I regret (Almost) nothing — Part 1

Do you remember what you were doing a year ago today?

No, of course you don’t, there was nothing particularly remarkable about the 10th August 2015 — it was just like every other day.

In London, it was raining. The iPhone zombies were rushing to work and the newspapers were filled with questions on what Britain could do about it’s ‘Immigration problem’.

Why does this day stand out in my mind? It’s because on that average Monday morning, I found myself sitting at Heathrow Airport having sold all of my possessions, quit my job and bought a one way ticket to Berlin, Germany.

This was not your average Monday morning for me. I would usually of cycled the 14 minutes to work and would be enjoying a quiet coffee and bagel before a day of meetings and conflict management between my designers and project managers.

I had spent the previous 10 years in London with my head down, working away to build a future for myself. I found myself working all hours of the day and night, in my dream job, making more money than ever before. I was slowly ticking off personal and professional goals and gradually managed to put some money aside to one day invest in some property — short term sacrifice for long term gain had been my mantra for the last decade.

London has a way of keeping you on that hamster wheel while making you feel like you are actually getting closer to leaving the cage.

It all changes in a moment.

Spending my best friend’s birthday by his hospital bed made me realise that I had sacrificed too much of my youth and energy to London and seeing first hand how quickly life had changed for my friend since his unexpected health issues, I decided that whatever happened, I wouldn’t be in that bed the following year wishing I had travelled rather than take that extra 10k raise and promotion.

I quit my dream job, sold all my possessions and started to make a rough plan for where I would start my travels. Two of my favourite people were getting married in Santa Barbara, CA at the end of that August so it seemed to make sense to slowly head in that direction for the wedding.

I settled on a rough route based on cheap connecting flights that would take me to Berlin > Copenhagen > Reykjavik > New York > LA then a bus to Santa Barbara.

Having put the word out on Facebook, Alex — an old friend from university got in touch to say that he would love to join me on the trip and one late night pizza and beers after, he had also quit and was waiting with me at Heathrow for our gate to open.

It was terrifying to know that I was about to spend every penny of my life savings but there was something so liberating about heading into the unknown with no plan other than finding our hostel and deciding what to eat for dinner.

We spent the European leg of the journey super excited to be exploring and living the hostel lifestyle with backpackers from all over the world, along with the late night shenanigans that that lifestyle lends itself to.

Berlin, Germany

In Berlin we partied all night to the sound of techno — well past sunrise, desperately trying to stay awake at 8am outside a bakery, (while a homeless man racially abused us in German) so we could return our rental bicycles at 10am.

Copenhagen, Denmark

In Copenhagen (or the land of Ryan Goslings, as I call it), we learnt the pains of saying goodbye. Living out of a backpack meant that any connections that we made were short lived as the road to Santa Barbara would have us moving on in a few days. Even so, we had so much fun hand-standing our way through Gay-Pride celebrations as well as watching the reserved Danish come out of their viking shells after a few drinks.

Reykjavik, Iceland

We were only a week into our travels but it was time to move again — This time to Reykjavik, Iceland. This would prove to be only a short stop of a few days as there were cheap flights to NYC from there. We only had time to do a couple of tours, exploring the incredible landscapes of the island as well as the Geysirs and waterfalls before almost missing our flight as we overslept.

It turns out that in order to gain entry to the USA, you MUST have an outbound ticket too. As I was head of research for this trip, we obviously had no idea of this until we arrived to our gate for our flight to New York City — which was closing in 2 minutes!

The check in assistant didn’t seem to see the funny side so we took our phones out and tried desperately to connect to WIFI and buy a ticket out of America. We could stay in America for 90 days so we looked for flights in November and after a frantic search and with seconds to spare before they closed the gate, it was booked! We got on board, sat in our seats exhausted and started laughing.

“Looks like we are going to Lima!” — I chuckled to Alex.

The only plan that we had for the next 90 days was to explore New York for a week then head to the wedding in Santa Barbara — After that, we simply had to get to Florida by November to fly to South America…

To be Continued
Follow me on Instagram: @onlinedesigner2