If you fail to plan, you plan to fail, right? Well, I barely planned at all for my first time solo camping. However, I’d say it went pretty darn well.
My family camped relatively often growing up. Always in state parks, often on road trips. After I quit my job, I decided that it was time to see more of the U.S. so I set off on a two-month road trip.
My main reservation wasn’t with the camping, sleeping alone
in a forest, or managing to make food. It was the idea of not having anyone
around if I needed them or just the sanity check of having someone to talk to.
My First Night of Solo Camping
One of the things I failed to plan was reserving a campsite. I pulled in to Vedauwoo Campground in Medicine Bow National Forest around 6:30pm after a 2h15 drive from Denver. The campground had two other cars in it, both with 5th wheel campers. Being the day after Labor Day, I figured there would have been more long-weekend stragglers. I drove around and chose a spot that was about 100m from the bathroom. I figured it’d be close enough to be comfortable, far enough to not smell it or hear the door slam.
Sunset brew on my ‘front porch’. Peep my blue pop up tent 🙂
The pop-up tent that I brought is so easy to put together. It took about two minutes to get ready! I staked it down and used my car air pump to pump up my queen size air mattress. Then, I put the fitted sheet on it (because nobody likes sleeping on plastic) and had the bed and tent ready to go within minutes. I cracked open a beer and watched the sunset.
When I walked back to my car to get fire starters and a lighter, I noticed my neighbor watching me. He wasn’t creepy, just one of those folks that you can tell doesn’t get a lot of social interaction. It could have been unnerving since it was my first-time solo camping, but I leaned into the situation.
I went over and introduced myself to him and his wife. Within 30 seconds I had an invite to come over for dinner tonight. They told me if I needed anything to come knocking, and that they’d keep an eye out for my things while I was out hiking today. Campers are the best 😊
I declined their invitation to come over that night, so they came to keep me company while I started my own fire. After a few comments on my veggie burger, we shared a beer and a few comments on the weather. Together, we watched a lightning storm approach. Again, they offered that I could come to their camper if I needed anything. I learned later on that it hailed hard on some campsites about 6 miles west of us, so I was grateful for the friendship.
I was super nervous about sleeping in the middle of nowhere alone. The best thing I did was bring an extra blanket and a flashlight. It got down to the 40’s but I was cozy as I read in bed and drifted off to sleep. I got a full 11 hours of rest and loved waking up without any technology.
First Day of Solo Camping
Another thing I forgot to plan? Filling up my water bottles and Camelbak before I got to the campsite. There was no running water after Labor Day, so I had to drive about 6 miles to find water.
I also forgot to plan anything to do while out there. Go ahead, roll your eyes.
I knew that ranger stations typically had plenty of maps and knowledgeable staff, so I chatted with the rangers while at the station. I lucked out because the Rest Area had Wi-Fi, clean water, and great staff.
The ranger had great tips for a hike that started about 1km down the road. So, I took off from there on foot to hike for about 8 miles. I had a sandwich, a banana, some cashews, and 2L of water on me when I left.
Ultimately, the first day of my first time solo camping went a lot better than it probably should have. I should have planned more than just food and a tent, but I fared pretty well.
After the day I just told you about, I spent an extra day in Vedauvoo National Forest. After that, I headed to Jackson Hole then onward to Montana for two weeks. Solo camping left me feeling so independent and free. I’m so proud of myself for doing it, and can’t wait to have another go at it somewhere else!
So, failing to plan might not always mean planning to fail,
don’t you think?
“I was under the impression that you weren’t working and taking some time off?”
“If you took time off to travel, why are you working?”
“How do you deal with the mindset that this isn’t a vacation that will end and then you’ll have to go right back to work?
These are all questions/statements I’ve gotten in the last couple of days, so I think this is a good time to clear things up and be explicit about my goals.
“When will you go back to work?”
I suppose I’ll start with what my goals are not. I have no intention of going back to corporate America. When I quit my job, I quit a lifestyle that I never wanted. I quit to pursue the lifestyle that was 8 years in the making; everything I’ve done since I was 19 was with the mentality that someday I would travel full time. I’ve known my goal and have stuck to it.
My goal, in case it wasn’t crystal clear before, is to visit every country.
Stonecutters Credo
To do this, I need time, I need money, and I need my health. I have all three right now, but I won’t forever, and that’s where the urgency of my decision comes from.
The ultimate goals lie under the ‘every country’ umbrella. There’s so much behind it, but the three under arching goals are:
I will lay roads for other people to travel who wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity.
I will create a home for people who are traveling against their desires.
I will generate a passive income through multiple avenues. This will be enough to both live on, save money, and be generous.
What I’ll Do Instead
So when people ask me if I’m working, I’m absolutely working toward these things. I believe that I wasn’t put on this earth to be employed but to be deployed.
I get to spend my days writing and having conversations with influential people and doing things that make my heart happy. I think of it in a Sonecutters Credo context:
When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow, it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
Stonecutters Credo
In other words, every day I get to live in a way that is a drop of water, knowing that the ripples tomorrow will be waves in the future.
Life is either a great adventure or nothing at all; this adventure is a vacation, or possibly nothing at all. And hey, it takes a little work.
