About Us

Meet the Hoffmeister family:

Marc, Danielle, Hannah & Olivia – we’re a pretty typical American family, with good jobs, a nice suburban house in a neighborhood with decent public schools. Or at least we used to be. In the summer of 2008, we decided to trade all that in for a more adventurous life!

We sold almost all our stuff and took a trip through the Caribbean, South America, the Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia, for starters. Now we’re back in Dallas, but using what we learned in our travels to live a little differently.

About this website:

We built this website as a way for our family & friends to keep up with our adventures, plus we wanted to have a journal of the trip for ourselves. If we can help other families who want to take a similar journey, that’s a plus!

Now that we’re back in the states, we’ll continue to blog about our experiments in lifestyle design. Want to follow along? You can bookmark this site – or better yet, subscribe to our RSS feed or sign up for email updates, using the boxes at the right.

The Blog contains all of our journal entries, with the most recent ones displayed first. You can use the navigation links at the right to jump to a certain point or view them by category.

If you have a question you’re dying to ask us, be sure to visit our FAQ page first. If you don’t find the answer there, feel free to email us.

You can find all the details about our itinerary on the Our Trip page.

If you have any suggestions, helpful tips, words of encouragement, or just want to say “Hi!”, just send an email to Marc or Danielle [at] 4suitcases [dot] com.