My husband and I are early retirees and enjoying it. We have been wintering in AZ but will be exploring different areas. We raised 2 girls and have been active in their activities (sports, Girl Scouts, school). Now retired we find stuff to do including volunteering.

Julie's volunteer experiences include:
A week with Habitat for Humanity in El Salvador building a house. It was hot and hard work!

Volunteered with Habitat Restore on their deconstruction crew. Not a skilled professional on any of the building stuff but am willing to learn most things. Dave is really the expert with handyman stuff.

Junior Girl Scout leader for 6 years - 3 years with each daughter. I liked coming up with projects to do with the troop.

Volunteer weekly at a local food pantry where my main role is organization and odds and ends as I have time.

We are both Red Cross Disaster Relief Volunteers. Assisting in Disaster relief when needed across the country and even Canadian Wild Fires in 2017.

Our family hosted for about 5 years when the girls did their International exchanges and for a few years afterwards. I am now a volunteer for AFS USA.

Julie spent 7 weeks in Costa Rica in the fall of 2010 . The purpose of going there was to learn Spanish. I did okay while I was there but kind of lost it quickly when I got home because I had no one to converse with. I am not sad I did it though - it was a great experience.

We both spent our careers in the IT field.

Our family chooses to eat quite healthy. One of our daughters has been a vegetarian for about 15 years. Julie has recently gotten into fermenting and makes our own Kombucha, water kefir, milk kefir, yogurt, sauerkraut and starting to experiement with fermenting other vegetables.

Julie has used couchsurfing twice and we hosted our first family in Sept 2018 for one night.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

I think courchsurfing is a neat concept. To be welcomed by another person or family into their home vs staying in a boring hotel room. I enjoy meeting new people and learning about new things and other peoples perspective.

Interests

I love to travel and go to warm places. I love to cook and walk(hike). I basketweave and do a lot of volunteering.

• cooking
• vegetarian
• traveling
• hiking
• sports
• software
• volunteering

Countries I’ve Visited

Austria, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Germany, Italy, Jamaica, Mexico, Peru, Switzerland, Thailand