our diplomas, we’d got married, we’d reduced our lives down to 34 cardboard boxes (that we tossed onto a ship headed for Europe), and then we boarded a one-way flight bound for Dominiek’s native country of Holland.

For the next few years we worked on making careers for ourselves, making friends in our new surroundings, and finding the town and the home in which we wanted to live. Every Summer we went on our annual SCUBA diving expedition to places like Turkey, Malta, Egypt and South Africa.

At the end of 2005 Santa came on 25 December, and our daughter Tessa arrived on 28 December. Since then we’ve devoted ourselves to our new quest: making her the most photographed human being on the planet! But now she “competes” with her brother Owen who was born on 21 January 2011.