The Wandering Koi

Sometimes I think that a year (maybe more like 10 months) sounds like a really long time, but most other times it seems so inadequate to cover any meaningful portion of this enormous Earth. I needed to find a way to start to narrow down where we would be visiting during our travels.

My first thoughts were selfish. I truly hate being cold. You can try to convince me that I am just not dressing appropriately, but I have really, really tried to embrace winter (it’s so beautiful!) and still feel just miserable. So, my first guiding principle was to avoid winter by visiting the northern hemisphere during their spring/summer/fall and the southern hemisphere during their spring/summer/fall. We are skipping winter during our year of travel.

Next, while our daughter will be close to adult sized when we set off, I wanted to have good health care available for the majority of our trip just in case something catastrophic happened like she decided to get appendicitis. This limited us to more developed countries.

I read loads of travel books, bucket lists, and blogs. I followed others who were already on their own travel adventures on Instagram. I listened to podcasts about travel and talked anyone’s ear off who was willing to listen and share their own travel stories. I started collecting interesting places in my “Sabbatical Planner” as hand-written lists and storing screen shots from my phone in a special folder of travel possibilities. As I started to get more specific about exact plans, I started to pin locations on an app called Wanderlog using their free service. This allowed me to get a better idea of how close areas of interest were to one another.

I made a calendar of interesting events that I would love to see. Bird nestings, whale migrations, festivals, flower bloomings, religious celebrations to see if there was a general time when it would make sense to be in a specific area of the world to maximize those seasonal events. While this was not particularly fruitful for me, it could make more sense for you.

The list of places I want to visit, things I want to see and events I want to experience may never be complete. I rather like it that way.