Barry Backpacks Around the World

After leaving my sister’s home in late May, I spent a week in Oregon and Washington catching up with family. From there I flew back to New Orleans where I was met at the airport by my parents who I hadn’t seen in 15 months. After settling in and playing with the Bassett Hound/Labrador Retriever mix next door (look like a Retriever with sawed off legs) so that she wouldn’t bark at me everytime I went outside, I set about finding a job in the local area. After sending out about 10 resumes, I ended up with offers from two different companies. (My trip was on the resume so as to explain the gap in work history.) One was the company that I worked for before I left. They were offering a job similar to the one that I had when I left. The other was from an engineering contract company which would move me around between different sites. So began an agonizing few days of going back and forth about which job to take. I was also trying to decide whether I wanted to return to engineering in the first place.

First I figured I would have to make the decision about whether to accept any of the jobs. While I do take risks in life (the trip), I am not one who likes to exist on a razor thin edge (show up somewhere with $10 in my pockets and hope for the best.) I like to have some sort of a back up plan. While planning for the original trip, I had set certain financial criteria that I needed to meet before leaving and didn’t leave until I met them. I wasn’t broke when I returned from the trip, but I didn’t feel I was in a strong enough financial position to just throw caution to the wind and try to invent a new life doing something completely new. In the end I decided to take one of the two job offered to rebuild my financial strength.

With one decision down, it was time to tackle the next one. From a financial perspective, both jobs were equal in the first year but the engineering firm won out by year two as the increased pay made up for lower benefits.  From a comfort level, my previous employer (from now on P.E.)  won out as I already knew the job and the people I would be working with. My P.E. would also provide stronger job security as engineering firms tend to suffer more in weak business cycles. The engineering firm offered a more flexible work environment with alternate work schedules, overtime pay, and easier access to unpaid time off which would be great if I wanted to do a longer trip.

To solve this problem, I put all my engineering skills to the task and try to quantify what was essentially a values decision in both Excel and mental spreadsheets. In the end I chose the engineering firm. While the pay was better (I will be making 30% more  than when I left), this was not what made me choose them. I have no desire to become superwealthy and I don’t have extravagant tastes. (I won’t turn down an opportunity to put myself in a better financial position if I can though.) It was the perceived flexibility that won out in the end. I am a big proponent of work/life balance. I believe in working hard when I am at work but I also want to be able to enjoy the fruits of that hard work. Starting on June 23, I will reenter the working world for the first time in 16 months. It will be an adjustment, but it will be nice to have income coming in again. I plan to stay at my parent’s home for the next two to three months and then go buy a house. From there the future is open. Currently I plan to continue to travel to exotic locales but just for shorter time periods. My plan for the near term is to try to set myself up so that I have some sources of income that don’t depend on me going to a job site everyday. This way, if I do decided to take another long trip, I can still make money.

As I sit here in my sister’s house surrounded by scenes of American surburbia, I find that the memories of my trip are beginning to fade as they always do. The tastes, smells, and sounds are starting to dull and are becoming harder to recall. It appears that I will remember my trip not in vivid memories and perfect recall but in flashes of familiarity brought on by what I encounter in daily life (a news story about China, a mountain view, or a movie filmed in New Zealand for example). This doesn’t bring on a feeling of depression that I thought I might encounter at the end of my trip. Rather it provides a bridge and helps to ease the transition between two very different lifestyles.

Now that I have been back in the US for two weeks, I have begun to look for a job and re-establish all the things needed for a “normal” life. I find that it is not as hard as I thought to make the jump back to my previous life. It just goes to show how adaptable humans are and how quickly the exotic becomes the norm. My trip ended at a good time. Towards the end I was the kid who ate too much candy and ended up with a stomache ache. Despite being surrounded by exotic locales and vistas, it was hard for me to feel any of the awe that I had at the start of my trip. My brain and body now needs time to absorb and deal with all that I have seen and been through. I am content for the time being to spend time with friends and family and reenter the workforce. The latter brought on as much by necessity as wanting to feel productive again. All that being said, I am once again starting to feeling a very small kernel of wanderlust.  The roving lifestyle is once again beginning to look exotic and full of promises of new adventures.  Who knows how long it will be before the calls from my backpack become too loud (Central Asia - the “Stans” fascinate me) to ignore and I feel the need to head out again. If I do, rest assured that I will do my best to document for anyone who wants to come along. In the meantime, check back with the blog every few months. As the trip is officially over, I will no longer do weekly updates, but plan to do updates if anything interesting happens in my life (like blog book deals, new big adventure about to begin, things like that). I still plan to do trips whenever work permits and they will definitely show up. 

I will be in Indiana until May 21 attending tea parties, watching Sesame Street, playing My Little Pony and dollhouse, and all the other things men submit to when confronted with a bright smiling three year old face.  These activities will occasionally be broken up with bouts of bug hunting and being used as a private jet (I like to think of myself as a tough fighter plane to make up for the My Little Pony sessions) for flights around the house. I will then go to Oregon for a week to visit other family, and return to Louisiana on May 28.

Since my return to the US, I have been asked some questions mulitple times so I thought it would make a good blog topic to answer them. 1. What was you favorite place? This question gave me a lot of trouble. First and ... [Continue reading this entry]

For those interested in such things, I have decided to write a page with some statistics about my trip. Hopefully some will be useful to someone and some will probably just be odd but here they are anyway.  1. Trip Costs: ... [Continue reading this entry]