The background…
In April 2019, Tracey and I embarked on a three month journey around the world. This wasn’t a super granola blow-up-our-lives to get off the grid situation, or at least it wasn’t intended to be, but the idea did stem from a break-up on my end and the desire to quit her job with no back-up on Tracey’s, so maybe we actually are completely cliche. Over the course of 2.5 months (we cut the trip two weeks short to fly home to surprise our mom for her 60th bday) we traveled to the north and south islands of New Zealand, Bali, Thailand, Japan, a brief regroup in LA, Peru and Chile.
Taking a hiatus from real life in favor of an adventure was an incredible experience (duh) that I would highly recommend to everyone, assuming you have a plan (unsurprisingly, I don’t recommend going into debt or upending your finances for this) We’ve had so many people say “how did you pull that off??”
So here’s how we did it:
With work: I work for an amazing company and have for almost a decade. In that time I’ve covered for several people on mat leave, so when I approached my managers about taking three months off, I was able to position it in that context. In Tracey’s case, she was feeling burned-out and wanted to leave her job, so she approached them to resign to take the trip, and they instead offered to give her the time off and convinced her to return after with a bolstered team in place for her that they would hire while we were away.
With money: I know you’re not supposed to talk about money, but I think that is really a disservice to not be transparent about what it takes to do something like this. Obviously you can scale up or scale down on the types of places you stay and activities/food costs you take on. Tracey and I made a decision that if we were going to do this, we weren’t going to cut corners. We are not crazy fancy as-is, but we did take on a bit of a YOLO mentality because if we were only going to these places once, we didn’t want to feel like we were missing out on anything because of $. I had a spreadsheet to track all the costs and a rough budget of $20,000 for both of us. That $20K did not include every single penny we spent - I tracked big meals and grocery trips, but smaller food costs and little transportation costs like public transit and cabs didn’t get captured perfectly. But based on my tracking, we got close to that budget, spending somewhere in the ballpark of $20-23K (which sounds like a lot but really isn’t meaningfully different from our combined 3 month spend in Chicago).
Here are the factors that contributed to us being able to pull this off:
It wasn’t a 50/50 split - Tracey and I have similar salaries, but our cash flow situations around this trip we’re different. I get a yearly bonus that I offered to use as a trip “kitty”, and I able to stack my vacation and sick time (much like a mat leave) to get paid for two of the three months we traveled. I also had no costs in Chicago over the time we we’re away because we aligned the time we left to the end of my lease and I put everything in storage. Tracey found a subleaser to cover a solid chunk of her rent, but she still had to cover the difference. That combined with the fact that her leave was unpaid, we agreed (i.e. I forced Tracey into accepting) that I would cover all travel and accommodations and she could contribute to food/entertainment along the way. In the end I probably covered 7/8ths of the expenses, but that’s because I had money coming in and no expenses to cover otherwise. Not suggesting that this would work for everyone, but this worked really well for us.
With planning: I always get the question “how do you plans these trips??” and truthfully up until recently I’ve been thrown by that. It never occurred to me that people actually hire other people to book things for them. Besides that, I think the question really is about how we find the places we want to go, where we stay, and all the food and entertainment we find. For the majority of my trips, I scour the internet/Pinterest and save all possibilities and then map them out into a loose itinerary that I run by my travel partner. Tracey and I did this big trip similarly, but much more on the fly than normal. I booked the first month of the trip, New Zealand and Bali, in advance of leaving Chicago. Then we planned the subsequent stops as we went, typically about a month in advance of when we’d be getting to that country. While I serve as the “travel agent,” Tracey is definitely the tastemaker - she has an ability to sift through Instagram tags to find hidden gems and has a network of people in the know from her jobs in food/travel content who give great recommendations. That combined with my planning and research is a magical combo.
With leaving people behind: I guess it goes without saying that dropping off the face of the earth for three months is not something that is feasible for people who aren’t operating as completely free agents in their lives. Tracey and I had talked about doing a trip like this “before we settled down” and a lot of the reason we were able to make it happen was that we were both single and living alone with complete agency over our decisions. I don’t take for granted that this is rare. With that said, I was excited to get some distance from my Chicago life and with that came a hiatus from keeping in close contact with a lot of friends and family, especially in the first few weeks of the trip. . I didn’t want to have to calculate time zones, I just wanted to be present in the places we were at. I was clearing a lot of things up in my own head at that time so my journal was good company. Tracey, on the other hand, didn’t have a whole bunch of emotional turmoil to work through and kept in contact through text and facetime for the majority of the trip. All of that is to say, given all the ways we can communicate now, it’s easy to stay connected in a situation like this, or not.
With each other: Soooo many people asked “are you worried you’re going to get sick of each other/ did you get sick of each other?” Honestly, I wasn’t worried and we didn’t. Tracey and I have a lot of experience not only living together (years of sharing a room) and more importantly, traveling together. I would never embark on a trip like this with someone I wasn’t confident I wouldn’t want to murder a week in. We are really lucky to have the kind of relationship where we complement one another and know each other so well that we are able to co-exist happily, respectfully and having a lot of fun even for long stretches of time like this. It felt like a true team - us against anything and anyone else. I will always be grateful to have someone that I can look at in any situation and think “we are the only two sane people here, right?”