Chris and I met early (at 17!) and have both always wanted to see the world. It didn’t really happen around uni for us – I was too excited to get started on my degree and after uni we came back to Reading, totally poor, saving for our wedding and living temporarily with my parents. We needed money!
A few years later with careers started and the wedding out the way we planned to go for 9 months; but got broody before we could go. We decided instead that we’d see the world on lots of holidays later in life rather than backpacking around the world. After all, with children it’s not something you can do (so we thought at the time…) and after the kids have grown up we’d be too old for backpacking.
With two young kids, careers and a mortgage we thought that there was no going back on this decision, even as our desire to travel grew. Then earlier this year we took the children to Costa Rica (follow our adventures here) and had the most amazing time; exploring the country and its culture with the children, and spending all our time together. The travel bug which we’d locked up before having the kids was fully let loose by the time we returned and we had major post holiday blues. The thought of another great holiday next year wasn’t enough and we started to wonder how we could fit trips into any school holiday – could we take some sort of sabbatical to go travelling for six weeks over the summer holidays? How could we fit more travel in?? After talking to a lovely lady at work (Jackie – thanks for inspiring me!) who took her three children around the world back in the 70’s (!!) we regretted not travelling when the kids were under 5 before they missed school. And then arrived at the real question; ‘Is it such a big deal for them to miss some of primary school? Why can’t we go travelling with the kids now?’
I’m sure other people can come up with lots of reasons, and most of them will be good reasons too (school, money, safety, friends and family, jobs to name a few), but none of them seem like something we can’t get around. None of them are enough to convince us not to do it. So that’s it – we’re going!
We’re going to leave jobs, take the kids out of school, sell most of our possessions, rent our house (which we totally renovated and literally has our blood, sweat and tears in the walls), load a few things into a couple of backpacks and head out for 11 months to countries we’ve never been to before. We’ll be sleeping in hostels, riding buses, trains and boats and trying to see all (perhaps a little ambitious – I’ll settle for seeing lots) of what the world has to offer, to learn about different cultures and ultimately I expect we’ll learn a lot about ourselves along the way.
Are we crazy? Probably a little but you do only live once!
Next step – planning!