It has been a long journey to my decision to leave my job and take a Sabbatical to travel the world at age 35. I embarked on a 8 month Sabbatical in September 2018 to travel through Eastern Europe, Middle East, Asia, Africa, and South America.
I was born in Champaign, IL and didn’t grow up traveling. My family vacations were road trips to Minnesota or Michigan. I don’t even think I boarded a plane until I was in high school. But it was a dream of mine to explore the world and I decided to study abroad in Brisbane, Australia my Spring Semester of Junior Year of College. I traveled around New Zealand with two other exchange students from my University for two weeks prior to the start of school. We sky dived in Lake Taupo, hiked on a glacier, kayaked, snorkeled, etc . After those two weeks of adventure, I was hooked on travel. I tried to make the most of my 5 months in Australia as well – learning to scuba dive on the Great Barrier Reef, visiting small beach towns, and exploring the bigger cities of Melbourne and Sydney. My time in New Zealand and Australia was when I first caught the travel bug!
When I graduated college, I had no clue what I wanted to do so in order to delay growing up and getting a real job, I decided it would be a better idea to Work Abroad. I landed a job as a bartender in London living above the pub for 6 months before spending a month on a whirlwind Contiki tour around Europe. By this time, I had completely fallen in love with travel. Still not knowing what to do for work, I decided to combine my new love of travel with work and become a travel agent. Getting paid to plan trips every day and getting to travel for free seemed like the perfect career for me! What could go wrong?? Well between competing with the internet, being in a brand new store, and just not being a natural sales person; I realized after two years that I wasn’t making the money I needed to support myself. Being a Travel Agent turned out to not be as glorious as I had envisioned. I decided to switch careers and my friend was making good money being a Recruiter and loved her job. So I become an IT Recruiter and that is what I have done for the past 10 years.
Now unlike most travel bloggers you come across, I don’t hate my job or the company I work for. In fact it’s quite the opposite. I have been working at the same company for 7 years and the thought of leaving them gave me anxiety and made me second-guess my decision. Luckily they encouraged me to take a Sabbatical and are willing to hire me back when I get back from my Sabbatical. Knowing me and my priorities in life, it made sense to them. The President of my division at my company best summed it up with, “ I think you work to live and not live to work.” He couldn’t have been more right and I consider that one of my mottos of life. Taking a Sabbatical has been a major goal of mine for years. While there will never be a perfect time to take a Sabbatical, sometimes you just need to follow your dreams before time slips away. Again, many bloggers you will come across are full-time travelers and nomads but my plan is to return to the US to work after a 7 to 8 month break to explore of the world.
I built this website with the hope of encouraging others to travel in general and take a sabbatical as well. Please follow me along on my Sabbatical journey, you can read about my trip by looking under the My Sabbatical section of this site. Want to research the idea of a Sabbatical? Then you can find tips under Planning. If you are looking for encouragement and other positive Sabbatical stories, then I have included a section under Sabbatical Tales that will include Sabbatical journeys from around the world. When I return, I will include a section After Sabbatical to detail the realities of coming back to work after a long break. The section Travel Gear includes my favorite products that I have taken with me on my trip. The Tips and Tricks sections includes my guide to Travel Hacking and other general tips along the way.
