Planning

After many months of planning and thinking about how far away April 22 felt, it finally arrived. The week leading up to it was more chaotic and emotional than I expected. We pulled some late nights clearing out the whole house to leave it spic and span for our new tenants. We were too stubborn…

We are one month away from leaving for our big trip. When reviewing the to-do list from January, we’ve made great progress. We sold my car, listed the house, found tenants, traversed healthcare.gov, got seven million vaccinations and one million prescriptions, filed taxes, rented a large storage unit, etc. We have a 30-page Google doc…

In my to-do list post I had the casual bullet of Complete our itinerary, written with the nonchalance of a person who had not entirely processed the fortitude required to plan 365 days of unknown and novel experiences. But we’re deep in it now. We’ve been spending ~1-2 hours a day focusing on a region…

I pride myself on packing light, but packing light for a whole year is a whole new ballgame. I’m doing it with surgical precision. This started, as most things do lately, with defining some criteria and making a list. The criteria The list Because I am who I am, I’ve laid all of the actual…

Today marks the first Monday in about 15 years that Nick and I are both unemployed. The last time was when we decided to quit our entry-level jobs in NYC, keep only what would fit in my station wagon, and drive slowly to try out a new life in Austin. The vibes are similar. We…

When we first started considering The Trip, my first thought was: how much will this cost? And my second thought was: even if we could afford this, is it a terrible financial decision? Now that we’ve started planning in earnest, I have rough answers for these two questions. First, I should acknowledge our privilege. We…

Whenever I tell people about our plan to travel for a year, the first question they ask is “so where are you going to go?” We have been asking ourselves the same question for the last couple of years. There is some criteria we are aligned on: The world is big and this doesn’t narrow…

Nick and I met in college while studying abroad in West Africa. From that point on, traveling together was a big part of our relationship. I’m at my happiest sitting next to him, on our way to somewhere new. I have a distinct memory of the first trip we ever took together, rattling around in…