raig daniels
Nobody knew the word "blog" yet. But I was a web developer, so instead of mass-emailing updates, I built a simple admin page where we could log in from internet cafés and post travelogues. I already owned craigandtina.com — originally our destination wedding site from Playa del Carmen in 2003. We'd done a coin flip to decide whose name came first. I repurposed it before we left in February 2005 and renamed it Cubicle Boycott — our gap year from cubicle life.
We had no idea it would last a year.
The site went through a few redesigns on the road. I remember one afternoon in Laos where internet café time was dirt cheap — I spent four hours rebuilding the design just because I could. After we got back, I updated it again, maybe for the last time around 2009. Then about five years ago, the design looked dated, I was tired of paying for the domain, and I let craigandtina.com expire.
In recent months, two people — a family member and a friend — separately asked if the travel site was still up somewhere. I told them no, mentioned the Wayback Machine, and moved on. Then on the flight back to Portugal, it clicked: the code was still sitting on the same server that hosts this site. I could spin up a subdomain for free and point it at the old codebase.
I did. It looked terrible. I couldn't help myself — I gave it a full modern redesign.
The site is now at cubicleboycott.craigdaniels.me.
What That Trip Actually Did
That year changed us in ways we're still living out.
It rewired how we think about money and things. The deal going in was simple: when the $15K runs out, we go home. We ended up spending $30K and staying a year. What it taught us was that we could be completely happy with a few items on our backs. We came back frugal — not out of scarcity, but by choice. Spend on experiences, not stuff.
That mindset followed us back to the States. We focused on careers, made good money, saved and invested aggressively, lived below our means, and had Soren. Tina talked about it on the Suze Orman show in 2010.
Our move to Portugal in 2022 is really just the trip continuing. We picked back up where we left off — this time with a kid, a base camp in Cascais, and a plan to show Soren what it looks like to actually live somewhere instead of just visiting, and a base camp to travel Europe.