I'm about to do something insanely stupid, and I need your help.

In My Humble Opinion
41

Is this just a regular savings account, or are you talking about wiping your actual retirement accounts and taking the penalties? One is a lot more cringe-inducing than the other.

I’d like to second the notion to do either Peace Corps or teaching English abroad. You can do both of them with little to no outlay on your part - in fact, selling all your stuff beforehand would be great for you because you won’t have to worry about storage.

You won’t make much money, but you won’t hemorrhage it like you would traveling through western Europe.

On the other hand: do it for all the people* who are jealous of anyone who picks up does lunatic crap like this.

*me

42

How close are you to getting your degree? I’m not saying don’t do it, but once you lose your momentum on that, you may never get it back (and it is almost guaranteed to cost more later on). If you’re very close, I’d say finish the degree then go the Peace Corps or teaching English abroad route.

43

It sounds like something is calling to you and enough events in your life have aligned to bring you to this point. It also seems like you’ve thought this out a fair amount. I’ve had a friend who picked up and moved to Japan, and he’s enjoyed his experience. Next he will visit Germany to redo it all over again.

If you have enough faith in your ability to get back and restart your life, here, should all things fail, then I’d strongly consider it. Only live once.

Interestingly enough, I was reading an applicable quote the other day, here.

44

Cracker: Eurotrash girl. Sorry, couldn’t resist. Good luck with your trip.

45

Pack your bags, go to the Himalayas, meditate, sing, dance, drink endless cups of spicy tea, find soulmates, maybe a Guru, reflect on life, and maybe you’ll find a real one.

46

If you anticipate that five/ten/twenty years down the road you’ll look back and think “I wish I would have done it.” I would go for it. You only get one shot at life. This isn’t a dress rehearsal.

47

I’d say go for it, or risk always wishing you had.

Working is difficult- most of the Europeans, Aussies and Kiwis who do the whole ‘gap year’ thing are on a Working Holiday Visa, but the US isn’t signed up for the scheme, and you’d be over the max age for them anyway. I stayed a year each in NZ and Australia on them.

There are ‘work for accommodation’ options, which don’t require a work visa, such as 'WWOOF, which, despite the name, and the description on the website, isn’t really just farming- I spent a week in a small pottery, for example, and stayed with some great people (as well as one lunatic, oh well…). Also a lot of hostels will do a work for a free bed scheme, informally, if you get desperate and are pretty reliable (I painted a room for a free week in one once).

Couchsurfing is also good, though flakes and the very odd do abound sometimes. If you’ve not really used it, there’s often groups for the area/city as well as individual listings, which you can join to get backup or emergency hosts. If you can, I’d suggest hosting a few people before you go, to get good reviews on there, and to get good current tips.

I would not get a car unless you do manage to get a job, and settle in one place for at least a few months. They’re great if you’re staying in one country, but if you’re crossing boundaries you can get into trouble with insurance and different requirements too easily. Besides, fuel is hella expensive over here. Consider liftsharing websites, if you’re not willing to go full on bum and hitchhike.

Oh, and if you wind up in the Southwest of England, PM me- I can’t guarantee I’ll have space, but I’m sure I can find someone who does! :smiley:

48

Do it. My biggest regret (and that of many people I know) is that I didn’t do this when I could. I’m about your age, but I’m married with kids. We travel a lot, but two weeks at a time in Spain is not the same as a year around the world.

Here is a book about this type of travel, will get into the details you’ll need

49

I’ll also encourage you to do it.

I’ve been in on a few hiring decisions and people who have played on elite sports teams, created cultural items (written a book, produced a play, etc), or travelled extensively always stick out in a positive way.

50

This above is why I said it is a bad idea. It will just put your ultimate goal on hold for at the very least the year you are gone. You will also be a year behind career wise and will have spent a lot of money. Sure it would be a great adventure, but it’s an adventure for an 18-20 something year old, not a 35 year old who wants a wife and kids.

51

My advice is to think carefully about the pros and cons of all the possibilities and then do what you truly want to do.

I was born into a family of staid, middle-class professionals. My parents and most other people simply assumed that the path of a staid, middle-class professional was the correct path, and that anyone who chose a different path must have something wrong with them. After graduating from college, my brother chose to travel the world, taking low-status jobs from time to time and spending most of the money he had. I kept my traveling more modest, staying in graduate school and traveling only during the summer, and keeping most of my money. But I think both of us would agree that the time we spent traveling was some of the most significant in our lives and some of the best.

