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Are we there yet?

Let’s get back to traveling!

After spending an amazing summer in the Colorado mountains, we are ready for a little international travel! 

We’ve passed the summer doing as many sports as we can cram in—and even decided to learn rowing/sculling at Dillon Reservoir to mix things up.  What I can say is any minimal time on the rowing machine at the gym did absolutely zero in preparing me for the real sport!  You can’t just go get a cardio workout trying to go as hard as possible when you are worried about wobbling around in a very unstable boat and not wanting to swim in ice-cold waters.  Fortunately, we took lessons with the Frisco Rowing Center where we learned how to stabilize the boats (oddly enough, it’s mostly to do with holding your hands at a certain height), how to position your hands and wrists (oddly challenging to get this right), and how to put together the pieces of the stroke/recovery (not at all what I was doing when I was on the gym rowing machine!).  

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Ready, Set…

It’s unbelievable to me to realize that I’ve been working on this crazy plan for almost 5 years:  leave our jobs, and slow-travel extensively for a few years.  

There’s been 100 steps in the process along the way including a lot of spreadsheets, travel research, having my Italian citizenship recognized, more spreadsheets, selling the house and even more spreadsheets.  All of them have been part of the journey of getting us to this point, but a few steps feel more symbolic than others.

This week has felt like a biggie.  This week both Mr Snacks and I are leaving our jobs.  

The feelings are complicated.  We’ve both been fortunate to have careers that have brought us a lot of fulfilment, and we are voluntarily walking away to take a lengthy break.  But, we are leaving to travel!  To do the mutual interest that brought us together!  Travelling is literally at the heart of our “how did you meet” story.  Still, we are leaving a lot of responsibility, accomplishment and work-friends behind with this decision.  It makes it all bitter-sweet.

I have no doubt that our new lifestyle will give us a great perspective on different cultures, more time in nature (instead of stapled to a laptop), and time to explore new opportunities.  On balance, I’m certain the move is the right one—just today it feels a tiny bit of sadness mixed with a scary amount of excitement.

So, now what?  

We’ve got about a month before we start driving to Baja and a surprisingly lot to do.  Finalize our Mexico vehicle insurance, de-winterize the van, mark out the cities to get gas in (this is only important in the Baja), stalk the weather for an appropriate window to leave, celebrate the holidays, pack for 3 months…  Oh, and I’m sure Mr Snacks will want to leverage his new free time and our mountain location to ski every day possible!

Busy times ahead!  But, it finally feels like this long-planned journey is about to start.

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Feeling flexible

2020 is a year that has taught us all to be flexible.  We are very fortunate that our family has stayed healthy and our biggest challenge that our travel plans have been upended.

It’s early September and according to the original plan Mr Snacks would be gainfully unemployed, we would have spent the summer in our mountain condo recuperating and be starting off on our international nomad adventure.  Not surprisingly, selling a home during a global pandemic isn’t the best idea.  What we thought would happen very quickly came to a screeching halt when we were instructed to stay home.  With a mortgage to pay for an no place to go, it only made sense to keep working.  We’ve just closed on the house, have shoehorned all of our stuff into our condo and are spending some time settling into mountain life.  We’ve been hiking, biking and re-exploring our great state.

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Aspiring Nomad

Well, without even trying I’ve taken the first step to living a nomadic life.  On Friday, my boss set up a call with me—and as soon as an HR person joined the call I knew…I was being laid off.  

Aspiring nomad
Can I be a nomad now? Now? How ’bout now…

Being in the tech industry for over 20 years, it’s pretty commonplace so I was very prepared for it. More than anything, the weirdest piece was being told it was “effective immediately”.  No hand over, no nothing.  The next few hours were filled with calls and text from other coworkers who had also been impacted.

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