Travel Story – How Jack got the strength from Aimee to take the leap of faith into a life of travel

One of us had, once upon a time, all but surrendered the idea of travelling. Instead he got a degree, pursued a career and started to settle for that before eventually changing his mind.

The other was the one who changed his mind by never giving up on her dream. We’ve since quit our jobs and are on our way round the globe.

We’re Jack and Aimee, 25 and 23, from rural Lincolnshire in the UK. It’s a very small part of the world but one its residents seem happy to stay in. We love it, and will likely return one day, but there’s much more to see first and we’re not coming back until we’ve found it all.

As a youngster I was always sociable enough and enjoyed being a boy getting up to all the stupid boy things boys get up to. I was, however, a bit of a geek as well – I went through phases of loving choo-choo trains, dinosaurs, space, nature and eventually built an unexplainable fascination with maps. It could be as small as my home county of Lincolnshire, UK, or maps of the world – it didn’t matter. I loved them.

One thing that interests me in particular in learning about the big wide world is the different cultures and customs from all its four corners and looking at maps to see how things change over very short distances or remain constant for thousands of miles. Through this interest, I slowly built up a desire to see as much of it for myself as possible.

While I was 18 I spent a year slogging away in the local pub between school and university while many of my friends did indeed go travelling. It made me excruciatingly jealous to see photos of them on social media in South East Asia, Australia, NZ, Africa, Europe, South America – everywhere I wasn’t. I on the other hand never left the UK.

It’s very easy to get envious of other peoples’ lives through Facebook and the like and it actually became quite destructive to my mood. Since then I did try to get away a few times. Three failed attempts were made to get into Camp America (largely because of the upfront costs). Twice I drew up different lists at different times of places I’d visit while travelling across Europe by train. None came to fruition, and I became even more down about the whole situation with every hurdle life threw in front of me.

Two things changed that. The first is far less exciting and, in hindsight, I don’t think the correct way to deal with wanderlust.

In a pub in Lincoln I met an Australian couple and asked them what brought them out to Lincoln. It turns out they’d spent 7 months travelling from their home country through Aisa, North Africa and Europe by train and boat. Their plan from there was to tour the UK, sail to the Americas and trek their way down from Canada to Chile before sailing home across the pacific.

This sounded right up my alley and, given they were in their 70s, sort of showed me that maybe there was no rush to get travelling. Yes that meant settling for careers, mortgages, family and whatever else would come my way in life instead of doing what I really dreamt of but I will say this – it was a massive weight off my shoulders not feeling such urgency to get away.

I learnt to accept that long-term travel might one day come my way and I’d be all the better for being patient. There’s no doubt that for some people, like them, this is the correct approach.

Then something interesting happened…

It was about four months later – November 2014 – that something else happened though. Something that very quickly eradicated this new patient outlook and replaced it with an altogether more active one. It was then that this single, interested man met a single, interesting woman by the name of Aimee.

During our first meeting we talked rather a lot over the space of a weekend away for a joint friend’s birthday and I learnt three things about her:

1. She has the same endearing and frightfully nerdy adoration for nature that I do;
2. She worked tirelessly for the NHS at the time;
3. And her deepest desire above all others was to see as much as the world as possible.

In time I really got a sense that this was all she ever wanted to do. She even splashed out on a big fancy backpack in preparation for the travelling she would one day do without even having planned anything. That’s how certain she was she’d do it.

I had to face the truth that she would set off on her travels whether I wanted to join her or not.

Although she’d worked tirelessly to save for an adventure she and I became much closer and spoke at length about the disparity in our travel goals. While I was ready to be more patient and had almost given up on the idea of doing it while I was young, this stubborn madam refused to be bowled into compromising her dreams. I complain about her being stubborn a lot but if she wasn’t she too might have surrendered to ‘real life’.

In Summer 2015 she went to Barcelona and Valencia for a week’s solo travel and, despite one or two mishaps (inevitable on your first trip alone) she loved every minute. I had to face the truth that she would set off on her travels whether I wanted to join her or not. At this point I’d grown very fond of the little twirp and I think she liked me too (she even told me once that she did). This, of course, gave me just one option.

For the next two years I saved what I could, switching through three different jobs to find something that would help me earn the money I needed, while Aimee did the same. In the last of these three jobs I signed a temporary cover on the basis of maternity leave, which ended August 2017. The perfect excuse to go at last.

If I could give my slightly younger self any advice it would be ‘get a move on with it’.

If I could give my slightly younger self any advice it would be ‘get a move on with it’. No doubt I could have gone much sooner but I understand it’s very difficult to adopt the mindset of just dropping everything and leaving unless you’ve actually done it. However, if you’re thinking about doing it yourself, I say ‘do it’ I really, truly implore you to follow your heart. Here’s why…

At the time of writing we’re currently in Split, Croatia, having travelled by train from Amsterdam through all these destinations over the past four weeks:

• Ghent
• Brugge
• Paris
• Munich
• Innsbruck
• Venice
• Bled
• Ljubljana
• Zagreb

This has taken 4 weeks so far. We’ve still got Hvar, Dubrovnik and Kotor to do in the next 11 days as well – 14 destinations in total. That perfect Interrail trip I agonised over so hard has become a reality and believe when I say it has been far, far more interesting, exciting, enlightening, inspiring and empowering thing I’ve ever done. Sharing it with Aimee has made it infinitely more magical too.

What happens when we’ve done that? Next we have a one way flight to NZ with a working holiday visa arranged already. Ideally this will lead to Australia, Asia, USA and some considerable time in destination number one South America, before hopefully continuing to visit new places around the world until we drop dead. After all these difficult years of dreaming, compromising, giving up and dreaming again we’re finally doing what we set out to do.

The biggest lesson we learnt in all this is there’s never going to be a perfect time to make the leap of faith into a life of travel.

The biggest lesson we learnt in all this is there’s never going to be a perfect time to make the leap of faith into a life of travel. All we changed in stepping from 9-5 jobs to this new existence was the willpower to say ‘sod it’ and finally get round to arranging the first steps in our adventure.

—

Jack (and Aimee of course!).