Each of us only has one lifetime on this earth, so it shouldn’t be spent trying to endlessly conform to the expectations of the society around us. Do what truly makes you happy, but be aware of the consequences of your decisions and accept those consequences.

52

My wife and I did something similar. In 2002, we sold most of our belongings, put the rest in storage at my dad’s house, got rid of our apartment and bought a one-way ticket to Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia.

11 years later we are still overseas much of the time. I’d go for it… as long as you have a good financial cushion ($100K is a good number)

53

According to who? Have you spent time on the road? While your average trashy Euro-hostel may be full of gap year kids, youngsters generally don’t have the funds to finance major trips. In even slightly more adventurous locations, the traveler population skews much older. You see a lot of mid-career-crisis types, recent divorcees going YOLO, couples doing one last hurrah before having kids, and a fair amount of empty nesters. Thirty-five is a bit older than average at any given hostel, but not at all unusual or uncommon.

Missing a year in a dead-end job isn’t missing much. Missing a year after a major breakup isn’t missing much. And, besides, half the people you meet are female pretty much everywhere you go. Romance is not exactly uncommon on the traveller circuit.

I was a little unclear from the OP if he had his bachelor’s or not. If not, that will make working legally much harder, as the average English teaching gig will definitely want a degree. There are organizations that will hire you without one, and people do freelance, but it’s not very secure and the last thing you want is to be fined or blacklisted for a visa violation.

54

I like Hasbroek’s The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World, and he provides a lot of advice on how to travel cheap (in addition to being a traveler, Hasbroek is a travel agent who specializes in arranging these kinds of trips for others) and how to stay relatively sane as well as deal with emergencies and communication issues.

I haven’t done a trip on the same scale, but I did do a six week solo trip to Okinawa a couple of years ago, with my shitty mainland Japanese skills and a folding kayak in tow. It was a great trip which allowed me good alone-to-think-about-my-life time and a couple thousand pictures of some of the most beautiful scenery on the planet, as well as a couple of irregular pen pals. It didn’t revolutionize my life, but I do return to it in my mind whenever things become too intolerable at work or elsewhere, and I ache for the time when I will have enough free time to return.

Oh, holy ****ing christ on a cracker, being “a year behind career wise” is the most underwhelming reason not to do have an adventure anyone could come up with. Unless you are a world class researcher who is getting half a dozen papers a year published in Nature, Science, or JAMA, you are not going to miss that year in the scheme of things. And you are honestly going to have a lot more to talk on a date with a potential wife with a year’s worth of travel than a year’s worth of filling out TPS cover sheets. Hell, you might be like a friend of mine and find your wife on the trip, and have an interesting cross-cultural marriage with an awesome partner who shares your perspective on life. And as for being 35 rather than 18-20, this just means that you are going to bring more maturity and not just spend every night partying away in the clubs that cater to the hostel crowd (although you shouldn’t shy away from that when and if it appeals to you, either).

I guess the only caution I would offer that no matter where you go, there you are; unless you get a vision of Buddha or something, it probably isn’t going to radically change your life, but you will get a greater perspective and I guarantee you will lose any anxiety about walking into situations where you may not fully understand the culture or language. I think of all of the responses in this thread, even sven has offered the most complete and informed, especially in looking for travel expenses that give you the best bang for the buck.

The only other thing I would offer is don’t be afraid to spend a few days here and there exploring away from anything remotely touristy; most of my best adventures are spent walking around the non-tourist areas and walking into random restaurants which don’t have English translations on the menu. Part of any real adventure is the uncertainty; a day spent walking around and not looking for anything in particular may well end up being more fruitful than a day spent hopping buses from one overhyped attraction to another.

Stranger

55

I honestly must be blinded by my own wanderlust, because* I cannot see a downside.* Even if he gets set back financially and it takes him years to rebound, it would still have been worth it in my opinion. Dooooo Itttttt.

56

After seven years of college attendance (said to be at the full-time level), the OP has yet to complete his degree. After five years of working at what he percieves as a stagnant job, he believes the only way to get a better job is to wait around for someone to die (rather than, perhaps, show a little hustle and leverage his current job to get a better job with a different employer). I believe that his military service, which he adverted to upthread, also ended prematurely.

