In March 2001 we left Cologne with backpacks and a rough plan. Sixteen months later we landed back in Europe, having gone the long way round.
EDP Manager at a German mid-sized company since 1992. Financial Manager at two subsidiaries. The one who built the original site, kept the costs spreadsheet, and shot most of the photos.
Art history student at the University of Bonn. Travel agent. Lived in Sydney as an au-pair. The one who chose where to go next, who knew which museums were worth the queue.
We met in Germany in the late 1990s. Kirk was working in IT for a mid-sized company; Maren was finishing a degree in art history and working part-time at a travel agency. We started planning the trip the way most people plan one — over dinner, mostly as a joke.
It stopped being a joke when we bought the first plane ticket. Cologne to Athens, one-way, 15 March 2001. From there: overland east as far as we could go. We packed two backpacks, one camera, and a laptop with a 56k modem. The website you're reading was updated from internet cafés in 30+ countries.
It was the trip we had time for once and won't have time for again. We're glad we went.
The original BackpackWithUs went online in early 2001 — table-based HTML, FrontPage 5.0, Comic Sans MS, the works. Updated almost daily from internet cafés as we travelled.
This is the same site, content-preserved, redesigned for a modern web. Same photos, same words, same trip. Just a more readable shell.