IN A STRANGE TOWN.

Here you will find stories, photos, and short videos from SC and Kevin, a married couple traveling around the world for a year in 2021 and 2022. The trip is a sabbatical, a writing project, a recharge, and an adventure.

Kevin is a recently-tenured economics professor in Toronto, specializing in game theory and innovation policy. He was born in Boston, and has lived in Maine, Western Massachusetts, Oregon, Virginia, Chicago, and Beijing. Previous adventures, including a similar year-long trip in 2008, have taken him to over 150 countries, including Iraq during the first Obama election, North Korea as part of the third post-1950 group of Americans given a tourist visa, and Yemen and Syria prior to the recent troubles. On this trip, he’ll be writing a popular press book on economics, checking the Patriots score from abroad, teaching a minicourse at UCAD in Dakar, and staring at spreadsheets filled with travel logistics.

SC is a former journalist and more recently non-profit executive from Mississauga, Ontario. She has lived in rural France, Ottawa, Oxford, London, Saskatchewan, Nairobi, and Kanazawa, Japan, doing everything from studying to teaching English to filing stories as a foreign correspondent. As a proud Franco-Ontarian, a linguistic minority that even many French speakers do not know, she appreciates the incredible perspective offered by meeting people all over the world while traveling. She is taking a year to work on a book and to test out what retirement feels like so that she knows what she has to look forward to when she gets back to the working world. She is on Instagram @scgemson.

Before this trip, SC and Kevin have shared many great adventures. They have driven a 4WD up the Dempster Highway to the Arctic Ocean, traveled from Khartoum to Cairo following the monuments of Nubia and Ancient Egypt, cooked halloumi dishes in the Cypriot countryside, visited old Cajun French speakers and Bayou wrestlers in deepest Louisiana, watched a total solar eclipse on a reservation in Eastern Oregon, and eaten everything from 10-cent falafel sandwiches to five-hours meals at L’Arpege, Mirazur, and Eleven Madison Park. With a full year on the docket, they both expect to add to this list of great memories.