And so now begins a whirlwind of packing, moving, house selling, and saying goodbye. As with any major change like this, emotions are mixed with sadness for what we’re leaving behind, but excitement for what’s ahead. But for us, this is what life’s about – making conscious decisions to pursue a life that makes us happy.

You are all welcome to visit us in our new home – we hope to see you soon!

Ben & Alonna in Colorado 2006

It’s a given that you won’t come back from a world-wide walkabout as exactly same person.  Some people write books about their life-changing experiences, but for most travelers, the changes are small. To friends and family, the only immediately noticeable difference will be an annoying tendency to share world travel related anecdotes. “This reminds me of the time I was grilling kangaroo meat in Australia….”

But even if you have an “ordinary” world travel experience, here are some of the ways that world travel might affect you:

• An understanding of what a huge and diverse place the world is. There is a big difference between knowing and understanding. You might know that it hurts to break your leg, but until it happens you don’t
  

  Millions of Parisians live out their entire lives without ever eating a Sloppy Joe

  really understand. Everyone knows that 95% of the people on this planet don’t live the USA, but until you’ve visited some of these places and seen how billions of people live their lives in very foreign ways in very foreign places, mostly indifferent to what goes on in our country, believe me, you don’t really understand.

• Softening of tightly held opinions. When you grow up in any given culture, you inherit a set of opinions that seem inviolable. Freedom of speech and the inherent superiority of the free market are ingrained for us Americans. It’s shocking to encounter entire countries full of people who live out their lives valuing things that seem strange to us, and indifferent to principles we regard as fundamental. Your opinions probably won’t change at all, but you’ll realize that there are a lot of different ways to live out your life happily, and that that is all that matters to most people.  (Though maybe they would be even more happy with freedom of speech and a free market)
• A better understanding of your own culture. Somehow I had always assumed that because America is a melting pot of different cultures, that the way we do things is the just the most reasonable way, and what everyone else does is their “culture”. You might not carry around such a silly notion, but even so you’ll notice a million little things that people around the world do differently.  Everything from what time we eat dinner and how we hold our silverware to what our government taxes and where new shopping centers are built, it’s all cultural.
• A long list of ways America could be improved. As you travel you will inevitably encounter ideas for how you’d like to see America change.  Some things will never change – we work long hours and take insanely short vacations, it’s who we are. Others – like public transportation and an appreciation for fresh food – are objectively better and might find their way here if enough of us work at it.
  

  From here, Incan history looks more interesting

• Appreciation for America. Living in the United States, you can’t help but take a lot of things for granted. Travel the world and you’ll collect a long list of things to be grateful for.  Start the list off with free water at restaurants, one of hundreds of only-in-America things that you’ll miss when you travel the world.
• A Second Education. You might have thought history was boring in high school, but you won’t find it boring when you visit the places where history was made. Stand next to the massive rocks Incans built with, visit WWII concentration camps, and walk down the road – still with the same basalt paving stones! – that Julius Caesar walked down triumphantly on his return to Rome, and history is suddenly fascinating. The same thing goes for geology, geography, zoology, botany, and gastronomy. It’s the field trip of a lifetime.

Over lunch on an otherwise typical day, Ben and I made the decision to spend a year traveling.  I don’t know what started the conversation or why it happened that day, but all of a sudden we realized that our dreams weren’t going to just happen; we had to make the decision to pursue them.

During our conversation, Ben and I questioned why we were saving up all of our money to enjoy at some future date (a.k.a. retirement).  While I do hope that some day we’ll retire comfortably and enjoy traveling and other hobbies, why we can’t do some of those things now?  Let’s face it, at retirement we’ll be older and might not be able or willing to travel in the same way we can now.  And who knows if we’ll even live that long or what will happen between now and then that could prevent us from doing something like this.  In other words, let’s live our lives now, not later.

We also talked about how we’ve found ourselves following the default life path: get a college degree, find a job, get married and buy a house, have kids, work for many many years while saving money and taking short vacations, and eventually retire and do all of the things you never had time for before.  While there’s nothing wrong with this path, we realized that we hadn’t really consciously chosen it.  Sometimes we all do things just because we think that’s how it’s supposed to be done.  But if you step back and really analyze what you want to spend your time and money on, what you believe in, and what you want out of life, you just might find that you’re not following a path that you would have chosen.  During lunch that day, Ben and I realized that, in fact, we do have a choice.  Ben said “you can either live the life that’s been defined for you, or you can define it yourself.”  And that really sums it up.

Once this realization hit us, it was pretty obvious what we wanted to do.  We had already thrown around the idea of taking more time off to travel the world.  Our previous week-long vacations just didn’t leave space for the kind of adventure we wanted.  But it wasn’t until this one day that it all came together and we realized that we didn’t have to wait to get laid off or for it to be the “right time” to make a change like this.

I realize that a lot of people would love to do what we’re doing, and that we are very fortunate to be in this position.  At this stage in our lives we have minimal responsibilities (i.e. no kids or pets) and have saved enough money to make this possible.  But what I’ve realized is that making this decision had very little to do with whether we could afford it or take the time off of work.  After all, there are always obstacles to every goal or dream.  Instead, what really drove this decision was realizing that it was even a decision at all.  Once we recognized that this was a real option, the decision was easy.