Who are Anna D and Adam? In short, we are a wife and husband travel vlog channel based in Colorado! We could bore you with how Adam played extremely hard to get when we worked at Circuit City as two young college kiddos but let’s jump to the part that matters for this story: March 2020. I bet, moving forward, we’ll all be able to remember exactly where we were when we got the news that the world was shutting down. I (Anna) was working at the gym and was told we needed to close by 8pm. So, my General Manager and I got everything ready to close and at 8:05pm, I waved a solemn goodbye to my sanctuary (the Cycle room). How long would I be out of work? What was I going to do with myself?
Adam and I found ourselves at home in mid-March and we had A LOT OF TIME to reflect on our lives up until that point. As we’ve often said during our vlog introduction, “we took a hard look at our life up until that moment and realized we’d barely explored our state in the first 5 years we’d lived there”. The biggest smack in the face was when we realized that the 19/20 ski season was coming to an end and we had only been snowboarding THREE times on our season passes. What were we doing? We were spending all of our time working. In our opinion, working so many long hours may have been somewhat acceptable if we had any sort of financial plan or goals – but we had none. We were STRUGGLING paycheck to paycheck with debt, bills and expenses that were suffocating us.
When we finally took a forced moment to breathe and look up – we noticed that we were also living completely separate lives only coming together here and there. We should note that we are firm believers in the power of “things happening for a reason”. Timing is everything. Adam realized that he was reaching the cap of what he could accrue for paid leave and would soon start losing whatever he earned over the cap. So what is a young couple to do when there is a global pandemic, have ample vacation time but nowhere to travel to? Well, we took many hiking day trips because that’s what you do in Colorado! And it was magical!
Circling back to the topic of living separate lives – during our earliest hikes we did just that. I would take photographs, Adam would record videos, we would edit them and then publish them on our own separate social media accounts. One day, I suggested to Adam that perhaps we should try a joint venture of video and photography. At first, Adam was reluctant (he’s not always good at change) but then (eventually) he obliged. That is how our first video, “Silver Dollar Lake Trail, Georgetown, CO (secret treasure hunt?) – Day Trips Near Denver” was born.
It’s been almost 2 years since the inception of Anna D and Adam on YouTube and here is what we can say: this little project has brought us so much closer together. We work extremely well together (we met at work!), this project forces us to communicate with each other and plan content together. At this point, our YouTube Channel has 82 videos and 447 subscribers (please subscribe!!). As a couple we have just launched our new joint website, Anna D and Adam, we are debt free (finally!), have more defined goals for our financial future and our travel vlog.
Part of these goals include to create more travel vlog and blog content in the United States and internationally, talk about our financial journey (clawing out of $36,000 worth of debt and contributing to the exact future we want to create), to reach 1000 subscribers on YouTube and build this to be a full-time adventure. As far as this blog is concerned, we plan to publish new posts once a month so we’ll see you next month when we talk about Arches National Park 🙂
Thank you so much for making it all the way down here. Please leave us a comment below (especially if there is anything travel, lifestyle or financial related that you wish to see on here!).
