FAQ’s

How can you afford to take a year off?

Everybody’s first question, whether they ask it out loud or not.

The simple answer is that we prepared ourselves for being laid off when the company was in a bit of a downturn, and it’s that buffer that’s financing the trip.

There were some key ingredients for us in being able to do that, of course.  We both work, and neither of us particularly enjoys spending money.  We have less house than we could have afforded, and didn’t upgrade.  We have 3 cars, but the newest is a 2007 that we got used.  My daily commuter is a ’97 Saturn (as Ethan once exclaimed in a voice of precocious incredulity, “You mean Nineteen ninety seven?!”).

And then there’s everything we don’t have to pay for while we’re away: Vacations (duh), Summer Camps, Ski passes, after school care, health insurance, all the bills… add it up, and it starts to seem like we’ll come out ahead!

How much will you spend?

Fortunately, many of the semi-professional travel bloggers out there are obsessive about recording their costs.  And because they’re writing a travel blog, you can get a good feel for the level of luxury that corresponds to.  After a detailed analysis (ie, messing around on the internet until I went cross-eyed) I came up with a budget of $200/day, or around $75k for the year.  That’s an average – some countries are way more expensive than others, so we’ll have to make up for a week in Tokyo with a month in SE Asia, but it gives us a good way to make decisions as we go.  And that covers costs incurred during the trip – local travel, short flights, living expenses – but not the big plane tickets or what we buy at home before we leave.  All-in, probably $100k.

The challenge for us is that our mindset on a one or two week trip is to spend more in order to get the most out of the limited time.  It will be a conscious effort to make the adjustment to assembling picnics instead of seeking the best restaurants in town (and trying to hit all of them), and to choosing the cheap room in town instead of the bungalow on the beach.  But these choices tend to force more interaction with the local non-tourist economy and community, which is why we’re doing this in the first place.

Our other financial irony is that the poorest or most remote countries can easily become the most expensive for a western tourist, since there is no indigenous travel infrastructure.  The tension here comes from the checklist mentality – if you have to see a certain site (or sight), you can’t often take a cost efficient path.  The balance is that it is the immersion

Medical Insurance?

One of the best things about being outside the US for a year is an escape from the American medical insurance system.  In places that actually have things like doctors and hospitals, we’ll be in a world of lower prices and better outcomes.  In places that don’t (and lots of places don’t) there’s medivac to Hong Kong, Europe, etc.

For insurance, we’ll use one of the major independent long term travel insurers.  The plans are cheap (since they don’t have to pay US prices) and the coverage quality is documented by some of the most engrossing (and harrowing) stories in the travel blog internet.

What about work?

It’s a roll of the dice.  Neither of us has a leave of absence or sabbatical policy.  If we can’t return to the same jobs, we’re fairly employable.  We’re prepared for it to take a while, if it comes down to that.  Seeing so many former cow orkers get laid off, and end up just fine, is a lot of what gave us the confidence to do this in the first place.

And if we stayed and didn’t take the trip, there’s no guarantee we’d keep our jobs anyway.  We are employees at will, subject to the fortunes of the industry and the whims of the M&A bean counters.

Don’t the kids need to go to school?

Not really.  The kids will be missing 2^nd and 6^th grades.  We’re one of those “education is everything” families, and big supporters of public schools.  But the hard subjects are things we can easily cover on the road: Math (we’re both Physics PhDs and Josh has teaching experience), Reading (Ethan drinks books, Aaron’s not far behind him), and Writing (they’ll both be writing for the blog.)

As for the other subjects… Social studies?  Foreign language?  Geography?

Education also underlies the timing for this trip: as unconventional as it sounds to pull the kids out for a year, we didn’t want to deny Ethan the benefits of a conventional high school experience with a breadth of academic possibilities that we couldn’t competently provide.

How did you decide where to go?

First priority was places that you just can’t visit on a two week vacation, either because it takes too long to get there or because the travel infrastructure is so unreliable that you can’t stick to any kind of schedule.  Mongolia is the archetype.  In Nepal we can take longer, slower treks, wait out the weather, and not have to choose between places we really want to see.

Our next thought is places that deserve a longer immersion to appreciate: Instead of going to the local market, sneaking some pictures and maybe buying some dates, we’ll actually be shopping for ingredients for our meals, and clothing and shoes to wear the next week.

Originally, we were drawn to places we’d been to, but want to spend more time in: Morocco, Turkey, southern Spain.  Those are on the list, but in the “backup slides” section, if we find ourselves with an excess of time.  More emphasis is on the “always wanted to go” places, and then on places we can get between using surface travel.  And for reasons I don’t understand and can’t articulate, I love being in Africa.

Almost anywhere in Europe can fit into a standard two week vacation, and it’s easy to go back again.  So if we’ve only got a year, that’s not the place to spend it.  Hopefully, that will keep our costs down as well: there’s no point for us in going to Paris on a $200/day budget, unless that’s $200 per person per day just for food.

Did you get round-the-world plane tickets?

The biggest debate in all of RTW travel.  With the RTW ticket, you get flexibility of dates, but have to choose all your locations ahead of time.  There are limits on the number of stops you make, and how many miles you fly.  And the biggest kicker is that if you travel without flying (eg, take the train), it still counts as a flight in your limits.

So for us, pay and plan as you go makes more sense.  The biggest downside is that many countries need to see an onward ticket before they let you across the border, so it may not be as flexible as we hope.  But we won’t get stuck paying too much – if the flights are outrageous, we’ll just go somewhere else.

What about your house? And your stuff?

We’ll throw out as much as possible – Suzie’s dream for a long time has been to rent a dumpster and fill it up.  We’ll pack up whatever the kids won’t let us toss out, and we’ll rent out the house.  We don’t expect to break even, but we hope to offset most of the housing costs and have someone around keeping an eye on the place.

If you want to borrow or babysit some crappy old cars or a couple of kayaks for a year, let me know!

Will you adopt me?

No, but you’re welcome to meet up with us along the way.

This is probably the most common question I get.  People fall into two camps: those who think we’re crazy and are calling Child Protective Services, and those who think we’re crazy and want us to adopt them.

Honestly, it’s no accident we have two kids.  Of course we didn’t plan our family based on this trip, but throughout life the ability to fit into one hotel room and play man-to-man defense is what has made it possible to devote ourselves to our kids and still follow our own whims.

So no more kids.  But if you’d like to be our au pair, there’s room to negotiate…