Josh and Amy were originally considering hiking the Appalachian Trail, but after some consideration it was decided that those six months could instead be used to travel the United States and see as much of the country as possible.

Amy was born and raised in Grandville, MI (a suburb of Grand Rapids). She graduated from Grandville High School in 1999 and headed on to Michigan State University. In 2003 she graduated with a B.A. in Communication. During her time at Michigan State she completed a community relations internship at a domestic violence shelter and decided that she would like to work in the field of non-profits. Unfortunately the job market wasn’t so great at that time and she was a broke college graduate. For the past year and half she worked as a customer service representative for Greatland Corporation, a leading provider of tax and business software and paper products. She resigned from her job to take this trip. This wasn’t too difficult since it wasn’t exactly the job she had planned to on doing after college.

Amy’s travel experience is not very extensive. Her vacations as a child never left the Mid-West, other than a few trips to Florida. In the past few years, since meeting Josh, she has traveled quite a bit more. Some of the highlights of recent years include: Omaha, NE; Colorado; Delhi, NY; Wyoming, and Boston, MA.

Josh was born and raised in Omaha, NE. He graduated in 1998 from Omaha’s North High School. After graduation Josh headed off to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with dreams of doing Electrical Engineering. After spending two semesters too long with that major he started taking journalism classes, but couldn’t get into the program. He settled for political science, but took a year off to become a member of the Catskill Outdoor Education Corps, an Americorps program in Delhi, NY (about 3 hours northwest of NYC.) After returning to Illinois he switched majors again and in December 2004 graduated with a B.S. in Environmental Science. After graduating he moved to Michigan and worked temp jobs to make money for this trip.

Josh has seen quite a bit of the country already through family and personal travel. In the summers of 2000 and 2001 he rode over 35,000 miles on a bus while touring with the Glassmen Drum and Bugle Corps. During the summer of 2003 he completed the Roadshow USA. This bicycle ride took a 7 member team from Astoria, Oregon to Boston, Massachusetts on human power, carrying all their gear on their bicycles. Outside of Oregon, Josh hasn’t seen much of the west coast and is really looking forward to that portion of the trip.