Overall, I’m getting a bit of a low frustration tolerance vibe, which is ill-suited for traveling/working abroad, as that is a very frustrating enterprise that takes a good blend of being able to persevere towards one’s objectives while rolling with the inevitable punches.

And I get this sense that this wanderlust is borne not out of genuine desire to make this work (he stated that for a long time, he postponed travelling until he got his degree — I am troubled that, despite his statements as to how much he wants to travel, that was not enough of an inducement to get him to finish his degree) but rather a typical LFT response: walk away and see if someone else will sove the problem for you.

I think a lot of distinctions can be drawn between your experience (which was identifying what your career values were, finding a career path that aligns with those values, and then undertaking the educational and professional commitments to get yourself in that career) versus the OP’s plan to sell everything, show up to the Irish border with no place to stay and nowhere to work, burn through his savings, have his parents repatriate him, and then go back to work, I guess (and at what job? if this little misadventure does not inculcate any new job skills, we can only suppose it will a job much like the one he has now).

I also get the sense that he is more than a little starry-eyed about things. Sure, he doesn’t like his dull office job stateside, but why does he think part-time work washing pint glasses in Dublin — work he will have to struggle to get given his status and high European unemployment! — will be more satisfactory?

All in all, I think the difference can be reduced to this epigram: You were building a career based around interacting with foreign cultures; he is running away from a job and wants a year-long vacation that he can ill afford.

57

I will disagree with this. A 34 year old is definitely out of the norm for the hostel.

As to the OP, if you have a burning desire to see the world, then a year long trip is great. If you think it is a panacea that will transform your life into something super awesome, then it will be a mistake. You will come back and find out that your life is pretty much the same.

I’d definitely recommend traveling to Asia over Europe, as well. It’s much cheaper and is a much different experience than Europe.

58

Where? I stay in hostels on a semi-regular basis–both because they are inexpensive (even though I could afford more expensive accommodations, if I just need a bed for the night and will be gone first thing in the morning, why am I paying for an entire room) and because they tend to be more fun than hotelling, and I see people from chlidren through retirement age adults. The median probably skews toward the college gradaute age, but he’s not going to be awkwardly out of place at 35.

As for “wasting a year” at achieving the “ultimate goal”, I guess it depends on what goal that is. If your ultimate goal is to rack up eight figures in your 401(k) and retire early at 58 to watch television for ten hours a day then yeah, spending a year as a vagabond probably isn’t getting toward that goal. But really, actually enjoying life while having the freedom and physical mobility to get the most out of it makes far more sense than pushing it off until you are at the point that the biggest adventure you can enjoy is taking a good piss. So many people I’ve worked with have spent their lives working hard to get to retirement only to meet their disillusionment. I’m not saying abandon all responsibility and indulge every whim, but a year out of seventy-odd spent as a dedicated tourist instead of being a paper pusher or i-banker is part of a life well spent.

Stranger

59

I would suggest that the OP get off the beaten track… try to spend a minimum amount of time in Western Europe… it’s expensive and you’ll tend to have more interesting experiences elsewhere.
By off the beaten track, I am thinking places like Albania, Oman, Laos, Rwanda etc. I’ve been to all of these and they are great places to spend some time without much influence from mass tourism.

The further you get from mass tourism, the cheaper things will be and the more contact you’ll have with real day-to-day life of the locals.

I’ve been to 85 countries and the most interesting ones have been where nobody goes: Syria (off limits for now), Iran (definitely try to go there), Yemen (probably off limits right now).

60

Just to comment on a suggestion made upthread - it will be extremely difficult to get ESL jobs in East Asia without a degree. You won’t have the right kind of visa, for one thing. Also, the market is saturated at the moment, so even with a degree you would find it difficult, particularly if you aren’t willing to commit for at least six months. Getting any kind of part-time work in Asia as a foreigner will be difficult, I think.

My SO traveled around Australia for a year and did odd jobs to fund his traveling. Everything from selling cell phones door to door to working for Cirque du Soleil. And I’ve met people in Ireland who manage to get odd jobs at B&Bs and restaurants right before tourist season hits. So it’s definitely doable.