The idea is to travel for a year or up to 15 months. I don’t have anywhere I need to be but Babel starts her teaching apprenticeship in the Fall of 2018, so we’ll head back to Germany before then. It’s a strange to think about being on the road for that length of time, but we thought if we’re going to do it let’s do it right. Other than time, the second component is schedule, which we’d rather like to avoid as much as possible. I’ve tended to be an over-planner, to the point of anxiety at times, and we both wanted to travel with some spontaneity. If we like a place we can stay. If we don’t we can change it. We both like happy accidents and want to see how many of them we’ll find.

Putting things in Place

I’ve heard that if you want to make sure you follow through on something difficult a great way to motivate yourself is to tell lots of people you’re doing it. It’s easy to fail yourself, you’ll always be forgiving. It’s somewhat harder to backtrack in front of your friends and family as at the very least it is embarrassing. With this in mind we’ve told everyone we know, or at least talked to in the last year, that this was our plan. We’re definitely going to go travel for a year. Yes that’s a long time. No we won’t have jobs. Yes we’ll come back and not live on the road forever, probably.

The bigger promise was to each other. When there are two of you committed to the same goal it is much more powerful. It has allowed us to take the stressful steps (well, stressful for me anyway) that make backing out trickier. An example is renting our apartment. We’re not going to need it, and don’t want to pay for it, so we rented it out for a year. If we get cold feet a few weeks in it’s not straight-forward to go back to our old lives. It’s not impossible, but it spurs us to forge ahead as opposed to heading backwards.

Some steps are small, like browsing travel guides. Some are larger, like buying plane tickets or packing up everything we own, but they all add together and push us along. If you talked to my Mother she’d tell you I always needed a good push before I would try something new. This culmination of these little pieces is our push.

Beginning

We started in Panama. A question we hear a lot is ‘Why Panama?’ I suspect we’d hear the same question for other countries too, but I think Panama stands out a little more as it’s not on everyone’s list. You don’t hear people rave about Panama like they do about France. There are several reasons for Panama – the first is why not Panama? When I’ve sat down to think about where I would like to travel the list is long. When I ask myself where would I not like to go the list is short, almost non-existent. Baring war and safety concerns there aren’t many places I wouldn’t be interested in visiting. So Panama fits the bill.

The more practical answer is that we want to be in California in late July. Living in Germany, I don’t get to see my family and friends very often and it’s nice to stop in and see them. I miss the place California too – the weather, the food, the character. My family rents cabins in Mammoth, in the High Sierras, in August and having visited the region since childhood it remains important to me. I try to come back and visit when I can. Babel has come to love it as well, and we’ve thought about doing some camping / backpacking for the weeks we’re in the States. This year the States will see a total solar eclipse, which while you might be lucky enough to experience once or twice in your life, you might also quite easily miss. Never having seen a total eclipse, the plan is to make our way to Idaho in August to see this one.

So why Panama? It’s kind of on the way to California or at least in the right direction. It’s a place neither of us have visited. There were cheap flights, and it is well connected to the rest of Central America. We figured we’d fly to Panama and then head North, eventually getting to the US.

The Journey

Only time will tell.