Sunday lunch with Karen at the Waggon & Horses: Roast beef, horseradish sauce, Sandra's Yorkshire puddings and an excellent bottle of Rioja. Normally, I’d be pretty content with this. Normally, I’d eat my pudding and think life doesn’t get any better that this. But today was different. This wasn’t just another Sunday lunch. This was the Sunday lunch were we had agreed to make some pretty fundamental changes to our lifestyle, and as a consequence, took the first step towards our ‘Overland Adventure’.Karen and I moved out to Steeple Morden, an idyllic village in South Cambridgeshire, a couple of years ago. Instantly, we achieved many of the things in life that we had always dreamed after: A lovely house, beautiful surroundings, great opportunities for outdoor activities, a sense of community, a new set of like minded friends. The only blot on this seemingly perfect landscape was that we both remained in relatively high pressure careers and so the time we had available to enjoy this utopia was limited.
But today was to change all of that. After much soul searching (and drinking of Rioja!) we decided to put our careers on hold and to spend our time in the pursuit of much more rewarding activities – the first of which was to be a period of extended travel.
To date, Karen and I had been very lucky. We had been on some wonderful holidays to far flung places across the globe: America, Canada, Australia & South Africa to name but a few. Fantastic and memorable though these trips were – they were just ‘holidays’ rather than ‘cultural experiences’: Two to three weeks at most – and because we wanted to ‘see’ as much of our destinations as possible – usually performed at break-neck speed with very little time to really ‘understand’ the culture and the people that we met along the way.
The first time that we ever discussed the concept of travelling was back in 2002. We had just returned from a three week trip to Hong Kong, Australia and Bali; covering as usual, about as much as it is possible to do in three weeks without suffering from stress or sleep depravation! When we returned, we started to reminisce about the holiday saying things like, “Wouldn’t it have been great to have camped out at Ayres Rock”, “Wouldn’t it have been great to spend more time talking to those Balinese farmers” or “Wouldn’t it have been great just to spend an afternoon in Perth watching the world go by!”.
It took a long time though for those early ideas of travelling to come to fruition. As most people tend to, Karen and I could always find a thousand reasons not to embark on such an adventure – “I just need to finish this project at work – then we can talk about it”. “We just need to get a bit more money behind us”. “Let’s see what happens to the economy next year”. Indeed, it took us 6 years to realise that the number of reasons not to do a trip like this never decreases. If you think about it long enough and hard enough you can always find new reasons to convince yourself that now is not the right time to achieve your ambitions.
Of course, we know now that for those six years we were having the wrong conversations. We would devote our time and energy to discussing why we shouldn’t do it rather than why we should. And that’s why the 29th June was different: For the first time ever our conversation focussed on the reasons why we should go travelling and why we should do it at this point in our lives.
So that was the hard decisions made. All that was left to do now was to work out where to go, when to go and for how long. Simple.
