Deciding to Go

So how did we get from living a traditional suburban American life to deciding to abdicate our responsibilities and play hooky for a year?

It all started nearly 3 years ago.   Before that, I don’t think it had ever really occurred to me that such a thing was possible.  I’d been vocally covetous of sabbaticals – having come from academia – but had dismissed the idea as lying along the alternative life path I didn’t choose.  I’d always maintained a list of places that take more than two weeks to visit, but that was for [early] retirement.

Ironically, it was my job itself that gave me the idea.  My division entered a downward spiral, with several rounds of layoffs reducing people at my site from a few hundred to a few tens.  Some truths emerged:  People find new jobs.  And most of them pay more.  You can be good enough – or lucky enough – to be one of the 20 who survive a layoff, but you can’t be one of the zero left at the end.  And so with the attendant sense of fear, we started figuring out how we’d manage if I were suddenly unemployed.

And once we became comfortable with the idea of me not having a job… then… why am I still working?

Okay, that started as a joke.  But it planted a seed.

So when life as a member of the skeleton crew who were left got more unpleasant and less fulfilling, I started daydreaming of where else I could be.  Since the decline of the company was due to a lack of work, I escaped the typical downsizing scenario where you end up doing your job plus the jobs of the two people they just canned.  Instead, I had time to fantasize.  In the two years since then, work picked up and the job became fun again, but the plan for a year off had already started to form.

My usual down-time habit is cruising the globe on google maps in one window, while typing airport codes into Kayak in a second window, keeping a written list of fares.  Almost all of our trips started this way: When an especially good deal pops up, I make a quick call to Suzie, we hem and haw for an hour or two, and then I buy the tickets.

But now, with an endless stretch of days to practice my geography skills, the list of potential destinations for our next trip kept growing.  And whenever I got mopey about work, I’d watch the wherethehellismatt (now Where the Heck is Matt) videos, which to me are the most inspiring thing that has ever appeared on the internet.  The thrill of seeing a few seconds of some obscure place that we’ve been to, coupled with the small world / global village spirit of (especially the later) films, reliably fills me with uncharacteristic sappiness and optimism.

Yeah, we’re going.

Greedy for more, I found A Year To Think (aka RTW365).  Whereas Matt is (in frozen internet time) a single guy flitting around the world for free collecting snapshots, and therefore just a daydream, RTW365 is a family of four living our suburban life who took a year off to go around the world.  30 seconds into seeing their video for the first time, our own trip became inevitable, although convincing Suzie took a bit longer.

(For the record, Matt now has a family – seeing his infant son at the end of the last video brings a tear to my eye every time.)