We are Chris Gill and Danila Mansfield. Both born in England, married since 1993, lived in California from 1994 to the end of 2013. Now we are permanent travellers!
We’ve both always enjoyed travel. I have many wonderful memories of spending summers in Italy with many cousins and friends (my mother is Italian), and Chris remembers long sunny days, swimming in the sea in Malta, when he visited family friends.
Since those days, we’ve both done as much travelling as we could, from cheap package holidays in Europe when we were young and poor – I once took a coach to Italy – to Chris spending a year working in Brussels, to moving to California, and seeing as much as we could there. I worked in the travel business for several years, and we took advantage of that to travel as much as we could. In 1996 we certified as SCUBA divers, and then our travel became very water-focused!
So we’ve taken our interests in travel, exploration and wildlife, and we now spend time in some of the many volunteer travel opportunities in conservation and wildlife. We also mix and match the volunteer travel work with renting apartments or housesitting for periods of time (weeks, months?) in interesting places that we would like to see.
We are NOT dunroamin yet! Why the strange name?
What’s that image at the top of this post? This is the True Things drawing by Brian Andreas. Chris bought me this years ago as a birthday present, and it’s come to inspire us and symbolise what we try to do. I had it laminated, and it sits somewhere in every room we sleep in. The quotation is “they came to sit & dangle their feet off the edge of the world, and after awhile they forgot everything but the good and true things they would do someday.”
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Hi Chris and Danila, nice to meet you.
I see you are currently in the Cook Islands.We were there a few years ago and absolutely loved it!
I’ve been looking through your blog – wow, lots of fabulous information and posts. We too are members of Trusted Housesitting, but also housesit for friends a lot.
Thanks for following our blog. I hope you enjoy the stories of our journey.
Cheers, and happy travels
Alison
Hi Alison, thanks for visiting, and thank you for your kind comments! I hope you enjoy our blog, and I’m certainly going to be checking out your posts for our future travel inspirations! cheers! Danila
Appreciating the commitment you put into your site and
in depth information you present. It’s good to come across
a blog every once in a while that isn’t the same outdated rehashed
material. Great read! I’ve bookmarked your site and I’m adding your RSS feeds to my
Google account.
Hello,
I am Hoa Nguyen from http://www.vietnam-visa.com/.
I would like to discuss with you about collaboration chance between us, so can I reach you via email please?
I look forward to hearing from you soon!
Best regards,
Hoa Nguyen
Hi Danila,
I love your travel map showing where you’ve been each year and was thinking I’d like to have it on my blog. Can you tell me where to find it? I’m assuming it’s some kind of download?
Thanks so much,
Alison
Hi Alison, thanks so much for your kind comments 🙂 I just did a google image search of “world map” chose one I liked, “saved as”, then put it in PowerPoint. Then I used PPT to add in the arrows and shading. PPT can be saved as a JPEG, then I uploaded that to the blog page 🙂 Only thing is the arrows looked sharper in PPT and in the JPEG, then once it was uploaded it lost sharpness. I have to work on that! But it’ll do for now 🙂
I know there are some fancy links out there that will auto add arrows or dots to a map, but it seemed easier to me to do this! I know I have to update it and re-upload it regularly (monthly? 6 monthly?) but that’s not too onerous!
Please let me know if you find another way of doing it that looks nice and isn’t too tricky!
cheers, Danila
Thanks Danila. I don’t have PPT, so I’ll do a google search and see what I find. I’ll let you know if I come up with anything relatively easy.
Alison
Danila, I am overwhelmed with your underwater photography in the
Phillippines with the brightly coloured creatures – a world a lot of
people never see. Well done!!
Cherry