About to Leave

I leave Thursday for five months of world travel with my girlfriend Kelly. I’ve been thinking about taking a trip like this for two years now, and Kelly and I started seriously talking about it last fall or so. We both left our jobs at the beginning of this year. I left my job in February to give myself four months to take care of selling my condo, and to catch up on my slacking, which before February I had really been slacking on.

Kelly and I just crossed our second year anniversary, and we figured it was time to spend 24/7 together for half a year. We’re planning to share an apartment when we return, unless, of course, we kill each other before returning (due to aforementioned 24/7). All inappropriate joking about murder aside, we have already discussed we will probably need some breaks from each other along the way. Absence makes the heart grow less annoyed.

Here is our rough travel schedule:
Jul 01 – Sep 14: Greece, Italy, Croatia, Budapest, Vienna, Prague
Sep 15 – Oct 06: India South(Bombay, Goa, etc.)
Oct 07 – Oct 28: India North (Delhi, Agra, etc)
Oct 29 – Nov 26: Thailand

The dates above are tentative…we may end up moving some of them around as we go, since we can change our ticket dates. If anyone wants to try to meet up with us, email me! If the timing works out it would be so cool to hang with friends abroad.

Kelly has been completing pre-requisites for a teaching program, and is considering getting her credential when we return and teaching elementary school. I have not figured out what I will do yet, but right now I’m not in any hurry.

Over the past four months I have told people our travel plan. I almost always got the same two-part response.
1. That’s awesome!
2. I’m so jealous!

I wouldn’t trust anyone who wasn’t jealous, actually. The trip itself sounds like a great experience, but reaches fantasy proportions when combined with the sweet dream of escaping work. Ah, work. My frustration has always been that once I entered the work force, there were no built-in breaks equivalent to summer break during school. Vacation is vacation, but for me it didn’t really count as a break. I would leave for a week and come back unchanged to the same job, and within two days I was sucked up in the same routine as if I never left. I determined the only way to introduce long enough breaks into the American Career is to quit. Having said this, I was blown away how hard it was for me to get psychologically prepared to leave a perfectly good job. It took me at least a year of struggling with it before I was able to do it.

In many of the people I talked to, I sensed a strong desire to do what I was doing, coupled with a feeling that it just couldn’t happen for them. I think this often times can be an internal limit set from within, constructed out of the fears that it brings up…fears I had to process for a year before being ready to quit. What if I can’t find another job? What if I get another job but it’s not as good as the one I have now? What if the hole in my resume looks funny? What if I go broke or eat into savings that was supposed to be my security? Basically: What if?

It is true I have saved some money which is allowing this trip to happen. It’s also true I don’t have kids, or any responsibilities I cannot transition for five months. But I challenge anyone who wants to take this type of trip to look carefully at which of their limits may be self-imposed. I believe many underestimate just how confronting this analysis can be. At least it certainly was for me.

I will be posting messages on this blog as we go, so stop by every once in a while to see where we are, what profound life lessons I have learned, and how tan and fat I am.