My Sabbatical

Source: hjl from flickr

Imagine that everything is planned for your trip. You have some money saved, you’ve picked a nice sunny spot, plane tickets are booked, a villa on the Mediterranean is rented, and you are all ready to go. One of the easiest thing to overlook is rules around visitor visas. You may want to go to Europe for six months, but what will happen when you show up at the border?

In an ideal world, you can just travel anywhere and everywhere without preapproval or restrictions. But in the real world, there are borders, passport controls, and there are visa requirements. It turns out that countries are actually pretty particular about who crosses their borders (who knew!). 

For the EU, the rule is that you can visit for a maximum of 90 days in any 6 month period on a regular visitor visa.  

What this means that if show up at the border expecting to go there for 6 consecutive months, you will only be allowed in for 3 (or might just be turned around on the next flight back home). Also, you cannot just leave Europe for a day and expect the 3 month clock to restart.

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Source: misat0 from flickr

Taking a sabbatical and getting married share a lot in common.

• You start by deciding to do it.
• At the time you make a decision, you might not even know all the details, but that’s ok because everyone who does it doesn’t know all the details on Day 1.
• You decide on a budget, and it can be as small or as big as you like as long as your dreams match the budget.
• Whatever you initially budget, you’ll probably need a little more.
• You set a date far enough in the future to plan and pay for it, but not too far. Usually 1 year in advance is sufficient.
• Certain things need to be decided early on, and many more things are not finalized til the month before you leave.

OK, maybe the list of similarities is not that long. But marriage and a sabbatical are often similar in the amount of money they cost, and the amount of planning required to pull them off. Yet it seems like at least half the population has no trouble envisioning a $30,000 wedding but only a small number can envision a 6-month or 1-year sabbatical for the same budget.

Here’s how my wife and I decided we needed to change our life to include a sabbtical.

It was a “dam breaking” type moment. One day, a friend of hers from work passed away – at work. A couple of weeks later, another friend passed away on the commuter train to work. A short time after that, a close friend died from a long illness. Within the span of 2 months, a number of people “our age” were gone.

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Source: pouwerkerk at flickr

The last couple of posts talked about how, in planning a relatively short 2 month trip to Spain, I was hoping to jettison a bit of baggage here at home and break a few roots. Well, for 2 months you don’t really sell all your stuff, sell your home, and put everything in storage, do you?

Well, no.

Even I know that. If this was “it”, if we knew the travel bug within us would be satisfied once and for all, I’d just pay the mortgage and have family or friends check on our place from time to time. It’s all just for a short holiday.

Mind you, this time is going to be by far the longest holiday we’ve taken. I think our honeymoon was something like 17 days – and since then we’ve only taken 1 or 2 week trips. Mostly 1. Or less.

I look at this at the trial run. Before taking the car out on the 24-hour Le Mans circuit, I want to run it around the track a few times to work the kinks out. This also serves as a way to clear my head, think, plan, prepare to act. Do I want to try working remotely full time? Find a cheap locale (cheap-er at least), sun, pool, laptop with wireless. Spend my days learning to salsa dance, learning to cook, learning to speak Spanish. And do a little web programming or write books, or blog. Two or three hours a day of work, 12 hours a day of living.

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Source: trent_maynard at flickr

As the old TV show says, it’s takes different strokes to rule the world. My mom used to say, “Different strokes for different folks”. All a fancy way of saying we’re all different.

So when planning a vacation of more than just a couple of weeks, there are a couple of different ways to approach the task. You could simply make short term plans, hop on a plane, and take a “see as we go” approach. Or you could sit down and plan each week before you leave. And either way you’re taking a risk.

If you don’t put too much thought into anything beyond week one, you could be forced to take “what’s available” or “what’s convenient” and also end up paying more for not having as much choice available. Through proper research, you could potentially uncover some very nice places to visit and stay, but without that research find yourself sticking largely to the popular tourist spots and miss out.

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Source: bradipo at flickr

An interesting post yesterday at the Escape 101 blog has me thinking, how much would it cost to travel for one year?

I’ve been doing my own planning for my time off this year. I set aside what I thought was a reasonable amount of money for 2 months overseas – $20,000. And now I read that that is what one couple spent for 1 YEAR away from home.

Now $20,000 is not much of a travel budget for 1 year. And truth be told, the couple that did that lived in rural Australia for 6 months and so are not really jet setting around the world, but finding cheap places to live for extended periods.

But I could do that.

I could live in a relatively cheap part of Spain for a couple of months. I could live in Thailand. I could live in almost any country in South or Central America. All relatively inexpensive places. Warm, and no 9-5 “work” required just to exist from week to week.

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Source: Jaivee at flickr

The first post on this site talked about trees and roots. Are we like a tree, in that we have certain things keeping us here and making it extremely difficult to go away for an extended trip? How many of those roots you are willing to break impacts the quality and length of your trip.

Your roots are what keeps you here. Your house, your car, your pets, your extended family, your close friends, your job, your community involvement… whatever you would miss, or would miss you, if you went away for more than a couple of weeks. (Now perhaps your house would not miss you, but your bank or landlord certainly would if you stopped making the payments.)

The younger you are, the less stuff there is to anchor you at home. You don’t have a house, your car is junk, you’re anxious for some time away from your family, you want to make new friends or travel with existing ones, no attachment to your job, no career, etc. That’s why “backpacking through Europe” is such a popular after college experience before the real job starts.

When you get older, you are both less likely to want to “backpack”, more likely to have a spouse and/or children, more likely to have a real career, more likely to have been at the same job for 10 years. These are the roots keeping us in place, and stopping us from adventure.

There are two approaches to handling these issues for people in this situation – you can either break some of those roots, or prepare things to make an easier for you to be away and come back to them.

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