What I Wonder When I Wander: What’s fate got to do with it? (The story of us)

Last Updated on February 15, 2021

We have so many loyal readers out there, a community of people who read everything we write, get in touch with questions, offers to host us in their cities, words of encouragement or suggestions for places to travel to next.

But we have realized something…

Just the other day, some new friends asked us the story of how we met. As we told them our story, we realized that this is something we haven’t shared with all of you who have been with us here for so long!

Here it is…The story of how Dani and I became a couple. It might just be a bit juicier than you expect.

Dani and I met in 2006 in her hometown, a small city in Germany called Erfurt. It’s the kind of city most foreigners don’t travel through…much less move to.

I did just that, however, in 2003, when I followed a previous relationship all the way from Guatemala (where I had lived for two years) to Germany. When that relationship fell through a couple years later, I had already managed to make a little home in the middle of a country where I didn’t speak the language, know a soul or have a clue about the culture.

It took about a year for me to learn German well enough to start making a circle of friends outside of the teachers at the schools where I worked as an English teacher. It would take Dani and I another year and a half after that before we ever spoke – even though we had been spending almost every single day together since I moved to the city.

You see, Dani had just returned from working in Ibiza, Spain in 2003 and started an International Business degree at the school where I worked. Every day throughout those years, I taught English to dozens of classes as Dani studied, though our paths never crossed until that fateful day when I stepped in to cover for their Business English teacher. The students responded well and when a spot opened up the next year to teach the class in their final year (with a nice per-hour pay raise) I accepted.

This turned out not to be one of my favorite groups to teach and while Dani was always nice, she sat in the back, cool as a cucumber, seemingly more interested in her newspaper or sending text messages from under her desk (can’t fool me!). Her grades were great with little effort, and I would have never thought she was interested in the class, let alone in me.

When Dani tells the story, she says she was already interested the year before, from that one day I taught her class. I was so nervous that day I barely remember a thing. This was because as the teacher, I was actually YOUNGER than a few of the twenty-four girls in the class and had less (read: NO) business experience at the time, either. Although Dani was, and not surprisingly still is, younger than me, the difference between us is only 14 months. This meant that the relationship was never exactly one of student-teacher, but more like I was working and she was studying and that happened to take place in the same place.

When I tell the story, I say that I still had no idea she was interested when, at the very end of the school year, her friend and fellow student had arranged lunch for the three of us to thank me for some extra exam help I had given a few of the girls. I still had no idea that summer when Dani and I started hanging out as friends, either, because, Dani being Dani, she remained totally relaxed about it all – until she absolutely couldn’t hold it in any more. She planted one on me at some point, and, well, that is obviously when I knew how she felt and how I felt, too!

Not six weeks later, however, I was scheduled to fly to England and leave Germany, quite conceivably, forever.

The funny thing was…so was Dani.

Completely independent of my plans, Dani had signed on back in April to study in northern England for a fourth year to complete her Bachelor’s degree. Four months earlier, in January, I had enrolled in a Master’s course in the south of England.

As fate would have it, we were both moving to England within one week of each other. What may have just been an exciting, confusing, small-town summer fling became a long-distance relationship, then a live-in relationship, and finally, this. Us. What we are now. The GlobetrotterGirls. Living our dream traveling the world.

What I wonder is just how much of a role did fate play in these wanderings of ours? Me, ending up in random German city, Dani moving back from Spain, neither of us knowing each other for almost three years and then our lives coming together on so many levels all at once…

And another thing I wonder…is there anything else you would like to know about the two of us? Let us know!

Related posts:

The Story Of The Yellow Envelope (+ Book Giveaway!) What I Wonder When I Wander: Why is bargaining so hard for some? What I Wonder When I Wander: How does technology affect the essence of travel? What I Wonder While I Wander: Why Don’t I Want To Volunteer?