Welcome to our Travel Blog, I’m Matt, and together with my wife Lyssa we have put together a simple documentary of our travels around the world that will hopefully help and inspire you all to go and visit all the wonderful places in the world. We are Out of Office Explorers as travel is our passion, but we have to fit it in between our full time office jobs…luckily we work in the same company in The Netherlands, where quality of life is a high priority, vacation time is quite generous…so emails to us will often be responded with “we are currently out of the office…”

You’ll find that some destinations will feature a bit more than others in our blogs – The Philippines, The Netherlands, The UK and Spain – this is because Lyssa is a Filipina (so lots of trips to see the family in the Philippines), myself English (so I’ve been showing Lyssa that there is more to the UK than just London), we live in The Netherlands in the wonderful city of The Hague and we have a small holiday place in Valencia in Spain. With all these regular haunts you might wonder how we get anywhere else, but that is through assiduous planning and our own targets to visit at least 4 new countries every year (~98 is the count so far). We pretty much collect countries, our style of travel could probably be called short trip immersion – planning the trip, flying in, invariably getting a car and then trying to pack in as much as possible in the time we have, then giving ourselves time before the next trip to capture all that we’ve done before starting again with the plans for the next trip.

We’ve sort of had a blog for many years now…but

the real old school type of blog – a hand written journal that Lyssa keeps telling me that I am the only one that can read as my handwriting is like a spider that has stepped in ink and then run across the page! So we have plenty of places and stories to tell, but limited ways to share; at the same time, more and more we get requests from friends and family for travel tips on different destinations – evidenced in a running email on Japan (our most favourite country in the world) that just keeps on growing and growing the more we go there…so we are making the jump to the digital world and hopefully you will find the results useful, interesting and fun…but above all as an inspiration to put on that out of office reply and go and see the world as much as possible. Enjoy!