“I don’t know if you remember this. We were sitting on the couch one night. It was the middle of summer. The windows were open, and we were listening to Dispatch’s “Only the Wild Ones.’
Ian chuckled, and said quietly, and somewhat convincingly, “Yeah…Yeah, I do.”
Lesli stilled for a moment as she tried to remember the exact line: “There’s a phrase in the song that goes, ‘Stars are up now no place to go…but everywhere.’”
She was referring to the indie/roots band’s song that’s a celebration of the free-spirited and adventurous who live life to the fullest and don’t give up on chasing their dreams.
“When I heard that I was like, ‘Ian, we’ve got to go. We have to make this happen now!’” she said.
The couple had taken short trips before when they’d gotten time off from their jobs at Roost, the popular Oregon District restaurant where she now tends bar and he’s a waiter.
Over the years they’d been to Mexico and Cuba and had some ventures that had taken them to three or four countries.
Ian had turned their 2016 trip to Iceland into a surprise marriage proposal. He’d kept the engagement ring hidden in a vitamin bottle.
By the time they eloped a year later with a small ceremony at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, they were in the process of buying their first home in South Park.
“We were going through the steps of the American Dream,” Ian said.
“I loved decorating our home, painting the walls, doing so many things,” Lesli said.
But they’d also fantasized about taking bigger trips and seeing more things and, after a few years, Lesli said her priorities changed.
Then came that song — “no place to go…but everywhere,” — and soon musical inspiration became mind-boggling reality.
In 2022, the couple put their home of five years on the market, and it sold in 24 hours.
“For a moment there it might have been ‘What are we doing?’” Lesli said. “But we had 30 days to be out, so I just started selling all our stuff, left and right.”
They got rid of their furniture, most of their belongings, their keepsakes, even their clothes.,
“They decided they were paring their life down to whatever they could fit into two, 40-liter backpacks and they’d take a third smaller bag for their camera and a few other items.
Soon they were headed to Bali, Indonesia, with a minimal budget — they planned to spend just $100 a day and that included airfare — and magnificent dreams. They had no pre-set itinerary, just a willingness to explore and learn.
“Everybody has what they want in life — that’s a beautiful thing — and we decided we wanted to see new cultures and new things,” Ian said. “We wanted to see as many places and meet as many people as possible.”
By the time they completed their trip last summer, they had visited 25 nations.
Some places they stayed for several weeks.
The spent 54 days in Georgia with its Black Sea beaches and Caucasus Mountain villages. They were in Thailand for 52 days, India for 41 and spent 44 days in South Africa and neighboring Namibia. They spent the same amount of time in Laos and Cambodia combined. Another 32 days were divided between Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda.
They went on safari in the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, visited the killing fields in Cambodia and death camps in Poland and they trekked to remote villages, high in the mountains in Georgia, a nation they loved.
The travelled by longboat, motorbike, sleeper train, motorized rickshaws called tuk-tuks and matatu minibuses meant for 14 people tops but packed with 22. Sometimes they hitchhiked.
They got private rooms at hostels and often stayed in people’s homes, where Lesli sometimes joined the cooking efforts in the kitchen.
Throughout India, she said she was given “hundreds of babies to hold.”
In Uganda they had to pay a bent border guard a bribe to keep from a trumped-up trip to jail.
Other places people couldn’t do enough for them, giving them meals, beers, travel tips and no-strings friendship.
It became like “peeling an onion,” Ian said. “Once you start taking away the layers, you realize you want to do more and more and more.”
‘To understand and educate ourselves’
Lesli is a Cedarville University graduate who was raised in Mount Pulaski, Illinois. Her grandparents were missionaries in Brazil and her dad, Don Crady, was born and lived in South America until he went to college.
“My hometown is a very small farming community,” she said. “It was a great place to grow up, but my dad wanted to make sure I knew, ‘This is not your total world view. There’s a lot more going on in the world than just what is happening in Mount Pulaski.’
“And I was lucky enough that he allowed me to see a lot at a young age. My older sister did her study abroad in Mexico and my parents sent me down to live with her for a month.
“I also had a friend whose father was a Spanish teacher in a neighboring town, and I got to go on two separate trips to Spain with his class.”
At Cedarville, she spent the first semester of her senior year studying in Spain and after graduation got a job teaching English to grade school children in Vietnam.
Ian, meanwhile, spent some of his early years in England, at RAF Lakenheath, a large air force base where his dad was stationed two hours northeast of London.
When his dad — Lieutenant Colonel Charles Dean, who is now a Beavercreek dentist — was sent to Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ian went to Greenon High School.
