I'm Merrisa, and that's Nick!
We're high school sweethearts who found their love for travel when a good friends parents gifted us two weeks on the island of Kauai, Hawaii back in 2014 for our honeymoon! Ever since then, we've been working on making this passion an every day reality, and man... has it been a trip!
How it started...
Nick and I met in high school. He was a junior and I was a freshman. I was sitting at single seater booth at lunch with my friend and her boyfriend (who happened to be one of Nick’s bffs) when Nick decided to slip his little bum into the single seat I was sitting in and put his arm around me. He looked at me and said “Hey… how’s it going?” with his crooked smile and afro like hair. I just stared at my friends but they were laughing uncontrollably. I said, “nothing…” and we continued to have lunch.
The days after that were pretty much the same. The four of us hung out after school every day, laughing, joking, listening to music. About a week later, walking to the busses after school, Nick’s friend/my friends boyfriend said, “Don’t you wanna ask her something?” Nick looked at me and said, “Oh.. Yeah! Wanna be my girlfriend?” Oh the simplicity of dating at 15. I said, “sure” so he put his arm around my shoulders and walked me to my bus.
We shared our first “I love you’s” at a local show, we went to all of the proms, three to be exact, snuck over to each others houses, introduced our parents to each other and learned that my father worked for Nick’s dad (who’s his grandfather, he was adopted) and his biological dad back in the day! Such a small world… We went on vacations with each others families, and spent pretty much every waking moment we had with each other. Nick even accidentally slept over once. We thought our lives were over when we had to walk out into the kitchen the next morning but my Dad was like, “Hey you two! Want pancakes?” We were shocked!
Nick graduated 2 years later and went to our local community college while I finished out high school and in September of 2009, we moved into our first apartment together so I could go to school in Boston! It was while we were living there, Nick proposed to me on on our 8th anniversary after spending the entire day walking around, doing all that you can do in Boston. We experienced financial hardships durning these years, lived through the Boston Marathon bombings (that’s a whole story within itself), and got our 2 fur babes Slim and Sara.
After college, it wasn’t smooth sailing. We had to move back home early because we lost our jobs. Luckily enough Nick’s Mom had the master bedroom available for us so we moved back home! It's in every college graduate's will to move back home right? We got married in April of 2014 and went to Hawaii the week after which, as you know, started our travel bug!
For a few years, we worked a dead end job and didn’t do much other than that. Eventually we left that job, found better day jobs which allowed us to get our own place, travel more, and I got to work on photography again! At the end of 2017 I was fired from that job and was forced to start photography full time, scariest month of my life... Completely terrified, Nick ensured this was happening for a reason and in the following year, we booked 30 weddings and haven’t looked back!
For the future...
We plan to buy house and a travel van. I don’t think we’ll ever stop exploring the world. And as for kids, we do plan to have them. Wether it’s by adoption or birth, we don’t know!
People ask us all the time, “Don’t you get sick of being with each other every waking minute of every day? And the answer is no. Nick and I have been by each others sides since 2006 and I wouldn’t want it any other way. Lucky is an understatement when explaining our love story. I realize many don’t find their person until they’re well into their adults lives, we're lucky that we found each other early. I do believe that everyone has a soulmate. I’ve got to love mine for more than half my life :)
