How We Roll

It was recently pointed out to me that I often say in a post “we wished we’d had more time but…” with some reason as to why we didn’t stick around. Or something to that effect anyway. It’s a good point. (I’m not quite that anal, I’ve not gone back to count the number of times I’ve said that, though the thought did receive more than a fleeting moment in my mind). I do think I sometimes mean it literally. Like recently when we visited Dartmoor Park in England I felt that we should have budgeted more time there. I also sometimes mean it more wistfully or allegorically like “ah… if only time were infinite” or as in “we are gonna come back here someday, hopefully”. But it does beg the question maybe you have, if he wishes they’d had more time, they’re wanderers, why don’t they just stay?! Point taken. Here’s why…

First, this is not intended to be a defense, though I learned the art of college debate in my fraternity house to which the cry “there’s always a defense” was oft recited. And there is, but this is not.

There are lots of ways to do this travel thing. Many bloggers we read or people we know who have taken sabbaticals from full time careers have done it where they go somewhere, plant, stay until they want to leave then go somewhere else. This level of flexibility certainly seems desirable on the surface. I took a post college road trip in a pickup truck following this model and Melissa took a trip to Italy twenty years ago following this model. On her trip, she learned that she doesn’t love spending a large portion of her first day somewhere figuring out where to stay. It can lead to staying in less desirable areas or in less desirable conditions, but you do meet interesting people and have interesting experiences. We found a hostel in Kyoto several years ago where we weren’t staying but went for breakfast and cocktails every day because we just loved the vibe. But. That form of travel isn’t really us.

Our journey to “full time” (in quotes because it didn’t really turn out to be full time, though at one point that was the game plan) travel is kind of long. For years we would save our pennies, block off two weeks and go somewhere like most people do. We went to France, Italy, Quebec, Spain, Greece, London and Dublin and Japan among many other vacations spent with our families over the years. We learned that we like to know where we are headed and have our accommodations booked before we leave. This helps us plan what we want to do. So, when our parents had either exited the scene, or where winding down, and weren’t a primary area of focus aside from our jobs we began to plan what we were calling then a “sabbatical”. It was to be two years on the road across the US to the east and then from Western Europe to Africa, through Asia and Oceania back to the USA via Hawaii and California. We had a “sell everything” model and were only going to keep treasured possessions and family heirlooms in a storage unit.

Then we got uncomfortable with having nowhere to call home and we learned about Schengen visas in Europe and realized we couldn’t execute that plan as designed. There were multiple tweaks and models and itineraries explored in a room with a map and little push tab pins (and string originally, then that got to be a pain in the ass every time we reworked) and a massive spreadsheet.

The purpose was twofold. Figure out where we wanted to go in the world, which initially was mostly major international capitol cities, and see if we could truly afford to leave our jobs and do this. We developed a budget to which we now track and compare when we book and complete a trip to see how well we did. We are also eternally grateful that we had a place to call home, ok two places on two continents, when COVID hit. I don’t think we would have loved living in a storage unit and I think our friends would have been pretty sick of having COVID squatters for two years. Creature comforts and all.

That spreadsheet is now about eight or ten years old. And in it, Melissa has spent countless hours of painstaking effort to pick places we really want to stay when we go. An apartment in the sixth arrondissement of Paris, a house on the Isle of Skye, a houseboat in Galway, a bungalow on Oahu. We’ve done the same with hotels. Some we’ve stayed in, some we are about to, some we hope to.

As such, when we get ready to go to a place, we pull out the spreadsheet, dust it off, tweak the dates and prioritize the places we want to stay (priority As, priority Bs and priority Cs) and start booking. We tweak the original plan, shockingly little, but based on what we’ve learned as we’ve done this. For instance, we learned last year in Italy that we really liked having a home base for a while and exploring from there vs one night here, two nights there, one night here. The packing and unpacking of that cadence gets tiring especially over two or three months. That spreadsheet now has about thirty years of travel mapped out and we’ve used it with our financial advisors to figure out how we bridge the gap until we can draw from retirement accounts. And it’s incredibly useful also when we decide, on somewhat of a whim, we have three months next year in the summer, let’s go to Iceland!

We also like to feel what it’s like to actually live somewhere. Right now as I write this, we’re in Edinburgh Scotland. When we would take a two week vacation previously we probably would have stayed three days, four max. We would have risen early, hit the road to check it out and packed it “all” in. We would have eaten most or all meals out. That was great, then. Now, we prefer to live in the neighborhood, unpack, do laundry, eat both in and out. For Melissa, the place we stay is as important as seeing the sights. It’s part of the experience. So, we invest in the places we choose and choose them carefully. When this is a priority, you can’t just show up in a city unannounced with no plan. Especially not in summer in Scotland or in May in Venice. We book all of our accommodations six to eight months in advance, so that we can finally stay on the Isle of Skye for two weeks in that Airbnb that caught our eyes and we’ve been dreaming about for nearly a decade. Yes, a decade.

When I was wandering around St. Andrews the other night experimenting with night photography on my iPhone I saw a van parked on the side of the road. It was clearly someone’s home (no, Matt Foley (Chris Farley), it was not down by the river). It had a sign on it that read “Just Because You Wander, Doesn’t Mean You’re Lost”. I almost took a photo of it and wish I had because it would have been the perfect cover image for this post. But, the “homeowner” was sitting in the window looking at me skeptically as I wandered by, probably because I lingered to read the sign in the fading light, and I didn’t want to cause a problem. But it’s true.

Some of my former work colleagues are mystified at my/our path. Some think I’ve “checked out” and will “get serious again someday”. Maybe. It’s highly possible I’ll want another career challenge in the future. I still feel extremely young and full of energy and am healthier than I’ve ever been in my life. And who knows maybe we will need the money. But I’m not checked out. Not at all.

I’m fully engaged in this blog. I work just as hard on it as I did on anything in my “career” for which I got paid. I spend hours curating photos, going back out to snap another shot of Edinburgh Castle in a different light just because the sky looks better now. Then writing, editing, researching, tweaking and trying to pick the best photo to meld in with the words to paint a picture of the place and our experience in it. I’m not sure this blog is helpful to anyone, but honestly I write it for us. It’s a selfish endeavor. As long as I still breathe I will maintain it (that’s a commitment, whew) because when I’m living in the retirement home (hopefully in a really long time) I want to be able to go back and say, what was the name of that fish place in St. Andrews (The Tail End) or that hostel in Kyoto (Len) that we loved.

Just because we are wandering doesn’t mean we are lost. This isn’t a defense, it’s just how we roll.

PS: Thank you for reading and I love the questions and comments so keep ‘em coming. We feel very blessed to have enough people in our lives who read these posts and genuinely care about what we are up to.