Travel blog hiatus explained
It’s been a while since I last posted anything–for a couple of reasons.
First, I quit my job. This had a two-fold affect on my writing.
1: I’m no longer sitting bored out of my mind in front of a computer all day with no actual “work” to do.
2: My attentions have been focused more on finding a new job than planning the trip which is a whole different computer-based process that I don’t really want to get into.
And the second reason is linked to the first in that having quit my job, I now no longer have a set amount of disposable income that I’m putting towards the trip each month. Which puts into question whether or not we’ll be able to hit our trip budget that I talked about in a previous post. Why would I quit my before-mentioned boring job when it was supplying me with the life-blood I needed to go on my dream trip, you ask? Well, sometimes reality gets in the way of dreams, I’m afraid. The short and long of it is that my boss was harassing me–in a completely (and surprisingly unfortunate) non-sexual way. It had been going on for a while, and I thought it was taken care of until it sort of exploded in badness and a few things became apparent. 1: It was never going to get better, only worse. 2: I wasn’t doing anything wrong. My boss has issues beyond me. 3. His issues were also beyond his bosses and the HR team, so I couldn’t get help from anyone. And 4: The way University systems are set up, it is virtually impossible to fire someone unless they’re dumb enough to put their craziness/threats in writing or to do it in front of others. My boss happened to not be that stupid. Six more months of personally damaging abuse without any chance of help and no hope that it would abate just isn’t worth suffering through for a year-long trip around the world with my honey.
On the upside, having loads of cash saved up made it feasible for me to quit my job without waiting to find something new. Which is a wonderful luxury that unfortunately a lot of others don’t have.
So now Steve and I have resolved that we’re going on the trip anyway. We’ll just go as far as our money will take us, and be very happy and thankful for the experience. And I’m still pretty optimistic that we’ll be able to travel for the full year. Steve is done with school in a couple of weeks, so he’ll start looking for work–ideally something that will utilize his Environmental Economics degree, but tutoring or something else that pays works well too. I’ve done most of the money saving so far, so it’s time for him to pull his weight! 😉 And in the mean time I’m still applying for new jobs and keeping my fingers crossed. There’s only four months until our planned departure date, so that opens up a whole new world of weird feelings about taking a job and then quiting, but what can you do? We’ll just wait and see how it turns out. And I’m getting back into researching the trip since it’s getting closer all the time.
I came across an awesome travel blog: The Lost Girls. They went on a similar one year rtw trip last year, so they have good post-trip information. They even broke down their post-trip expenses by country and what they did. It’s ridiculously helpful both in comparing to my pre-trip, best-guess budget and in getting a little hope about being able to make our trip awesome. They have good tips on some of the countries we’re going to visit (I’m really excited about Peru now!), and they did the trip with only about $17,500 each. Including all of their pre-trip expenses, flights, and everything. And it seems that they did a little more drinking/partying than we’ll most likely do (me not being a big drinker and Steve not being a big dancer/club person). So, we could probably completely cut out their drinking budget, which ended up being pretty sizable. And it’s also a little reassuring that 3 stylish, New York, 20-something, single ladies can go around the world and suffer through the budget lodgings and modes of transportation. If they can do it, we can totally do it! It helps a lot to calm the ugly doubt beast. And one of them sounds like she has a similar lack-of-food-related meanness like those who know and love me have learned to fear–and she didn’t kill and eat the others along the way, so there’s hope for Steve coming home intact.
So, I’m happily back in the swing of planning and getting excited all over again. And hopefully we’ll get a lot of our last travel gear necessities for Christmas (or shortly after Christmas purchased with gift money), so I can lock down our gear costs and pack up the bag and see if I can handle the weight. I’m planning a pre-trip mini-hike, me with pack, Steve without. That way if I buckle somewhere in the middle, he can carry it the rest of the way and I can rethink all my crap.
And that’s that. Hopefully I’ll start updating this a bit more frequently with our progress. With Steve no longer spending all his spare time with studying, we should be able to get a lot more planning done. And this blog is really for during our travels, and I want to keep it up-to-date then both for the sake of those back at home worrying about us and for our own keepsake when we get back.
Tags: Pre-Trip Planning
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