We’re leaving

February 6th, 2018, Chris and I are driving to the airport. One-way tickets in our bags, we’re on our way to start the biggest adventure of our lives: traveling around the World for the next 6 months… at least! We can’t remember when we started talking about doing a World tour. We always loved traveling and we both knew that we wanted to take some time off to travel for a longer period of time than usual.Trying to find the perfect timing held us back for years. Until we realized we didn’t have any kids or pets yet, were not home owners… we really didn’t have anything concrete holding us back except for work. We both loved our work, very much. We cared about our teams, had some really exciting opportunities to look for at work, but we both knew that if we waited for the best time to do it, we would never find it. We would always have good reasons not to do it. And more we waited, harder the decision to leave would be.
We’re leaving
Now that we had made up our minds, we had to figure out where to start. How do you organize a 6+ months trip? I’ve always loved planning trips for myself or my family but never quite as long as this one. There are 195 different countries in the World. They all seem worth visiting for different reasons, but in order to really enjoy a place, you have to give it enough time — so we had to prioritize certain places over others. The idea was to discover new places we hadn’t got a chance to go to yet, places that we’ve been thinking about for some time and try to hit as many as possible in a certain timeframe. The first thing we both did, was to list places or things to do that we always dreamt about. We ended up having very similar ideas. We both wanted to do another Safari, see the Machu Picchu, hike in Patagonia, see kangaroos in Australia, visit Japan… After aligning our two lists and finding the overlaps, it became clear that our trip would at least cover South America, Australia, Japan and South Africa. We could now work on a more concrete itinerary.
Walking on the edge of a Dune in Namibia I started to do some researches about each of these places. “What’s the best time to visit?”, “What are the common itineraries of tour agencies in those countries?”, “What are the things not to miss in each place?” I watched many videos, read lot of blog articles to finally create 3 potential itineraries with a specific list of countries to visit, and how much time we would get to spend in each of them. Now that we had options, we only had to decide which one would better fit our calendars. Chris and I both turned 30 (respectively in December 2017 and January 2018). We decided that starting a new year (2018) with such an exalting adventure would be perfect to celebrate the passage to this new decade.