30-year-olds quit their jobs to travel. They had a gap in their CV
I started my career in education as a high school school counselor. My husband was a self-published author who could work from anywhere, so we made the most of my school holidays and long summer holidays, venturing to new places whenever we could. We created the ForgetSomeday travel blog to share our stories.
However, trips limited to school breaks meant that I wanted more, so I suggested to my husband that we take a year off from our careers and traveled “full time”.
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It didn't take long to convince him. We didn't have our own home and hadn't started a family yet, so the timing seemed perfect.
I applied for a year's unpaid leave but it was rejected due to planned budget cuts. We decided to go ahead with our plan anyway – we didn't want to wait until retirement to make this dream come true.
Time for an adventure
Over the next year, we radically reduced our expenses and, giving up everything that was not necessary, we saved more 30 thousand hole. (approx. PLN 109,000).
We sold the car for 5 thousand hole. (approx. PLN 18,000) and we made some money by selling smaller items and put the rest of the stuff in a 10×10 warehouse because we thought we would only be gone for a year.
By June 2015 we had approx. 40 thousand hole. (approx. PLN 145,000) in the account, we gave up our rented apartment and flew to Prague with one-way tickets.
We traveled across Central and Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, sampling local foods and attending bucket list events such as Oktoberfest in Munich and St. Patrick's Day in Dublin.
See also: I started saving for retirement at age 35. This is my minimum financial goal
We visited over a dozen countries – island-hopping in Croatia, Thailand and Portugal, visiting temples in Cambodia, relaxing in Hungarian thermal baths, and driving 500 miles around Scotland in a campervan.
The couple's adventures included a camper trip around Scotland
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Toccara Best (private archive)
From hiking in Austria and Slovakia to swimming with seals in Sweden, this year has been a crash course in adventure tourism.
When our official gap year ended, our account balance was still surprisingly good — thanks to keeping an eye on houses when their owners were away and blogging collaborations that allowed us to stretch our budget. And since I didn't have a job to go back to, we decided to keep traveling.
Little did we know that our greatest adventure was yet to come: six months later, we found out that we were expecting a baby.
They visited more than a dozen countries, including Vietnam
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Toccara Best (private archive)
And then there were three of us
We returned to the U.S. to give birth to our son, but just a few months after his birth, we began traveling full-time again—this time around the United States.
By his third birthday, our son had already visited 27 states. Eventually, the pandemic put an end to our constant traveling and we took it as a sign that it was time to settle down.
Iceland was the couple's last stop before returning to the US
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Toccara Best (private archive)
We returned to California five years after starting this adventure.
When we planned our gap year, it was actually only supposed to last a year. However, over time, the gap in my CV grew largerand the motivation to return to the career I once loved began to wane. My husband was also trying to figure out what he wanted to do next.
Return to the labor market
We didn't realize that our global adventure would end with such an obstacle – having to change our career path after a five-year break in the middle of a global pandemic.
Perhaps it was a break we both needed to consider our next steps, but it took us a long time to come back.
When our son started kindergarten, I returned to the workforce as an executive-level personal assistant for a busy entrepreneur, using my organizational skills.
After the birth of their son, the couple continued traveling around the USA
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Toccara Best (private archive)
When that manager moved to another state a little over a year later, I quickly found a new role as operations manager at the nonprofit where I have worked part-time for almost four years. I have been looking for a satisfying full-time job for a year and a half, which is especially difficult in today's competitive labor market.
Was our gap year impulsive? Not necessarily. We spent a year saving and planning. Was it risky? Definitely. More than we expected. Would we do it all again? Absolutely yes.
Still, If we had to do it again, we would probably limit ourselves to one year.
The above text is a translation from American edition of Business Insider
