MEET MATT & LINDA
We travel a lot.
Sometimes that means a cruise ship or a very nice hotel. Sometimes it means somebody else’s house, somebody else’s pets, and a detailed conversation about exactly how many times the dog expects to be walked.
How do we travel more, experience places well, and make the whole thing practical enough that we can keep doing it?
That’s what Matt & Linda Travel is about.
We didn’t start out as travel experts
In 2019, after nearly two years of preparing for a very different kind of life, we packed what we needed into a small Chevy Sonic, left a few things with family, and headed out.
House sitting became a big part of the plan. Instead of building every trip around hotel reservations, we could care for someone’s home and pets while they were away and use that as a base for exploring.
From there, the map got considerably bigger.
We road-tripped around the United States. House sat in the Caribbean and Hawaii. Traveled through Europe. Took cruises. Flew, drove, rode trains, rented cars, packed badly, packed better, changed plans, missed things, discovered things we weren’t looking for, and learned an impressive number of lessons the inefficient way.
We travel more than one way
One thing we’ve learned is that travel gets a lot easier when you stop believing you have to belong to one particular tribe.
We like house sitting.
We also like hotels.
We like road trips.
We like cruises.
We like a good deal, but we also know that sometimes paying more for the right flight, location, cabin, or schedule can make an entire trip better.
The point isn’t to be the cheapest traveler, the fanciest traveler, or the person who can brag about fitting six weeks of clothing into something the size of a sandwich bag.
The point is to build a trip you actually want to take.
Why we built Matt & Linda Travel
Over the years, people started asking us questions.
How does house sitting work?
How do you find sits?
How do you travel for that long?
How do you decide where to stay?
How do you put a complicated trip together without losing your mind?
And sometimes simply:
How are you guys doing this?
We realized we had accumulated something more useful than a collection of vacation photos.
We had experience.
Some of it came from trips that went beautifully.
Some of it came from a 200-pound dog trying to dismantle a basement during a thunderstorm.
Both kinds are useful.
So this site is where we share where we go, how we travel, and what we’ve learned that might help you travel more. That practical travel focus is the job of Matt & Linda Travel.
We’ll tell you what actually happened
There are enough travel sites on the internet telling you every destination is magical.
That’s not going to be this one.
If we loved something, we’ll tell you.
If we thought something was overrated, confusing, expensive, inconvenient, or just plain weird, we’ll tell you that too.
And if we screwed something up, there’s a pretty good chance that story will make it onto the site.
Because the useful part of firsthand travel isn’t proving that we’re good at it.
It’s helping you make better decisions because we already learned something the hard way.
Want some help planning your trip?
Matt is also a Fora Travel Advisor.
So if you’ve got a trip rattling around in your head and would rather have some help turning it into an actual itinerary, Matt can help you explore the options.
There’s another part of our story
Travel is a big part of our lives, but it isn’t the whole story.
Our other site, No 2 The Quo, is about the bigger question behind many of the choices we’ve made: how do you build a life around what actually matters to you instead of simply following the script you inherited?
That’s where we talk about Life Design and the why behind some of our bigger decisions.
Matt & Linda Travel has a different job.
No 2 The Quo is the why.
This site is the where and how.
Come along
There are still a lot of places we want to see, trips we want to take, and travel ideas we haven’t tried yet.
Some of those will become stories.
Some will become guides.
And eventually, some may become trips where you can pack a bag and come with us.
In the meantime, if you’re here because you want to figure out where to go, how to make the trip work, or how to travel a little more often…
You’re in the right place.