We're Jess and Philipp
Two kindred spirits from different continents who met in San Francisco, fell in love, and took the plunge of fulfilling a life-long dream together. We’re traveling the world!
We both deeply understand that life is short and it should be savored so instead of settling down, we packed our bags. Well, first we quit our jobs, sold our stuff, put important things in storage, and then packed our bags… 4 suitcases to be exact.
Our intention is to take this next however long to reconnect with ourselves, learn more about each other, and work on passion projects we wouldn’t have time for otherwise — like this blog. Here, we’re happily recording our experiences, learnings, and recommendations from the road. We hope you enjoy it and follow along with us on our journey together.
Read on for more about us and our mission.
About Project Murray
Project Murray was a code name we started using to talk about travel planning when it was still sort of under the radar and it stuck. It came to us from a mutual appreciation of the actor, Bill Murray (he’s the man), and some relationship advice Murray gave another young couple that Philipp took a liking to -
“If you have someone you think is the one, take them and travel around the world… to places that are hard to reach and hard to get out of. And when you land [back home] and you’re still in love...get married.”
Meet Jess
Originally from NJ, right outside of NYC, Jess built a career in advertising after graduating from Boston University with a degree in Communications. She studied abroad in Sydney (loved it) and moved to California to chase the sun after grinding it out at an ad agency in NYC for a couple of years. There, she worked at Hulu in LA and Netflix in SF and is now on a career break taking time to explore the world and figure out her next move.
Jess is a curious cat that loves exploring, music, food, art, and history, and thinks the world would be a better place if everyone practiced yoga.
Meet Philipp
Philipp was born in Cologne, Germany and grew up in a small city called Münster. He’s an entrepreneur, product designer and YC alum. He studied Design & Visual Communications, worked in various creative industries and advised world renowned companies. Enthusiastic about capturing memories and user experience design, he moved to California and founded an award winning photo management company that later got acquired by Dropbox.
Philipp loves Jess, films, music, wine, art, good design and exploring new places. He takes most of the photos and sometimes writes as well.
Our approach to traveling
There are many different ways you can travel the globe and so every aspiring full-time traveler must eventually ask themselves - what’s my style? For us, it’s long and slow. We want to go places to live like locals for weeks or months at a time and not rush things.
Sure, we’d do and see a lot more of the world if we backpacked our way through it, but there are things we wouldn’t experience or nuances we wouldn’t pick up on if we moved quickly from place to place. Moving slowly takes the edge off and gives us a chance to immerse ourselves in our projects and in our surroundings. But most of all, it prevents us from burning out.
We don’t know where we want to end up at the end of our travels so we’re also approaching this trip as a way for us to figure out where we want to settle down. Do we feel one city is more livable than another? Where are we happiest? City, suburb, forest, lake, jungle? America, Europe, Asia, Africa? We don’t know yet and want to find out.
