How I (Finally) Took My First Sabbatical
“Hey – What if we quit our jobs and traveled around the world for… three months?” I said this to my boyfriend as he was making coffee one day.
“That sounds like a good idea,” he said, as if I’d asked him if he wanted take-out for dinner.
Hold on, let me back up…
I spent the first year of Covid in deep denial that with the right approach to work-life balance, my 7am-12am job was sustainable. I had left a fast-track career in finance two years prior to join a unicorn start-up. I went from feeling like a cog in the wheel to feeling like I was building the next wheel. After a series of layoffs, a couple promotions, and in a tighter fundraising environment, the start-up had gone from being the most fun and empowering work experience I’d ever had to – somehow – a more draining experience than finance. Quite the feat.
For months, I had been hoping things would go back to what they were pre-pandemic. But it hit me one day – slogging through some particularly ridiculous work – that no matter what I did, I would need a break soon to come back to life. A real break. I could quit and try to go back to the same company, or I could quit and find a new job – but what was non-negotiable was that I needed time to stop moving at lightspeed.
The idea hit me then: a travel sabbatical.
It took about 2 seconds to convince my boyfriend, Nick, to take the risk with me. I pressed him after his blasé response.
“No really,” I said. “What if we really did that?” We started talking through our most fantastical travel dreams. Antarctica? Safaris in Africa? We quickly realized 3 months wasn’t enough to justify the risk of leaving our jobs. A year started to make more sense.
After that fateful conversation, I thought about leaving for our trip every single day. But we had huge hurdles to overcome before we could go. We spent the next two years planning, problem solving, and saving up.
I bucketed the prep work we did into three categories: logistics, saving up, and actual trip planning. All of these components were challenging in their own ways.
To figure out how to handle the lengthy list of logistical travel issues simply took perseverance. Most evenings I was researching something, relying on someone’s blogpost from many years prior about some nuanced topic. What could we do for medical insurance? Standard travel insurance didn’t cover long trips like this. How and when could we get travel vaccines? And how could we get them cheaply? I learned quickly that few health insurance plans actually covered them. The list went on. Our apartment, everything in it, our phones, the CATS… (Grandma would take exceptional care of them.)
Saving up was another battle. We had to get creative. Some sacrifices – like not getting each other presents when we used to splurge – were easy. Others – like deciding not to contribute to our 401ks for a period – took real reflection. And then others still – like leaving our apartment 9 months early to move somewhere cheaper for the summer, and then to couch surf at our parents’ places while working – felt weird. We stayed savvy though (and of course were very fortunate to be relatively high earners in the first place) and achieved our savings goal.
Actually planning where we’d go and what we’d do was surprisingly painful. We’d get excited about some destinations only to look up the travel advisories and decide under no circumstances were we willing to go. Or we’d find out a bucket list destination was far outside of our budget.
Plus, there was everything we didn’t know that we didn’t know. When I learned about monsoon seasons in southeast Asia, I realized I had to completely adjust our entire itinerary.
And hardest of all, we had to accept that less would be more. We had 60 countries we really (really, really) wanted to visit. But that would mean too many transit days and too little time to actually see each of them. Slowly and reluctantly, we whittled our itinerary down to just over 20 countries with bucket list activities planned all over the world – from going to Italian school in Italy to camping in the African bush for 2 months.
All in all, it was worth the grunt work, the frustration, and the wait. We went on a life-changing trip through Europe, Africa, southeast Asia, and South Africa. I’m convinced I learned life lessons normally taught in your 50s at the age of 30. I reset my relationship with work in a profound way and fell deeper in love with my amazing husband.
And we had a crazy amount of fun. We went to pizza school in Napoli, stood fifteen feet from rhinos in the wild, and watched purple sunsets over Torres del Paine. We found the best beaches in the world, confirmed our cats actually are the cutest kitties in the world, and redefined jet lag.
I’m a better person because of the trip. So is Nick. And my mission in life now is to help more Americans realize these trips are at least possible, however antithetical they are to the American hustle culture. If you’ve ever dreamed of taking a real break – not a vacation, but a true pause to reflect and enjoy life beyond work – I’m here to tell you it’s possible.
If only 23-year-old Maria could see me now. I wore a suit most days in New York and thought I was living the dream. Today, flip flops are my jam.
Follow along on my quest to help more people deliver on their travel dreams…