Dealing with idiots for dummies

It’s Christmas Eve and we’re at our favorite watering hole preparing for our last Christmas in Dallas and everything was going great.  And then this dickhead engineer (we’ll get to that part) sits down next to us.

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Sell, Discard, Donate

The biggest obstacle in preparing for our trip has been all of the stuff we’ve piled up over the years.  What are we gonna do with all this stuff while we’re on our trip?!  We didn’t want to pay for storage, so we did what any rational couple that is planning on quitting their jobs to travel around the world would do.  We started selling it.

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Goodbye, Michael

I’ve known for a few years now that I’d have to have the conversation I had with my boss last week about our trip, but I honestly had no idea how he would react.  I’ve worked on a project with him for the last three years and I’ve known him for longer than that.  He’s been a great boss, as evident in how he took the news that I’d be quitting to travel the world.

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Our Round the World Trip

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?!

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