In July 2019 we leave for our yearlong trip around the world! We think it’s important to give a little backstory as to why we have made this choice because it is certainly not the norm. So in this post we want to explain why we’re traveling for a year and what led us here.
In order to prepare for this next year we’ve dedicated a lot of time to figuring out how to take what began as a dream and turn it into an actual plan. There have been so many moving parts over the last few months including finally deciding to commit to this trip, selling all of our belongings, giving up our apartment in Philadelphia, quitting our jobs, and essentially putting our home life on pause. Our hope for this post, and in all our posts on this blog really, is to show others who are toying with a similar idea that it is possible.
**We want to put a disclosure that this is just our story and includes our journey to getting to this point. Everyone’s priorities are different as well as everyone’s current life situation. We don’t write this to make judgements or criticize others decisions or vice versa.**
A Little Background
We graduated college in 2015, moved to Philly and we both got good jobs. We loved exploring the city, spending time on the river trail, and visiting the many restaurants and bars in the city.
I (Nicki) was a teacher in the city and therefore I only really had flexibility during school breaks. Theoretically I could go travel for June through August. However, Dave has always been in more of a traditional 9 to 5 job (or 9 to midnight depending on the time of year) where he has had the more common two or three weeks annual vacation time. This makes it impossible for him to take off for 2 months in the summer to travel. So while we always talked about big plans and wanting to do extensive travel we kept pushing it off or relenting ourselves to it being difficult and not knowing if it was the time.
The idea of long term travel had been thrown around numerous times going back to before we graduated college. We talked about it right after graduation but had jobs lined up. Then we talked about living internationally for a year or so but logisitics didn’t look like they would work out . Again and again we talked about wanting to travel, not just for a week or two every year, but for far longer.
- We took a trip to San Francisco and took an Alaskan cruise in 2016, we went to Greece and two of the Greek Islands in 2017, and then took a trip to France spending time in Paris and Nice in 2018. All three of these trips were well planned out and very exciting for us. They were all amazing trips and we feel very fortunate that we were able to do all of them.
Greece 
Alaska 
France
However, taking a step back and looking at the year in a whole we were working long hours and only spending 2 or 3 weeks a year traveling, which is what we wanted to do so bad. So the remaining 49 or 50 weeks we just looked forward to the next trip. That started to feel like not enough for us. We never took for granted the trips we were able to do but just struggled with having to spend so much time waiting until we were able to do it again.
- This got us thinking more and more. Can we do this? Why wait a year to take a 2 week vacation and then wait another year to do it again?
We went to France in June 2018 and had an amazing time! Immediately afterwards we both were saying how much we wanted to go back and that is where everything else started. We started asking ourselves is this the time and thought more and more about how we could actually make this work.
Another major factor in our decision is simply timing. If we are going to commit to this kind of long term travel, we would not be able to do it if we had a mortgage, kids, or pets. When we look at our life over the next 5, 10, and 20 years, this is far and away the best time for us to take a risk like this.
Living vs. Existing
Traveling for a long period of time and choosing to walk away from everything else at home is a big decision and isn’t for everyone. But the idea that we could potentially keep pushing it off was also equally if not more scary. We’ve seen how the days go slow but the months and years go fast.
We want to make sure we’re living the way we want to and not just existing, going through the motions. To us, it seemed a lot of times like we were just existing instead of actually living and spending our time doing what we wanted to be doing. We craved a break from the monotony of our everyday life.
Over the last few years we have changed our travel approach in order to prioritize experiencing different cultures and seeing things that are off the beaten path. There are so many things we want to do and see, and our bucket list keeps getting longer. We want to go out of our comfort zones and do things that are not in our day to day routine. It’s hard to know exactly how it will go and if we will do everything that we think we are going to. But right now, at least, we’re okay with the uncertainty.
Our (Rough) Travel Plans
We have no idea if this is actually how things will go but this is our plan as of now. We leave in July to go to Peru, Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil. Our plan is to be in South America for about 6 weeks.
- Our planning for South America started with a huge desire to hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu in Peru. Because of the rainy season it’s ideal to go in June or July so we really planned everything else around that part of the trip.
Then we’ll fly over to Europe where we will spend the next 3 months. We think this will bring us to the beginning of December and our plan as of now is to come back home around that point to spend the holidays with our families.
Then we’ll leave again to do the second half of the trip going to the other side of the world. The second part is even more vague (if you can imagine) but generally we’re thinking Australia, New Zealand, a couple months in Asia and then honestly who knows!
It’s exciting that we’re finally doing something that we’ve talked about for so long. We hope you will follow along with us in this next chapter! We have so many exciting plans coming up and want to share it with you all. Our goal is to show you that while travel is definitely not always glamorous it also can be amazing! No matter how long your trip is, whether a week or a year, if it’s something you want to do we really feel it’s something that you can make work!
