Travel — Travel Blog — LIFE BEYOND ROUTINE

WARNING: You should never suggest an idea without accepting the risk of me taking you 100% seriously.

Allen and I usually take a big international trip once a year and when we were discussing where to go next, he said "there are so many places I want to go in Europe. I wish we could just go on one big trip and travel all over". I Immediately loved the idea and my brain went straight to work trying to figure out how we could turn this idea into reality.

Neither of us have generous amounts of PTO saved up (we use it as soon as we accrue it) so it would have taken a few years to accrue enough time for such a long trip. Our next option was to look into temporary leaves of absence. To our surprise, Allen was able to negotiate 6.5 weeks of unpaid leave for our trip so I just had to figure out what I was going to do. I really hadn't been enjoying my job for the past year and was casually looking around for other opportunities, but I assumed it would be very difficult to convince a company to hire me and then take 6.5 weeks off in my first couple months of working there. So my next option was to quit and find something when we returned. I'm usually a risk adverse person, but I was either too frustrated about my job to care or was so excited about the trip that the thought of quitting with nothing lined up didn't really scare me.

So after weeks of deliberation, budget discussions, and brainstorming we committed to the idea, booked our flights to and from Europe, and started filling up our itinerary. We made a list of everywhere we wanted to go and started mapping it all out. We initially wanted to keep our itinerary open so we could "fly by the seats of our pants", but I'm too much of a planner and we are trying to cover so much ground that we decided to book our accommodations for everywhere except for Croatia. We are using Airbnb for most of our overnight stays, but reserved a few hotels and B&Bs to mix it up. For the most part we will be traveling by train, ferry, and the occasional short flight, but will rent a car in Croatia so we have a little more freedom to go wherever we please. Because we are trying to pack so much into our trip, we've scheduled some relaxing stops throughout and decided to make some cities our home base for a few days and take day trips to towns close by. For someone who hates packing and unpacking as much as I do, moving around as much as we are is going to be a challenge...but I'm currently too excited to care.

Throughout the planning process, I decided that I would casually look for a new job (knowing the chances were slim, but that there was no harm in trying), but ultimately was planning on putting in my notice about a month before we left. And of course...the minute I decided that I was ok with quitting, some new job opportunities presented themselves. After a couple months of interviewing (while still not holding my breath) I got offered a new role at the same company (in a completely different side of the business), with a boss I've previously worked with, and a job description that seemed much more in line with what I was looking for in the next phase of my career.

So we're about a month out and everything has come together better than we imagined. The Euro is flat to the dollar (1USD = .92EUR as of 4/5/15!!), we don't have to worry about me finding a job when I get back, and it turns out that our itinerary overlaps with a couple of our friends' trips so we'll meet up with some familiar faces along the way.

We leave April 29th, flying directly from Seattle to Paris and return June 12, flying directly from London to Seattle. Here are all the stops we plan on making during our 6.5 weeks in Europe: