How To Avoid A Nervous Breakdown

In my last post I presented the problem: one month is too short a time to really enjoy travelling. After some thought, and some helpful advice, I've settled on a solution: spend THREE months travelling instead! (Some of you presented some more conservative - and more rational - alternatives. Too bad about my balls-to-the-wall attitude about this trip.)

Obviously, this approach comes with more than a few difficulties.

Difficulty #1: Money.

In food and lodging alone, a trip of this duration will cost about $3000 more than my shorter version. Add in little banalities like my rent back home, my cell phone, and paying back my student loans, and it comes up to about 6000 more buckaroos than I was originally planning on.

Fortunately, I currently have a great job that not only pays the bills, but allows me to work when and wherever I want. (I'm under contract building a web app to help people find outdoor adventures near them.) Contracting is the best. If only the halcyon days could last forever. Unfortunately, my current gig will be finished within the month. Which brings me to...

Difficulty #2: Timing.

The longer travel itinerary would require me to leave in October. This is for a couple of reasons. First, I need more time to save money. Second, you can only visit Antarctica during the austral summer, which lasts from November to February. Leaving in October would land me in Antarctica right when it's at its warmest. Perfect, right?

Only one little hang-up. Leaving in October leaves eight months of unemployment between the end of my current job and the moment my plane takes off from JFK. The problem should be pretty obvious: without a job, you can't live. And you certainly can't save up for a circumnavigation of the globe.

Easily solved, you say. Just get a job for the eight intervening months! Except that, in the software industry, salaried employees are expected to stay on board for at least two years from their hiring dates. If I say hasta la vista after eight months, my name is mud and I never work in New York again.

Solution: More Contract Work

But not this kind of work-from-home job.

I would really love to get a salaried, 9-5 kind of job right now. But it's simply not going to jive with the whole continent-hopping thing.

The long and short of it is that I need another job that is similar to my current one. It may be a long shot, but it may not. Yesterday I started putting out feelers on the job boards. I'm also in the middle of a redesign on my résumé website to improve its search engine optimization. Hopefully that will draw some interest. My pièce de résistance, however, is a JavaScript data framework that I developed over the holidays called GeniusJS. Hopefully, all of this, combined with a little ingenuity and a lot of pavement-pounding, will yield the 6-month contract/work-from-home kind of job that will make my voyage possible.

The Upside

The good news is that I'm now even more excited for the adventure ahead. And I've gotten some great new ideas, as well: first, to couch-surf my way as much as possible. Second, to travel by plane as little as possible. Additionally, if I can get the kind of job I need, I can spend three weeks at a time in each place - enough to live, to make friends, and to go on excursions along the way.

I'm so blessed to have friends and family that have already helped me a ton. They've pointed out resources for helping me get to Antarctica, given me great ideas for modes of travelling, and poured out lots of support. I'm going to make another appeal: if anyone needs a web developer for the short term (or for the long term and doesn't mind if he doesn't come into the office Oct-Dec), or knows of a friend who does, I'd love to hear about it.