About Us

Hi! Welcome to ChasingAnna! The girl up there in that picture, that’s me! I’m Anna, lover of alpacas, adventures, and Chase. In case you hadn’t figured out, Chase is that handsome guy in the picture next to me ;) We met in elementary school, did similar activities all through school, actually started paying attention to each other in college, and he’s been Chasing Anna ever since!

After both deciding that the other was pretty cool, we fell for each other hard and fast, and it didn’t take long for us to start adventuring together. Chase impressed me from the beginning because of all the travel experience he already had, as a 22 year old college student! When he first started talking to me about travel points, what they were, how they worked, and how he used them to go awesome places, I was very confused and honestly not that interested. But it didn’t take long for me to realize how incredible they were, and the amazing travel opportunities we were able to have when we used them. 

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A little more on Chase…

Chase is a 24-year-old tech guy who likes video games, board games, and strategy games as much as he likes outdoors and traveling. He also ran cross country in middle and high school (yes we were on the same team) and can still crank out a few sub 7-minute miles in a row (so annoying right?!) Growing up with only an older sister, his family of four did a lot of traveling in campers to National Parks and to their condos in South Carolina and Arizona. One thing I love about his family is that when they vacation, it’s much less about rest and much more about exploring. Vacation with them involved lots of hiking and biking, which at least in my opinion, is great!

Chase is also a big history and geography buff, and loves learning about battles, political movements in different countries, and how countries formed and evolved into their current state. He is the reason our two dogs (Tolly and Cleo) are names after Ptolemy and Cleopatra (Ptolemy I was the first of the Ptolemic rulers and Cleopatra was the last) Very nerdy, I know! He gets a lot out of visiting historical sites and ancient ruins when we travel. If there’s a castle in the general area, you better believe we’re going to visit it! He also takes advantage of the travel time to and from said locations to teach me all about the history of the place, which he will definitely have looked up beforehand if he didn’t already know it.

As much as Chase loves learning new things (he’s constantly picking up snippits of information about all sorts of things from Reddit and Youtube videos) he doesn’t really like to read, and along with that isn’t a huge fan of writing. Because of that, he will serve more as a

behind-the-scenes guy and occasional visitor on this blog rather than the main contributor. However, I would be lying if I said I thought I could handle all of this without his help. He will be behind the camera if he isn’t in front of it with me. Besides showing me a whole new side of travel to begin with, he is often the inspirator behind my ideas. He is the sounding board I use as I refine them, and he’s my on-call tech support. So please just know that while you may not always see him, he is and will always be a very important part of this blog as well!

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A little more on me…

I’m currently a 21-year-old college student finishing up a degree in computer science and trying to decide what I want to do when I get to the “real world”. I grew up in the middle of Indiana and am a Midwesterner through and through.

I ran cross country from 6th grade to my sophomore year of college (please enjoy these lovely pictures of the evolution of my running career), and I’m constantly fighting to run consistently now that I don’t have a 1-2 hour block of my day where a coach is telling me where to run and how far to go. This usually means making plans with a friend, so I can’t slack off, or dragging Chase along on lots of fun-run 5Ks.

Another one of my passions (and for sure the main inhabitant of my future farm) are llamas and alpacas. I’ve been showing and hanging out with alpacas for over 10 years now, and the farm remains my favorite place to be when I’m home. If you haven't had the chance to hang out with some alpacas or llamas at some point, you definitely should because they are some of the coolest animals ever!!

And of course, another passion is travel. As I was growing up, my family was big into traveling and camping. My dad is a teacher and my mom was stay-at-home for most of the time I was in school, so we planned for months and took awesome road trips during the summer when we all had time off. We went to lots of National Parks and spent lots of weekend canoeing in local creeks. Many of these trips involved another family and at least a full day of driving, but that always made the trips even better. Looking back I realize what a huge influence those trips, and especially the things my dad taught me while we were planning, packing, and executing, had on my view of the future. I learned to love reading because when you spend 15+ hours in a car with your two younger sisters and no electronics what else are you going to do?? (I used to pack an entire backpack full of books for our week-long trips and I would finish every one of them before we got home) Some of my favorite memories of those trips are cooking dinner for 12 people every night at the Great Sand Dunes and playing wiffleball in a tiny park in a small town in Colorado.

I always loved our family trips to the beach or the mountains, but until I met Chase I never really thought about international travel. Then, a little less than a year after we started dating, we took our first trip abroad to Costa Rica. Six months later I went to Australia and less than three months later we went to Jordan, Turkey, and France, where Chase proposed! Now our international bucket list continues to grow as we travel and meet more people who have been to or live in countries all over the world!