Janet Stambaugh:  

Jan & Andy Stambaugh Our Story (as told by Jan) Andy and I met at Nathan Hale. We sat across the room from each other in Mrs. Elson's Honors English course during our senior year. That was fifty years ago. We were not high school sweethearts...far from it. As fate would have it, we both selected Washington University in St. Louis as our college pick. There we hung out together and fell in love. We married in the summer of 1968. I was 19. Andy was 20. We continued our studies and received our bachelors degrees in 1970. (Years later, we got our masters degrees in business administration. Andy also earned a masters degree in telecommunications management.) We both worked in the technology field for a couple of years, and we saved most of what we earned. When our bank account hit $2500, we convinced ourselves we had ample cash to travel. We had lived in St. Louis long enough to know that we did not want to spend our lives there. We quit our jobs, bought a tent, and set out to see the world. The first night, we camped in the Oklahoma Panhandle in Beaver County, Cow Chip Capital of the World. The wind was fierce. In the middle of the night, it lifted the tent-flaps and hurled our canvas hideaway to the ground, breaking both of our lanterns and sending us scurrying to the shelter of our automobile. I sat in the backseat and cried. (What were we thinking?) Nine months later, as we ended our excursion, I cried again, certain that the best days of my life were now over. We had traversed all of the states west of the Mississippi and most of the states to the east. We had slept with the bears, bathed in a bucket, and foraged for mushrooms and other wild edibles. We had explored places we had never been, and made friends with strangers. Among our treasures were a box of sand dollars, a large whale rib, a huge boulder, and a wild flower alphabet sampler that I had embroidered along the way. Since our college years, we have lived and worked in a variety of places including Denver-CO, Princeton-NJ, Portland-OR, Cupertino-CA, Monterey-CA, a...Expand for more