About Me — Lisa Cyrier
Living life everywhere and nowhere; in search of novel experiences, endless laughter and adorable animals.
Who would have thought that writing about yourself would be so challenging? Maybe because I have stuffed so much life into my 49 years (only six more months to go until the big 5–0!) I am overwhelmed with the thought of trying to summarize it into one story.
You know that famous quote from Abraham Lincoln:
“In the end, it’s not the years in your life that counts.
It’s the life in your years.”
I feel accomplished knowing I am succeeding in the latter.
I grew up in Indiana in the 1980s, full of big hair and bigger dreams. I always felt in my heart that I needed to travel and explore. I knew there was a big ole’ world on the other side of the cornfield, but when you’re fifteen, you need a partner with who you can dream with. A partner who gives you the confidence to dream big and turn those dreams into reality. Thanks to a boy named Bob, a boat and a sandbar, Ronnie crashed into my life on a summer day in 1987. (That’s a story for another day.) From the very beginning, we would take as many vacations as we could afford. Back then our vacations were road trips, mostly to Florida because we were both pro sun and warmth and con snow and cold. We were married in July of 1994 and lived in Illinois until the following January.
Why did we leave Illinois only six months after we became Mr. and Mrs? Because of The Weather Channel and a meteorologist named Vivian. Every cold morning we would watch The Weather Channel and Vivian would always be telling us how sunny and warm it was in Arizona. That’s all it took for us to quit our jobs, pack up our car and move. Arizona here we come!
I earned a Master’s of Science Degree from Arizona State University in Speech-Language Pathology. The first few years of my career I worked in an elementary school, but I quickly learned that a school salary and schedule weren’t working with our travel plans and future dreams. We would take a few vacations a year, but with each vacation, we realized that we wanted more time on vacation and less time on the job. We started scheming of ways that we could work less and live more. As a computer programmer, Ronnie was working as many contracts and hours as he could so we could save, save, save. With his encouragement, I started my own early intervention therapy company so I could also help contribute to our “saving machine”. We worked countless hours and stuck to a strict budget so that we could take a step back from 60 hour work weeks and step into more hours living. We were so tired of our working life interfering with our living life. During the “work our butts off” chapter, we travelled often while living in Cave Creek, AZ, Dallas, TX, and finally Charlotte, NC.
On our 20th anniversary, we gave each other the greatest gift. It wasn’t porcelain or platinum or wrapped with a bow. It was the gift of more time to spend with one another. Time to explore, time to love and time to live.
We sold everything we owned, except our dog Dooley Bear, and moved to San Pedro, Belize in October 2014. It was time to truly start living. And living we did. We lived on an island in Belize for four years and in that time we learned and experienced so much. From canoeing 170 miles from the Guatemala border to Belize City to exploring Mayan Ruins to writing an award-winning children’s book series about Dooley Bear and his travels to buying a boat and learning how to deep-sea fish to mastering the art of pulling coconuts down from palm trees to navigating life on an island to……the lessons and stories are hysterical and endless.
Dooley Bear was an island celebrity. He was always the first one with his paw up to enter costume contests, appeared on the cover of the newspaper and met the mayor more times than I can count. Oh, and he was featured in not one, but two House Hunters International episodes! (Beating our record by one.)
We loved our island family of misfits, but island life didn’t satiate our appetite for exploration. After Dooley Bear passed away in 2018, we packed our bags and decided to try something different. Instead of living on an island, we decided to live nowhere and everywhere all at the same time. We have road tripped from the tip of Baja to the Arctic Circle, trekked from Peru to France to Jordan to Egypt to Zanzibar to Uganda to…….to be continued.
We have splashed around in the Dead Sea, Red Sea and Caribbean Sea. Dipped into the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean and the bathwater of the Indian Ocean. We have trekked the Inca Trail, scaled Mount Sinai and licked a glacier. We have kissed gray whales, swam with whale sharks and hiked with mountain gorillas. Living through hurricanes and a lightning strike has only made us stronger and reinforces us that we are on the right life path.
If you follow me you can expect to be entertained by lighthearted stories from my life on a small island and tales of adventure from traveling and living around the world. I love telling my stories and my goal is for the reader to not only read my words but hear my stories as if they are listening to me in person.
Here are a few samples -
Who knows, you might even learn a fun fact or two along the way.
Did you know that camels love pitas?
Did you know that mummified dogs still have fur?
By the way, Dooley Bear was also one heck of a writer. If you’re interested in what island life was like from a dog’s perspective, you’ve come to the right place! He accumulated quite the collection of stories in his day.
Thanks for taking the time to get to know me.
I hope you’ll enjoy reading my stories as much as I enjoy telling them!
