When you decide to leave the country for a year, you are left with a few decisions to make. Do you store your stuff? What travel credit card to you get? Who will you get for a phone card? What type of medical and travel insurance do I get? Where will we stay? Honestly, these are just the beginning of the mound of things we’ve had to address, and only about 2 weeks to do it in.

Isaac and I came up with the idea of an extended vagabonding trip in February 2015. We had sat and contimplated how on earth we would be able to afford 6 months (the length of time we had in mind at the time) without dipping too much into our savings. While we both wanted to travel, neither of us wanted to start off our marriage with a huge pile of debt. It was late one night that I discovered a work-exchange site called Workaway. We got started right away making our profile and flipping through countless hosts in France, Italy, and all accross Europe. How Workaway works is a family/business will create a “host” profile and list the work that is needed, as well as the room/board that is provided in exchange for x amount of hours per week. Sometimes it was 5 hours/day for 5 days/week for full room & board. Sometimes it was 3 hours/day for 5 days a week for just lodging. The contractural agreement varied as much as the needs per host. Some were as simple as helping around the house, while others had specific jobs like building a woodfire pizza oven. When we began contacting hosts, we struggled conveying the idea that Isaac and I wanted to still work in the states part-time online, while in a workaway setting. When hosts were accepting of the idea, Isaac and I began making arrangements. We found our first workaway in the Faroe Islands, and decided to stop in Iceland for a quick honeymoon.

We had used Skyscanner to score some cheap tickets to Iceland back in January, and while we hadn’t managed to plan the rest of our trip, it seemed to be the least of our worries. Luckily we had had enough foresight to get ourselves the Chase Sapphire Card before the wedding (helped us unlock the bonus points after spending a certain dollar amount). By the end of our first month traveling, we had made use of the travel insurance policy built into the card, avoided all the international transactions fees, AND had enough points to buy 2 tickets home from Australia at the end of our trip the next year. We have put as many bills on hold/seasonal standby/cancelled as we could (car insurance, cell phones, health insurance), got ourselves a travel health insurance plan, and have tied up all our other loose ends. We found a storage unit in Columbus, Ohio (where we knew we would want to eventually return to to live), and moved our bed back to my parent’s second residence in Toledo (in the event finding a job to facilitate the move back to Columbus should prove challenging). Our good friends Matt & Heidi kindly let us stow Isaac’s car at their place. After shooting my friends wedding, and hitching a ride back to Columbus with our friends Katie & Pat, we cleaned our apartment and are now ready to fly out.

It is definitely a bit surreal getting ready to leave… I have this feeling of being on the precipice of change, and am filled with anticipation. I can only imagine the types of experiences Isaac and I will discover and the people that we will meet. I feel like we haven’t prepared much for what is to come. I worry about if I’ve packed the right things, about how heavy my backpack is, and even about if using workaway will even work out okay. We’ve had a lot of prayers, and despite our hesitations, we are going to blaze forth. Ready or not world, here we come… 🙂