Firstly, a big thank you to those who have subscribed since Wednesday - none of us know in which direction this is going to end up, but it’s all about the journey, right? We’ve settled on Friday as publication day for the newsletter, so here’s a bonus issue on Week 1!
I’m still working out all the functionality this platform has to offer - so this week, we have a guest writer for the newsletter! Here’s my travel and life partner Zoe, to tell you a bit more of what this is all about…
How long have we been planning this?
Harry and I had always talked about travelling the world, who hasn’t? Jumping from university degrees, to further study in our jobs, the timing had never worked for us to take an extended break. We had been to the USA and seen some of Europe using annual leave, but had been no further East than visiting family in Abu Dhabi during an Easter break while at university.
New Zealand had always taken our fancy - filled with dark sky reserves for stargazing and night photography (one of Harry’s favourite hobbies), fantastic scenery for hikes during the day, and beaches to relax as the sun goes down, and not to mention the sites from filming the Lord of the Rings.
The end of 2019 saw us talking seriously for the first time about taking time to travel, before considering larger commitments. We had some savings, so why not see what we could do by taking an unpaid sabbatical and having three months away? Unfortunately, a little something called Covid had other ideas. We worked throughout the lockdowns, thinking about a time when our dreams could be turned into a reality.
With the world starting to open up more in 2022, we were determined to make this our year.
Planning to leave our jobs at some point in the year, we started the spring cleaning early, and sorted out possessions that were gathering dust. We started by storing the Christmas decorations at the end of January, hoping we wouldn’t need them at the end of the year! Each free weekend we had, we packed a carload of our worldly goods to store (read as: belongings that we might need in the future).
The time came where we had to make a decision - with two months’ notice on our tenancy and jobs, we were going to have to commit to this if we wanted to live a full year of summer. We considered a variety of factors, including:
needing to assess our careers, work-life balance and where we saw ourselves in the future
the convenient ending of work projects
the increasing cost of utility bills, and the worry of whether our house could become unsustainable to run.
And most importantly, this is something that we wanted to do for our own personal development and satisfaction. As you’ve probably guessed by now, we took the plunge.
Moving on out…
Key-day was 29th June. Having finished work earlier in the month, we had a week and a half to get the house looking better than when we moved in. We were heading straight to a friend’s wedding and then on to Wales after that (all to come in Episode 3), so we had to pack strategically - separating out our possessions between storing and travelling. I wouldn’t say it was the most relaxing time we’ve ever had. We had a lot of stuff still to sort and store (try saying that five times fast!) - all the games of Tetris played as a child did come in handy!
What planning was done in advance?
We couldn’t decide the best date to start our adventure and therefore the plan was sparse. Trying to fit any plans around all the weddings we had this year was very challenging (for those interested, we had seven…). We had a rough plan to explore parts of Wales for three weeks in between weddings, followed by a few cycling adventures. The rest was all TBC when we took the final decision.
Going forward
So as you may have noticed, it has been a little while since we moved out. Things haven’t exactly gone smoothly, but I guess you’ll have to wait until Episode 3 to find out more…
See you next week!
Harry and Zoe