How, Why, and Saying Goodbye

Before we dive into the fun packing lists and exotic destination posts, I wanted to take a few minutes and answer some basic questions about our trip. For a rundown of what the heck we’re doing, see Our Worldwide Adventure.

The short version is that my wife Mary and I are quitting our jobs and spending the next ten months traveling the world with nothing but a couple of backpacks (OK, and a fairly large personal item) apiece .

Why?

Wouldn’t you want to see the world if you had the chance?

We’ve been talking about travel pretty much since the day we started dating. We’ve had a few excellent (and notorious) adventures, like a beautiful trip to Italy and Croatia (marred by a brush with pneumonia), and a week in Hawaii for a wedding (ended up featuring a near-miss with a hurricane).

After those experiences (and a few movies like Crazy Rich Asians that could have been sponsored by a tourism board), we realized that we’d need to travel a lot longer if we wanted to experience the world the way we imagined. We needed an unbroken journey where, no matter what happened, we’d have all the space and time we needed to make incredible memories.

Mary and I both have friends, relatives and plenty of Instagrammers who have done the world traveling thing. Inspired by their pictures and stories, we knew we wanted to get a taste of life where place and permanence were second to experiencing the world in a deep and meaningful way.

While we were still early in the decision-making stage, we were trying to figure out how this could work. We stumbled on Alexandra and David Brown’s book A Year Off which did an amazing job of both laying out the basic logistics of traveling for an extended period of time, and encouraging us to chase our dreams.

With the blessing of our friends and family, we decided to commit.

How (and how much)?

This one is a little more straightforward. Mary and I are both Silicon Valley software engineers and have no dependents aside from our ridiculous slash lovable dog Bandit. We don’t own a house, and don’t really have ambitions to buy one any time soon. We’re the type of people that value experiences over things (classic millennials).

We’ve been planning this trip for about two years now. One of the first things we did was to establish a savings goal – we decided that we’d shoot for $60,000 for the whole trip, and an additional $20,000 cushion for re-entry. This is a lot – we’re pretty cautious people, so we wanted to make sure that we’d have plenty to at least get us around the world, and enough for a few months after landing to account for finding jobs and post-travel readjustment.

The Browns (our inspiration authors) did their trip a lot differently – they only prepared for a few months beforehand and went on a budget of $40,000 for a whole year. They were able to pull this off by getting free lodging from a pretty extensive network of friends and acquaintances. Mary and I aren’t quite as well connected (also, probably a little more introverted), so we’ll need to pay a lot more for housing.

We’ll make sure to keep good records of our spending so we can do a nice breakdown afterwards of exactly where our money ended up going. So far it looks like the expensive part is going to be excursions. We have the Inca Trail and a stay in the Amazon queued up for the first month, which is taking a pretty good chunk of the budget.

As for Bandit? Mary’s parents have graciously agreed to take care of him while we’re away.

The long path to saying goodbye

I reserve the right to write a longer post on this, but I’ll finish this one by quickly spelling out the things we actually needed to do to get our butts in the sky.

• Figure out a basic itinerary
• Update passports
• Buy tickets
• Pick out luggage and the million things we need to pack
• Get immunizations
• Buy insurance
• Quit our jobs
• Sell our car
• Get international drivers licenses
• Re-route anything needing an address (mail, paychecks, etc)
• Make a blog and Instagram (optional)
• Plan and throw a sweet goodbye party (required)
• Actually pack (and re-pack… and re-pack… and re-pack)
• Terminate our lease
• Move our lives into storage
• Drop off Bandit (and the other car)
• Get to the airport
• Call my mom, tell her it’s going to be fine
• Deep breath
• …
• …
• We’re doing it.

See you in Mexico City!