A New Beginning
Now that it’s happened, I suppose it’s a good time to write about it. Simply put, Yuki and I have decided to take a year away from work to go traveling. I’ve become a contract employee and Yuki has taken a year-long leave of absence. Our plan is to spend the next year traveling to obtain some worldly experiences.
It’s been four years since we did our three-month backpacking trip around Asia, after which we began our engineering careers. At the time we knew that we would want to go on an extended trip one day, but we didn’t know when or for how long. The turning point came about two years ago when both of our workplace situations started to get a bit frustrating. Although our career potential has improved since then, we started to seriously consider a year of travel and began preparations. We didn’t leave immediately because we wanted to save up some money and also get our Professional Engineering registrations. We didn’t purchase a car or the motorcycle that I wanted, and instead invested heavily into savings plans. We were already tracking our expenses, and putting money aside in our savings became a top priority.
I’m happy to say that today we’re ready to go traveling and have made the arrangements and commitments to make it happen. It’s unfortunate that we are both leaving good jobs with high potential at a time when the industry is booming, but we also felt that the time was right to take a break. We were encouraged by surrounding ourselves with positive people who reminded us that we were still young and there was no time like the present to go traveling and not regret it later on.
Both of us had a goodbye party and I receive a signed T-shirt from many of my close colleagues. It was a really cool gift and something totally unexpected. There were a lot of heart-warming messages on the shirt and made for a good sendoff. That night, Melissa, Mark, and I got kicked out of the restaurant at midnight because it was closing, making for fond memories to leave by.
Unsurprisingly, it’s not easy leaving a stable life and career for the unknown. There are some great people at work and the work itself has been rewarding. Leaving this all behind, I feel like I’m adrift at sea again and am relying on the wind to blow me in the right direction. I recognize that I am prioritizing certain dreams and aspirations over others that I have wanted to accomplish here in Vancouver but will be putting on hold or abandoning. I am leaving behind stability. However, we know that we can always come back and that’s reassuring on a certain level.
Our departure coincides with the end of our annual lease, which is the end of August. We are selling as much furniture and household items as we can to save on storage fees, and are using this time to appreciate this beautiful part of the world we’re leaving. We’re going camping near Squamish and will also go back to Vancouver Island for a few days.
I never thought I’d be a person that quits to travel the world. It just hadn’t occurred to me until it had happened. From September to Christmas, our plan is to visit Bangkok, Australia, New Zealand, and the Caribbean. These choices are so that we can take my Dad to Thailand and see Yuki’s parents, take Yuki’s Dad to see Ayers Rock in Australia, and attend a friend’s wedding in the Dominican Republic. We want to be back in BC to see my grandmother at Christmas. In 2018, our plan is to visit Japan, Taiwan, Mongolia, the Philippines, and tour around SE Asia. We haven’t set any plans in stone yet and will figure it out later; hopefully as we go. One of our goals for this trip is to plan less and be more spontaneous.
We’ll be blogging and Instagraming along the way, and we hope to get some life-long memories. We hope you enjoy our stories. Please let us know if you have any advice or recommendations on the places we plan to visit.
