By Melissa David was in Burlington, Vermont at a work conference when I called him and told him all was hopeless. Yes, that dramatically.  Earlier that day, I had innocently added a column to my spreadsheet and thought I’d poke away at educating myself about visa requirements by country.  I was thinking I would do a couple countries a day and plug the $100 or $200 Visa fee in the spreadsheet.  I was once again smug thinking of how impressed our financial advisor would be when she reviewed the plan.  “Wow, she’s really thought of everything,” she’d think. Just like…

By Melissa The first thing I did was hit the travel blogs, hard.  We couldn’t be the first people trying to do this.  How did others with similar dreams pull it off?  I always look for travel blogs when I’m researching countries in my travels because they are authentic and practical.  I feel like I can get the real scoop from real people in a way I can’t get from travel magazines, sites or guides.  It was a great place to start.  Bloggers advised us on how they worked from all over the world, the unique ways they generated income…

By Melissa We were visiting my family and staying at my sister’s house when the new scheme was concocted and spent the next several days in a kind of terrets-like world tour shouting random cities at each other.  There are a lot of options.  Eventually it became clear to us that all these great ideas we were generating made it impossible to limit this adventure to a year, we needed two.  Now, working with two years, we could give ourselves twice the options.  Looking at maps, we started to chart out paths bouncing us all over Europe and a little…