On October 2, 1872, Phileas Fogg left London to travel around the world in 80 days. On that date 127 years later, Sophie and I got married. Our marriage has been mostly less fictional than Phil’s trip, but even so, when October 2 comes around again this year it’ll be our tenth anniversary, and we’ll have just started our own round-the-world journey (in closer to 300 days instead of 80).

People have been asking me why. They seem to expect that there’s a grand quest behind this, like we’re planning on fornicating on all the ley lines or vandalizing great works of art or visiting the tombs of every one of the New Christy Minstrels. A coworker of mine boiled it down to two options: “Is this a mid-life thing or a spiritual thing?”

It’s none of the above. In fact, the motivation for this trip is way more mundane. Which is to say that I don’t know what it is. A tour of the world is something that Sophie and I have talked about almost since our first one-on-one conversation, 14 years ago in her dorm room at NYU. After having charmed her into submission with a combination of relentless wit, an unstoppable jaw line, and stone-washed 550’s, Sophie showed me the photos of her road trip to Alaska — Alaska! Seriously, who drives to Alaska? — and excursions to Greece and Prague. While I was falling in love with her combination of relentless intelligence, an unstoppable curiosity, and big brown eyes, we talked about all the places we’d like to see.

Over the years that conversation evolved into the idea of a trip around the world, but I’d be lying if I said that we dreamed about it constantly, or saved pennies in a jar marked “Hyderabad,” or stuck thumbtacks into a globe and then bought a new globe that wasn’t inflatable. We didn’t build our lives around the goal of taking this trip or ever even really think much about whether or not we’d do it.

We didn’t need to think about it, for the same reason we haven’t thought about why we’re going. It’s the same reason we don’t think about why we go to sleep at night, or why we eat the whole pizza, or why we hug puppies whenever they let us. All of those are things you need no justification to do — in fact, you need reasons NOT to do them. They are all part of the point of being alive, and if you’re alive long enough, you’ll do them.

I could go into my own deeper motivations — about how sometimes I aspire to live in a way that I have no obligations to anyone; or about how as a kid I subconsciously was waiting for my real life to start, the one with adventure; or about how I’m lazy and don’t like to work — but I’ll save that for when I’m snowed-in in Norway or recovering from being punched by a lemur. For now, it’s really as simple as this: there’s a world out there, and it would be a shame not to see it.