Kicking off the planning
Traveling 9 months seems really daunting
In February 2024, Marshall agreed with his employer that he would take a nine-month sabbatical starting that October. October made sense from the perspective of his work; he needed time to make sure his team was set up to succeed in his absence and to transition some of his responsibilities to others. But it also made a lot of sense from the perspective of the travel that we wanted to do. So how did we decide to start in the fall?
Introducing our ~ Aspirational Travel ~ Google Sheet
Word of warning, I’m a big user of Google Sheets and planning an overview for 9 months of travel is no different than planning the individual day to day adventures.
If you’re not interested in the total breakdown of how we created this sheet, here is a TLDR
List all the places that you could possibly conceive of being interested in going to. This was a surprisingly good list for us to start with.
Identify which months were ideal to go to those locations (Use ChatGPT!)
Rank! and if you want to be cute, look at the correlations of your categorizations
Pick a 9 month period that encapsulates most of your Tier 1 destinations and voila!
Our Framework
If you want to get into the nitty gritty, we tackled this process with a couple of things in mind:
Prioritize places we couldn’t go during a “normal” vacation when we’re employed
Go to places that would generally take longer than 1-2 weeks
Prioritize places where it’d be harder to travel with a child.
I’m not pregnant and have no plans on being pregnant anytime soon but it’s going to be harder to travel when we have a kid and it’ll be definitely harder to do the more adventurous travels when we have a kid. Imagine doing a 9 day liveaboard scuba trip or go to Antarctica with a 1 year old in tow 😳
Go to those places during the ideal season.
Because we have a lot more flexibility, we should go to the places when the weather is good and it’s relatively peak tourist season (or at least we’re aiming for shoulder season for most destinations).
This also helps with packing — we don’t need to pack and be prepared for as many seasons since we’re hoping to travel with minimal luggage and minimal stops back home to New York New Jersey.
The World is Our Oyster
It truly was, and one Saturday night (so wild 🤘🏼), we spent 3 hours compiling a list of all the places we wanted to go. Some resources to get the neurons firing include:
this was the most useful link…from a home decor site website?
Making a list of all countries (this one is in spreadsheet format) and just marking things off
Looking at some travel influencer’s pages to see where they’ve gone. Currently fans of @chelseakauai, @claireandpeter, @laxtoluxury, @briankelly, @samkolder, etc.
We then ranked into 3 buckets:
MUST DO - If we don’t do this, what’s the point of 9 months of travel?
EH - We’ll probably hit this destination later in our lives as a regular destination but if we can squeeze it in, great
PASS - I actively don’t want to go here during these 9 months
And calculated the “average rank” per month to help us figure out when we wanted to take the 9 months off. We were pretty surprised that there wasn’t as big of a difference in months as we had anticipated. April/May/June were the least favorable (makes sense since Europe is great in the summer and we’ve been to Europe/ can go to Europe more easily). I was more surprised that the correlation of ranks between Marshall and me was only 0.42. I thought it’d be a lot higher but Dubai, Thailand, Maldives, Seychelles, and Vietnam were the places that threw off our correlation the most. Our ideal proposal was to leave in July and return March, but taking into account some of the practical aspects of Marshall’s work, October made a lot of sense and was still pretty close to optimal according to our spreadsheet. And so..
🎉 We have our travel dates: Oct 1, 2024 - July 1, 2025! 🎉
