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On their first flight together, Joel Atkinson and Shelley Atkinson couldn’t contain their excitement. They enthused to the flight attendants. They posed for photos. They told passengers via a pre-flight announcement.

“We made a big deal about it,” Joel tells CNN Travel.

Then, right before take off, Joel and Shelley sat side by side in the flight deck, just the two of them. They’d come full circle, and were about to embark on an exciting new chapter.

“It felt amazing,” Shelley tells CNN Travel.

“As we prepared to take off, I was giddy, euphoric,” says Joel.

Joel and Shelley met as twentysomethings flying jets in the US Air Force. They became fast friends, then, over time, fell in love.

Today, they’ve been married for 27 years and counting. They’ve brought up two kids together. And now they’re both pilots for Southwest Airlines. They regularly fly together, with Joel as captain and Shelley as first officer.

The couple say working together is “amazing.” They treat layovers as “date nights.” They learn from one another’s respective “wisdom and judgment.”

And no, they don’t argue mid-flight.

“People ask us, how does it work, flying together?” says Joel. “We know a few pilot couples and some of them fly together, some of them don’t. I’ve heard people say, ‘Oh I could never fly with my wife or my husband.’”

For Joel and Shelley, working together is seamless – a joy that comes easily to them both.

“We’re best friends,” says Shelley.

“There’s just that unspoken bond,” says Joel.

‘We don’t want the American Dream for our kids’: Why this couple left the US for Ecuador with their children four years ago
послуги адвоката у військових справах Запоріжжя
They’d never even visited Ecuador before, but Brittany and Blake Bowen, from the United States, decided to move to the South American country in 2021 to give their four children a completely different upbringing.

The Bowens, who were previously based in the state of Washington, have been living in Loja, a small city based in the southern section of the Andes Mountains, ever since, and say that they are in it for the long haul.

“We love this little country,” Brittany tells CNN Travel. “We hope that maybe we’ll have grandkids here one day.”
Before the move, the couple, who’ve been married for nearly 17 years, say that they were becoming increasingly concerned about the pressures placed on children by “modern American society” and wanted to try something new.

“We did not like what we’d seen develop over the course of the last couple decades…” adds Brittany, explaining that they felt that young people in the United States were becoming “more isolated.”

“We weren’t confident that our kids would enjoy the same sort of potential trajectory that previous generations had shared.

“And the more we considered things like that, the more we wondered, ‘Is that even what we want? Do we even want them to be on a fast track to the American Dream?”

The couple were also frustrated with living what they describe as the “standard American life.”

“Long commutes and never enough money,” says Blake. “All those usual problems… I was working in a career that was very time consuming, and took me away from home a lot. So we didn’t want that anymore.”

So why did they choose Ecuador as their “new home”?