And so it begins…

As I write this I am only days away from embarking on what promises to be an epic adventure.  My wife and I are about to begin our first foray into long term travel.  What makes this trip even more special for us is that we are bringing our 7 year old Labrador Retriever Maverick with us.  4-1/2 months, 16 countries, and sure to be countless memories.  It has taken years of preparation, discipline and planning to get to this point and I can’t believe it is about to happen!

Our journey begins in Brooklyn NY when we board the Queen Mary 2.  The last active ocean liner in the world.  Yeah, we’re traveling old school.  Que the Celine Dion, but let’s stay afloat.  My brother-in-law keeps sending us articles about big shipwrecks so maybe he wants us to sink?  I’m pondering that one. 

The seeds of this trip were planted back in 2020 during the depths of the pandemic.  Stuck in perpetual lockdown I came to learn what I truly missed experiencing.  There was the obvious like friends and family, but things I would have expected to miss more like attending live sporting events and concerts or playing hockey (my favorite sport in every way) were not at the forefront.  Instead it kept coming back to travel.  

During the 2010s my wife Amy and I started our international travel adventures.  Tentatively dipping our toes into the continent of Europe.  As the decade progressed our enthusiasm for travel grew.  I obviously didn’t know how much until the pandemic rudely cut our travel time to zero.  Back then we were pretty restricted in what we could do.  Amy was a teacher and so we could only travel during peak tourist times that bring peak prices and peak crowds.  My travel hacking skills were rudimentary at best providing little relief for the high costs.  We would manage 2 weeks internationally in the summer and a week somewhere closer to home during winter school vacation.  I continued to crave more.

The onset of the pandemic in 2020 forced me to cancel a summer trip to Switzerland and Italy.  It was a real bummer.  As things got worse and travel as an escape became more and more of a pipedream we stumbled across a bunch of YouTube channels featuring people traveling the world full time and documenting their adventures.  While others were binging garbage like Tiger King we were binging Kara & Nate (https://www.youtube.com/karaandnate, these guys played a big part in inspiring us to travel long term and travel beyond Europe).  Confession, we did watch Tiger King but I still regret burning those hours of my limited time on this earth.

As we consumed more and more content my appetite to travel grew.  Not just vacations, I craved long term travel.  It seemed like one of those things we would have to hope to be healthy enough to do at 65.  We had two big roadblocks.  One was work.  I didn’t think it was really a factor for me.  Like many I was working full time remotely.  Even pre-pandemic I spent more than 50% of my time working remotely.  I could theoretically work from anywhere.  Amy was a different story.  Teaching remotely was not going to be a thing if/when the world recovered.  The other blocker was our dog Maverick.  We don’t have kids, so perhaps we are a bit too attached.  I don’t think we could bring ourselves to leave him for months and months at a time.  That’s a lot different than a week or two.  As I said before, it seemed like a retirement thing but I REALLY did not want to wait.

During this period of time and even pre-pandemic I started to feel a growing discontent with what we’ll call the normal American middle class life experience.  Back then I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was bothering me.  Now I can look back and tell you exactly what my problem was.  I was tired and bored with the consumerism trap that is modern America.  I was in my 40s and so I had seen the same cycle play out over and over.  Buy the newest TV, so exciting!  Two years later it’s practically obsolete.  Time for a new one!  Buy the new car I want, so exciting!  Two years later it’s just “the car”.  Thankfully I was smart enough to keep those for 10 years.  Buy a house, so exciting!  A few years later.  Wouldn’t some more space be nice?  Let’s buy a bigger house!  And so the wheel spins, around and around.  Banks and corporations separating you from the money that you give up almost all your free time to earn.  

This was spilling into my work as well.  The endless meetings and workplace politics that after so many years you recognize as a repeating cycle slowly burning your life force away.  There has to be something better!

This underlying discontent and restlessness combined with the external factors of the pandemic led to my discovery of the concept of Financial Independence, or FI for short.  It is brilliant yet unbelievably simple.  We are conditioned as working class and middle class Americans to go to school and get your diplomas, then work for 40+ years and retire at 65 if you saved enough.  Why 65?  Because that was the life expectancy of the average American when social security was enacted.  Literally work (and most importantly spend) until you die.  Financial Independence challenges that concept at its core.  Save more than you make by as much as possible.  Invest that money wisely and let it compound over time.  Eventually you will have the assets required to fund your lifestyle without working.  How soon that happens depends on how much you save and how little you spend.  I’ll get more into Financial Independence in future posts but that is the high level concept.  

I was in the perfect headspace to dive head first into Financial Independence.  This was the key to unlocking the freedom to do what I wanted, and what I wanted to do was travel!  As the shackles of lockdown began to loosen their grip with the advent of the vaccines the possibility of travel began to look realistic again.  We started slowly with 1-2 month road trips that included our dog Maverick.  He has proven to be a tremendous traveler.  He can ride endless hours in the car and adapts to new accommodations with no issues at all.  I wanted so badly to take him with us beyond North America but flying him in the belly of an airliner seemed too risky.  Meanwhile, embracing Financial Independence ultimately allowed Amy to retire early from teaching and thus removing one of our roadblocks.

At this point I started researching alternatives and found the Queen Mary.  Amazing!  But we are talking about a ship that crosses the Atlantic maybe 8-9 times a year and can accommodate a max of 24 animals and more than half of those accommodations wouldn’t fit a dog Maverick’s size.  I reached out to Cunard (the cruise line that operates the Queen Mary) and discovered that I needed to talk to one of their “Vacation Planners” and coordinate with them to book a kennel the day they release a new batch of scheduled crossings.  2 years in advance!  I had no idea what our life would look like in 2 years.  I like to book things early but this was taking it to another level.  I had to try though so I got a vacation planner and coordinated with them on the release day.  I had to submit a list of preferred dates and I tried to be as flexible as possible.  It was extra nerve racking because we needed to get an outbound kennel and a return kennel.  As you might have guessed it worked out and not only that but we got our first choice of dates.

That’s really only the tip of the iceberg.  Traveling with a pet to a foreign country is filled with red tape (except for Canada and Mexico).  That is something else I’ll go into more detail in a future post.  I haven’t left yet as I write this so I’m still hoping it all works!

All of that brings us to today.  The precipice of a trip that I changed my life to make possible and I know will be something I will remember for all the rest of my days.  I hope you’ll join us as I post updates from the road, but even if you don’t I will continue to write because I want to be able to look back and remember the details of this great adventure as a family.

If you are interested in more information on the Queen Mary 2 kennels check out this link: https://www.cunard.com/en-us/cruise-ships/queen-mary-2/queen-mary-2-kennels

Cheers and happy travels!