He was a nationally ranked soccer player, who starred not only for his prep team, but with the club team, Ohio Thunder, that finished second in the nation. Although he got scholarship offers from the University of Dayton and Cincinnati, he chose the academic route at Ohio State.
He eventually got a job at Jay Alexander’s in Centerville and so did Lesli.
They became friends, but initially she was dating someone else. She talked to Ian about her adventures abroad and urged him to travel.
He said one day he’d like to — with her.
Six months after they met, her relationship ended, and they began dating.
After their Icelandic engagement in 2016, they eloped a year later at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.
“I’d found a photographer online and she worked in Colorado,” Lesli explained with a smile and a shrug. “I said to Ian, ‘Let’s go to her and let her do her thing.’ “That was the beginning of our story, just doing random things.”
Their 25-country journey was fueled by that same spontaneous spirit, though it did come with surprising discipline.
Over the 405 days they were gone, they stayed under their budget and spent an average of $93.95 a day — $86.00 if you subtract airfare — for a total of $38,052. And the other night Ian took out a spreadsheet that detailed those expenditures.
They saved money — and got more authentic experiences — by taking all local public travel.
Although an African safari and rooming can cost thousands of dollars per person, they were introduced to a member of the Maasai tribe who lived in a village right outside the Maasai Mara National Reserve and for $200 he took them along the same route as the big spenders and they saw everything they did, including lions, bush elephants, giraffes. cheetahs and rhinos.
While that made for one of the marquee memories of the trip, there were scores more that were simple, but unique moments, that still make them smile today.
They had just enough clothes in the backpacks to get them through a week, so that often meant washing everything along the way.
In Africa and India, their clothing often was handwashed and hung on bushes to dry. That was fine until a sudden thunderstorm one morning drenched everything and they needed to stay another day until their clothes were dry enough to put back in their packs.
Some other memories are indelible because of the fright that came with them.
“We got rides on motorbikes in Kenya and Uganda and they did this thing called freewheeling, " Lesli said. “They’d turn off their ignition going down hills to save gas.”
Ian nodded: “We’d be going 90 miles an hour down the hills. There were no helmets, and we were sitting on the back, wearing our backpacks.”
“It was terrifying,” Lesli admitted “We were on gravel roads. There were times I thought, ‘If we slide or something happens, this won’t end well. This will be the end of me.’”
Before they visited a museum in Rwanda that chronicled the genocide there in the 1990s between warring Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups, they communicated with a friend in Dayton who wondered: “Why are you doing that? That’s depressing.”
Lesli shook her head: “I was like, ‘Well, isn’t that one of the points of coming to these places? To understand and educate ourselves.’
“I know things we’re interested in might not be the same for someone else. I respect that. But I think it’s important to learn people’s history, so you understand them.”
Planning another trip
A year ago today, the couple had just left the Maasai Mara National Reserve and Ian headed to Hell’s Gate National Park near Lake Naivasha, Kenya. It’s home to a wide array of animals — including leopards, lions, zebra, buffalo hartebeest, baboons, 103 species of birds — and magnificent scenery.
Once the couple left Africa, they headed up through the Middle East, the Balkans, Italy, Greece and eventually got to Paris for their flight home.
Dana Downs, the owner of Roost, kept their jobs open and they’re now back at work. After selling their house, they now live in Airbnbs.
Although Lesli said they still haven’t “digested” everything they experienced in the nearly 14 months they were gone, they already are planning their next venture, which they hope to begin in late spring or early summer.
“We’re in the midst of planning to do the Camino de Santiago,” Ian said.
One of the most important pilgrimages during the late Middle Ages and still popular today, it consists of a network of routes from Spain, France and Portugal that lead to the Shrine of St. James in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain.
The pilgrimage was further popularized by another Daytonian, actor Martin Sheen, who starred in the 2010 film “The Way,” written, directed, and produced by his son, Emilio Estevez.
“The route we’re looking at is about 800 kilometers,” Ian said. “We figured we can go about 20 kilometers a day, so that would be 40 days.”
He said he also wants to travel the Silk Road, that network of European trade routes to the Far East that began in the second century BC and exchanged goods, ideas, religions, and philosophies. He said Lesli wants to go to Nepal.
He talked of going to Bhutan, the Buddhist kingdom in the Himalayas, and places like Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
It’s more of that “peeling the onion” he talked about.
“When we did this last trip, we didn’t meet many people our age,” said Lesli, who is 38, as is Ian. “Most people were in their early-to-mid 20s, or they were taking a gap year.
“One time someone actually asked us if we were having a mid-life crisis. They said, ‘Are you OK?’
“I said, ‘Yeah, we’re great!’
“We have that sponge mentality, where we’re just soaking up as much as we can for as long as we can.
“And I just hope it never stops.”
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