Welcome to Sidewalk Safari travel blog!
I’m Jennifer Petoff (aka Dr. J) and my motto is: Work to Live, Live to Travel, Travel for Work.
I live my life in service to my guiding star. What is that guiding star, you may ask?
⭐ To travel as much as possible and live in different places ⭐
I have developed and continue to develop my career in service to this guiding star. I evolved a Ph.D. in Chemistry and what started as a very traditional career in research into:
- 1. A full time job traveling to universities across the United States in the chemical industry and then in Tech visiting awesome college towns like Ann Arbor, Michigan and prestigious schools like Stanford University.
- 2. An expat assignment as a project manager in the Tech industry in Ireland. What was supposed to be a one year assignment soon became home and a 12 year stint living in Dublin and traveling around Europe.
- 3. A Site Reliability Engineering expert and conference keynote speaker enabling even more travel from a home base in Lisbon, Portugal.
What can you expect to find here? Sidewalk Safari has been all about part-time travel since 2008. What is part-time travel? It’s a style of traveling where a full-time career unlocks travel opportunities you never could have dreamed of alone.
You’ll find travel stories and advice that aim to inspire you to make the most of a “day job” to live a life full of travel. I only write about trips that I've personally taken and things that I've personally done on those trips. Read about:
Business Trips Turned into Bleisure Trips
like our road trip in Southern Finland, birding in the San Francisco Bay Area, a whirlwind half-day adventure by train from Zurich to Liechtenstein, and 2 weeks in New Zealand.
Workcations
to South America and Southeast Asia including stops in bucket list destinations like Machu Picchu, Patagonia, Angkor Wat, and the Great Wall of China.
Conference Add-ons
like 3 days in Melbourne, one day in Chicago, and one day in Auckland.
Favorite Weekend City Breaks
to destinations we likely never would have visited if we hadn’t taken the expat assignment in Europe including places like Bydgoszcz and Poznan Poland, Sofia and Plovdiv Bulgaria, and Luxembourg.
Off-the-Beaten Track Travel Experiences
enabled by our life as expats in Europe like a road trip to the Eastern Alentejo region of Portugal and a city break in Limerick Ireland that brought out my inner poet.
Expat Life and Travel
in Ireland and Portugal such as 25 ways to spend a day in Dublin, the best places to find Dublin doors, best Irish road trips and places to visit in Ireland by train along with Lisbon’s best coffee and Lisbon hidden gems like Queluz Palace.
