About Us: The Story Behind Our Pixel Passport
Travel has been part of our lives for a long time, although neither of us could have known where it would eventually lead. What began with trips around the world became the story of how my wife and I met, built a life together across two countries, and eventually started exploring the world as a family with our daughter. Today, Our Pixel Passport is where we share those experiences, along with the places we visit, the photographs we take and the practical things we learn along the way.
How We Met in Vietnam
By 2014, I had already visited Vietnam a few times when my parents decided they wanted to travel around Southeast Asia, following a route through Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia and Vietnam. I joined them for the trip, and when we arrived in Saigon, they booked a couple of tours to see more of the city and the Mekong Delta. I went along, not knowing that one of those tours would change the direction of my life.
Our tour guide that day was the woman who would later become my wife. We weren’t staying in Saigon for long, so there wasn’t much time to get to know each other, but she invited me out for dinner and we started spending time together. A couple of days later, we moved on to Da Nang and then Hanoi, with the plan being to fly home to Ireland from there. By that point, however, I wasn’t quite ready to leave things where they were.
A change to my flight meant I had to travel back through Saigon, giving me an opportunity to see her again. Rather than simply continuing with the original plan, I booked a return a day earlier so we could spend more time together before I headed home. Before saying goodbye properly, I promised that once I landed back in Ireland, I would book another flight for three months later so we would already know when we would see each other again.
It was a fairly straightforward promise to make, but following through on it meant that our story would continue long after that first trip had ended.
Moving to Vietnam and Starting a Life Together
After returning to Ireland, we kept in touch through messages and calls, working around the time difference and the realities of living in different countries. By early 2015, I was back in Vietnam, and after a few more trips, I began to realise that visiting whenever I could wasn’t going to be enough if we wanted to build a life together. I needed to make a bigger decision about where I would live and work.
At the time, I was working as a cartographer, which wasn’t a career with obvious opportunities for moving abroad. I decided to take a different route, completing a TEFL course before taking a career break and moving to Vietnam in 2015. I initially taught at a high school, figuring things out as I went, before finding my place teaching younger children, covering subjects including English, maths and science. It was a different direction from the career I had trained for, but it gave me the opportunity to build a life in Vietnam with my wife.
We got married in 2016, and not long afterwards we made another important move, returning to Ireland. Our life together had started in Vietnam, but we were now building our future in Ireland, carrying those experiences with us while beginning a new chapter closer to home.
From Travelling as a Couple to Travelling as a Family
Becoming parents changed the way we travelled, although it didn’t mean that travel stopped being part of our lives. Our daughter was only five days old when we were already dealing with passport paperwork, and she took her first flight at three months old. At nine months, she was travelling on her first long-haul trip back to Vietnam, where my wife had grown up and where our story together had begun.
As she grew, our trips gave us the opportunity to introduce her to different places, from beaches and cities to quieter towns and road trips. Our experiences included budget hotels, early mornings, snack stops and tired legs, alongside the big smiles and family moments that made the effort worthwhile. Not every part of a trip was straightforward, and travelling with a child meant that the practical details often mattered just as much as the destination itself.
We also began to see familiar places differently. Returning somewhere we already knew could be a different experience when we had our daughter with us, because the things we needed from a trip, and from the places where we stayed, had changed. We were still interested in exploring, taking photographs and experiencing somewhere new, but we also had to consider how the day would work for all three of us.
In 2020, a job change brought us from Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland, where we are now based. Our travels have continued to take us to different places, giving us more experiences to photograph, write about and share.
Why We Created Our Pixel Passport
Over time, we became increasingly interested in sharing more than photographs of the places we visited. The pictures show where we went and what caught our attention, but they don’t always explain the decisions behind a trip, the practical details that helped us along the way or the things we would approach differently if we returned.
When you travel as a family, the experience is shaped by more than the destination itself. Accommodation, timing, transport and the needs of a child all influence how a day unfolds. Sometimes a plan works well, while at other times a small practical difficulty changes what you can do next. These are the details that often get lost when a trip is reduced to a collection of highlights, even though they can be some of the most useful things to understand when planning your own travels.
That is what we want Our Pixel Passport to offer: an honest account of our experiences, with enough detail to help other families make informed decisions about their own trips. We share the places we visit, how we approach our travel days, what worked for us and what we would do differently next time. We want the writing to reflect what actually happened rather than present every trip as though everything went according to plan.
Photography is another important part of what we do. Taking pictures gives us a way to record the places we visit and the details that make them distinctive, while our travel writing allows us to explain the experiences behind those images. Through our blogs, photography, books and guides, we bring these different parts of our travels together.
We also have a Kids Zone, because travel is something the whole family can take part in, including younger travellers. Our aim is to make the website useful to families looking for ideas, information and inspiration, whether they are planning a trip of their own or simply enjoying the stories and photographs from ours.
What You’ll Find at Our Pixel Passport
Our Pixel Passport brings together our family travel stories, practical blog posts, travel photography, books and guides, and activities for children. The content comes from our own experiences, with an emphasis on the places we have visited and the details that help explain what travelling there was actually like.
We want to show the enjoyable parts of travelling, but we also want to include the decisions, difficulties and compromises that come with taking a family on the road. That means sharing useful information where we have it, explaining how we approached particular situations and being clear about what suited us rather than suggesting that the same approach will work for every family.
We are a family of three from Ireland, with a shared interest in exploring new places, photographing what we see and keeping a record of the experiences that have brought us here. Travel has played a major role in our lives, from the circumstances in which my wife and I first met to the trips we now take with our daughter, and Our Pixel Passport gives us a place to bring those experiences together.
If you’re planning a family trip, looking for somewhere new to explore or simply enjoy reading about real travel experiences, we hope you’ll find something here that is useful to you. Our story is still unfolding, and there are plenty more places to visit, photographs to take and experiences to share.
