The career behind the company.
Hi, I’m Missy. And I’ve spent my career helping people move their lives across the world.
It started, as the best things do, with a terrible financial decision.
In 1996 I was a broke college student who’d just had mono, hadn’t saved nearly enough money, and bought a plane ticket to London for a semester abroad anyway. By fall break I was down to my last 50 British pounds. My host mother offered a free room. I bought a bus ticket to Scotland instead.
What followed was nine days of hitchhiking — a hurricane on the Isle of Arran, guard dogs at a Braveheart film set, hauling hay for dinner on the Isle of Skye, sleeping in the back of a lorry. Genuinely dangerous for a 19-year-old woman traveling alone. Completely unforgettable. The trip that started everything.
That same curiosity took me to Spokane, where I taught ESL night classes at a Mukogawa Women’s College satellite campus while finishing my degree at Gonzaga — which led directly to two years teaching English on a tiny island in southern Japan through the JET Programme, followed by six months at a private language school. Japan led to the Foreign Service. And the Foreign Service led to 14 years of moving people across the world.
The career bit
I spent 14 years as a US Foreign Service Officer, serving in Brasilia and Bridgetown, with temporary assignments in Beirut and Kingston. I supported Americans during the Rio 2016 Olympics and spent three years as the Olympic and Paralympic Unit Lead at the US Embassy in Tokyo — coordinating US Government support for Team USA and managing visits from the President, the First Lady, the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense.
After Tokyo I spent four years in Washington redesigning how the State Department handles international moves for 13,000 employees — building a multilingual concierge team, rewriting the software, and asking “why does this have to be so hard?” on a daily basis.
Before the Foreign Service I wrote software for NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and worked as a digital archivist at the National Defense University. I have a BA in English Literature and Philosophy from Gonzaga and an MA in Information and Library Science from the University of Arizona. I speak Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese.
So why this business?
Because diplomats get an entire government support system when they move abroad. Most Americans attempting the same thing get Reddit threads and contradictory blog posts.
That gap bothered me for a long time. So I built something to fix it.
A little more about me
I grew up in rural Idaho and after years abroad I came home — close to family, close to the mountains, close to a pottery wheel that keeps me sane.
I’m taking my own leap right alongside you. I just happen to have a lot of miles under my belt while I do it.
Take the one less traveled.
Missy Paulin Founder, Two Roads Travels