A tiny bit of panic set in yesterday as I checked my account balance. Everything was there which was good, but the $$$ number listed was only going to get smaller over the course of a year. My last pay check had cleared: no more income… Yikes! I sure hope I knew what I was doing. Thankfully my anxiety quickly passed as I realized the corollary was also true: no more work! Sweet.
Such an odd feeling, knowing that you are bucking every responsible trend that society (ours anyway) expects of its citizens… no kids, no job, no career plans whatsoever: A non-contributing burden on society, A negative line item for some economist’s GDP forecast. I can’t believe that I’m actually getting away with this. Someone pinch me please.
It’s sort of funny. Word spread over the past couple of weeks of our plans, and I’ve gotten the strangest looks and comments from people. The comment that really took me by surprise yesterday went something like “Wait… you’re that guy?!?” from people that I either didn’t know or had only met a few times before. This came up at least 3 times from random people. Surreal. Here are some other comments/questions that have come up:
- Wow, I wish I could do that!
- Where are you going?
- How long?
- How much is this going to cost?
- Who / what travel agent is planning this for you?
- How long have you been planning the trip?
- How long have you been thinking of doing this?
- Are you on going on leave? When are you coming back?
- Are you coming back?
- What? No seriously, which company are you joining?
- What are you doing with your house/car/boat/stuff?
- You have to blog/flickr/facebook/etc. your adventure!
- You guys getting ready to have kids or something?
- You Suck.
- Swine Flu! You’re not going to Spain/NYC/Mexico are you?
- Are you backpacking? What are you bringing with you?
- You’re not going to visit x/y/z location? You should really visit x/y/z.
- Why are you doing this?
- That’s too many places, you’ll get burnt out.
- That’s too few places, you’ll get bored.
- Are you following any seasons? Endless summer?
- How do you pack for something like this?
- Don’t drink the water! No seriously, don’t drink the water
- You bastards! I know you…you’ll get to that island somewhere in the south pacific and never come back.
As rare as it is to come across Americans who have done a RTW trip before, we’ve actually met a few who have given us some good tips. I think the most common advice we get is to not do too much. One friend of ours told us that she could last about 3 weeks before having to just park somewhere and do nothing. I don’t know what our personal tolerance will be, but hopefully our plans will be flexible enough to detox every now and then.
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