I have a picture my wife took of me the minute I became infatuated with traveling around the world.  It’s August 30th, 2006 (Thanks timestamps!) and I’m sitting at my computer pointing at the monitor of what appears to be a longtail boat in Thailand.  I had stumbled upon a blog by a couple named Sarah and Brendan.  You can still see their website here. This was in 2006, before the indulgence of travel blogs that currently litter the internet existed. I asked my wife why she took the picture of me and she told me that I wouldn’t stop talking to her about it when she got home from work and I would sit and read these stories of this couple while she watched tv.  She could see I was hooked and thought it was cute.  Their blog linked to a blog of another guy doing this from Boston and his stories were just as impressive.  I wish his site still existed…The guy posted one blog post a day while he was gone for a year and he stuck to it.  It was impressive.

The idea of actually doing this ourselves sat in the back of my head and marinated for a while until one day Mandy brought it back up to me.  “Why aren’t we doing this?  You seemed so excited.”   I didn’t have a good answer, but I had a ton of excuses.  We don’t have enough money saved!  We have jobs!  We have cars!  We have stuff! What will we do with all our stuff?!

This past weekend, our apartment complex held a yard sale.  It was a godsend.  We were planning on throwing all this stuff away.   We bought a table for $10 and made $200 selling stuff.  We’ve also sold stuff on Craigslist, and a local Facebook ‘yard sale’ group Mandy found.  We moved from a two bedroom apartment to a one bedroom that costs about $300 a month less.  We cut our $120 cable and bought an over the air antenna so I could still watch football on the local channels.  I don’t miss it and I wish we had done it years ago.

We’ve saved money and are getting close to our goal. We bought our backpacks and all our travel accessories.  We’re in the process of getting our immunizations.   We’ve purchased our one way tickets to Belize and booked our first few nights accommodation on Caye Caulker.  We leave January 12th.   After Belize, it’s on to Guatemala and the rest of Central America.  The plan after that is to fly to California and then out to New Zealand, then on to Australia, Indonesia, and a lot more of SE Asia including Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos.  Then India, Nepal, Turkey…and on to Europe.

I went back and forth deciding on whether to do a blog.  We’re planning on using this space for our friends and family to keep up with our travels and if we pick up some new followers along the way, that’s fine with us.

My next posts will include what it’s like telling our respective bosses that we’re quitting our jobs to travel the world, what’s in our backpacks and a little more in depth of what went into saving for this trip and how you can do it too.

I want to go to there!