Category: About Us

I’m a little bit Type A, sort of an overachiever. I don’t really do well with relaxing, and I’m terrible at saying no. Why do one thing if you can do ten? I got my first job at 16 (well first job that was on the up and up), and I pretty much haven’t quit working since then. My senior year in college, I held down three jobs, volunteered with two Girl Scout troops, took 6 more hours than was necessary to graduate, and chose to write an honors thesis for my German degree (all while still managing to attend every single home baseball game…a part-time job in itself). To some this seems crazy, to me, well it’s normal. It’s just how I am.

So when we decided to take this trip, I immediately started thinking of how I could use it to further my freelance writing career. I began to gather ideas. I started long lists of newspaper and magazine markets and editors. I tentatively approached the one editor I could count on about a regular column. I pondered ways to make our blog into a popular and profitable site.

And then we went to Sweden. While there, I pitched a couple of ideas, finished a few articles I had already been working on, and continued gearing up for the big trip. And then one day, after running around town trying to get last minute photos for an article I had due and after trying to sort through a huge pile of information I’d accumulated for possible future stories when I really just wanted to go to the chocolate shop and indulge, I just decided no. No, I wasn’t going to pitch ideas, write articles, or try to spin every adventure and non-adventure into a story for which I could get paid.

You see, freelance writing, though yes more fun than working on an assembly line or sitting in front on a desk all day, is still work. It requires lots of research, lots of ground work, lots of networking, and generally results in lots of rejections or way too many impossible deadlines. This trip is my year off. My one year in which I don’t have to work. I just want to live it. I don’t want to not get to do what I want because an editor wants me to do something else. I don’t want to have to excuse myself from a lively conversation in the hostel kitchen because I have a deadline to meet. I don’t want to look at every experience, every place, every moment through the lens of “how can I pitch this.”

But every once in a while, maybe on a long bus ride when I have much too much time to think, I have one of my Type A panic attacks and wonder what I’m doing, why I’m wasting this opportunity. And then I get a wake-up call, like an email containing the final layout of my hiking book, which I just spent the past few days reviewing. While it was awesome to see everything finally in book form, I’m so glad to be done with it…and to not have any other work looming. Maybe one day in the future, I’ll be a freelance travel writer, but for now, you know what, I’m okay with just being a freelance me.

We’ve been asked a fair number of times, during the course of dinner at a hostel or speaking with various people around town, whether we’re “on vacation.” Now this is all meant very informally as a social icebreaker of sorts, but frankly, I find that question hard to answer. Almost as hard as the “so where are you from” question. After a five year residency, are we from DC now? Even though we’re not returning there? Is Theresa from Kentucky and I from Seattle? Either way leaves out the explanation for the Texas accent I’ve managed to acquire or why my passport says Sweden. Just answering that question leads to a half hour discussion … which I suppose, in the end, is the point.

Anyway, I digress. This question of vacation comes up a lot. And frankly, my answer is usually, no, we’re traveling. “On vacation,” implies a absolvement of major thought and an indulgance of relaxation. An escape from the busy-ness of life to refresh and renew. And believe me, I do love a good vacation. This, however, is not what we are doing.

We posted awhile back, when this whole plan was somewhat in its infancy, about the comforts of home versus the lure of the open road, so to speak. And what you come to quickly realize is how complicated things become when you don’t have those comforts. At home, you know where you will be sleeping at night. You know you have food in the fridge, or if not, you have solid knowledge of the network of nearby groceries, restaurants and fast food joints ready to serve you, and in addition, your means of getting there. You know how to use your shower, what key goes where to open your house, and whether you should put the toilet paper in the toilet or the trash bin. You have a system for cleaning your clothes, be it your own laundry machine (I yearn for the day I own my first washer and dryer … how simple life will be), or something nearby.

When traveling, none of these things are ever abundantly clear. Life is a neverending series of decisions, often dominated by where do we sleep tonight, what do we eat tonight, and how can I clean my clothes? It’s amazing how much time you can spend on these basic questions, especially when you are as over-analytical as Theresa and I are. Just this morning, we spent almost four hours at the grocery store, with another evening trip tonight (in our defense, we were planning our meals for our five day trip into Torres del Paine starting Thursday).

Now, I don’t want this to seem like a complaint, especially this week, as I truly enjoy every bit of what we are doing. But I do want to draw the distinction between vacation and travel. I think of our traveling as basically, what I do. It’s my “job” for the next year. This is what I put my energy and focus into. This is what I will need a vacation from every once in a while.