We Had No Plan: How We Prepared to Travel the World

If you have read my previous posts, you already know that deciding to quit my job and travel the world was something I had been thinking about for a long time. The decision itself was a big one, but once we actually decided to do it, I realized that there was another problem: we had to figure out how to make it happen. Where would we go first? Which country would we start in? Which city? How long would we stay? And what would come after that? Somehow, we had managed to make the decision to travel the world without having a real plan for how we were going to do it. We kept talking about different routes and possibilities, but it took us a surprisingly long time to actually sit down and plan everything properly. In reality, we only started actively planning about three or four weeks before we left. There were smaller things we had taken care of before, but even two weeks before our departure, we still hadn’t booked our flight. Looking back, I can definitely say that this was not the smartest financial decision. The flight ended up being much more expensive than it could have been if we had booked earlier. At the time, though, we were so focused on everything that was changing around us that planning every detail of our journey didn’t feel as urgent as it probably should have.

Naturally, people around us had a lot of questions. Where exactly are you going? When are you leaving? When are you coming back? What happens if you don’t like a place? And, probably most often, isn’t it dangerous? The truth was that we couldn’t give them very specific answers because we didn’t know them ourselves. We could say that we had an idea of where we wanted to go, but we weren’t following a fixed route with every flight, accommodation and destination already booked. And when people asked whether we were scared of travelling to certain countries, our answer was usually something like, “Yeah, probably, but it’s kind of dangerous everywhere.” It wasn’t meant to dismiss the risks of travelling. Of course, there are places where you need to be more careful, and travelling responsibly means knowing your surroundings and understanding that not every destination is the same. But at the same time, the idea that you can completely eliminate danger by simply staying in the familiar has never really made sense to me. We wanted to travel with an open mind, learn about the places we visited and figure things out along the way rather than letting fear decide where we could and couldn’t go.

For me, however, the hardest part of preparing for long-term travel wasn’t really choosing countries or figuring out a route. It was the uncertainty that came with leaving the life I knew. Jay was working in Uganda while I was still in Germany doing my last night shifts before my job ended in April. We were both dealing with completely different parts of the same transition, and suddenly the life we had been living was coming to an end. There was also the very practical question of money. You can dream about travelling the world all you want, but eventually you have to ask yourself how you’re actually going to afford it. That was probably one of the biggest things I was thinking about. I knew I could always work again. I had already worked in many different areas and had learned that I could adapt and find something to do wherever life took me. Still, leaving a stable income behind and spending money on something as uncertain as travelling felt scary. I am also a person who likes structure. I like knowing what is happening next and having some kind of plan to follow. So the idea of leaving with only part of a plan and figuring out the rest as we went was very unfamiliar to me.

Jay was much better at accepting that uncertainty. Whenever I started overthinking everything, he would remind me that we would figure it out. “We’ll figure it out.” It became one of those simple sentences that somehow made things feel a little less overwhelming. He wasn’t pretending that everything would be easy or that nothing could go wrong. He just trusted that we would deal with whatever happened when we got there. And maybe that was something I needed to learn too. I had spent so much time thinking that I needed to have everything figured out before I could make a big decision, when the whole point of this journey was that we couldn’t possibly know everything in advance. Eventually, we stopped waiting for the perfect plan. We booked the flight, finished the last practical things, packed our bags and left. And I don’t think either of us fully understood how real it was until we were actually on our way. There was excitement, of course, but there was also fear. We had left behind our jobs, our routines and everything that had felt familiar, and now we had to find out whether this life we had imagined would actually work in reality.

Looking back, I think not having a perfect plan was one of the most terrifying parts of starting this journey, especially for someone like me who usually feels more comfortable when I know what comes next. But it also taught me something before we had even properly started travelling: sometimes you can plan as much as possible and still have no idea what is waiting for you. At some point, you have to stop preparing and actually go. And maybe that is the strange thing about taking a leap like this. You don’t suddenly become fearless. You just reach a point where finding out what happens feels more important than staying where you are because you are afraid of what might happen.

And honestly, the first few days of our journey taught us more than all the planning ever could. But that is a story for the next post.

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Written by Fabienne, Cartagena, Colombia