Have you ever thought to yourself, ‘Man, I just want to quit my job and travel’. Because same.
I thought it every day for the five years I was in corporate. Honestly, I know I even thought it in college.
Yet, even though I knew the travel lifestyle was for me, I finished college, got a big girl job, and kept pushing on this inauthentic (to me) life. Why? So that I could travel.
Sound a little bass-ackwards? That’s because it is. But, hear me out: I wanted to learn from big companies before going out on my own. I wanted to experience corporate life so that I could make an informed decision. And, I wanted to make a ton of ‘easy’ money so that I could LOVE entrepreneurship and appreciate the hustle even more.
In Gent, Belgium on my one-year quit-my-jobiversary
I believe that just about anyone with the drive to do it can quit their job and see the world. I’m a white, middle class, solo-traveling marketing major from Iowa, and I’ve seen 51 countries on my own time in the last decade. I’ve been a digital nomad for a year. Here’s my story:
The Back Story: Why I Quit My Job to Travel
I decided to visit every country when I was 19. I was two semesters into university and assumed that I had gone too far (read: had too much debt and not enough earning potential) to turn back. My thoughts were that I didn’t have marketable skills that would allow me to get a job that paid well enough to both enjoy my life and pay off my debt. I held on to that belief until I graduated.
Looking back, I’m not sure that I was wrong in that belief, but I also think I’d have figured it out along the way.
However, in college I did everything that I could to set myself up for a lifetime of travel. I studied abroad and traveled solo during that time. I minimized my debt and took lots of domestic road trips. During college, I even started credit card hacking and created a savings account just for travel.
After college, I spent 3 months in Bahia, Brazil. Here’s me, enjoying my time at a waterfall in Chapada Diamantina National Park
After graduation I was unsure of what success meant to me, so I kept heading down the corporate path. I did take six months after graduation to travel to Colorado and Brazil, but eventually went to work.
And then… my wandering soul landed in a cubicle.
However, I kept traveling and accomplished my financial goals super quickly. In theory, I was super successful. I’d paid off my car and student loans in three years. I had savings set aside, owned a home, and used my 15 days of PTO a year to travel as far and wide as I could.
However, I knew that the lifestyle of working 49 weeks a year and then having to balance seeing my family and seeing the world with the other three just wasn’t for me.
So I created an escape plan.
Originally, the plan was to eliminate my debt, then quit to travel and work. After a taste of a full-time income, though, my college plan of bumming around the world wasn’t as attractive. So, I told myself that I’d save up a year of expenses (roughly $40k), and then I’d quit my job. Once I saved enough money, I told myself I’d give myself a year in my current role at work before I quit…
Do you see how I kept pushing the metrics for success further out in front of me?
Then, it all changed.
How I Quit My Job To Travel
In June of 2019, I had officially spent five years in the traditional workforce. I’d moved to Rhode Island, Florida, and Texas for work. Each time, I found a little adventure that helped me accomplish my travel goals. I got closer to major airports, had doubled my income, and was generally happy.
Then, a few things happened at work that I wasn’t ok with. Nepotism, harassment, and more were happening around me daily. When I raised concerns, I was met with indifference at best. By day, I was miserable. By night, I was having anxiety attacks that kept me up. Which, in turn, led to even worse days. I’d cry in my car on the way to work, eat lunch in my car, and spend my free time daydreaming about my escape plan.
To cope, I decided to take a two-week long vacation in Southeast Asia to unplug and reevaluate.
The view from where I quit my job – Vietnam
The Final Straw
While there, I accidentally sent a hotel confirmation to my work email, so I logged in to retrieve it. It was then that I saw a chain of email messages blaming me for something that I didn’t do (because I was in Asia?), and the demand that I’d meet with several layers of my higher-ups when I returned to the office.
I was standing in a hotel on the beach in paradise, and all the anxiety that I’d felt over the past few months flooded over me again. Instead of soaking up the sun, I wanted to run out of the lobby and into the water. I wanted my activity level to match my racing heartbeat.
Face flushed, heart racing, I was a million mental miles away from where I should’ve been. My mind should’ve been on the beach. Instead, I was two weeks in the future, in a conference room in Dallas getting chewed out over something that I no longer cared about.
Ultimately, it took the friend that I was traveling with to ask me some honest questions about why I was living the life that I was. This friend and I had lived together a few years previously, so he knew that my goal had always been to travel around the world, nonstop, while earning and income and making an impact.
The guy on the right is Matt – my former roommate and the pal that helped me find the courage to finally quit
He asked me what was keeping me from quitting my job and traveling full time. I didn’t have an answer.
There was nothing but myself holding me back from doing what I’ve always wanted to do.
So, the next working day, I called my boss from the beach. I told her that I was leaving the company, and she was supportive. She also knew where my heart was, and told me that I didn’t need to come back to the states to turn my computer in.
In that moment, I was free.
One Year Later: What’s it Like?
When people ask why I quit, I can tell that they’re looking for some juicy dialogue about why I did it. In the end, corporate and I aren’t made for each other, and that’s okay. I decided that it was better to let go of the success metrics and daily activities than to hold on and get emotional rope burn.
I was becoming an emotionally and intellectually concave version of myself, all while becoming physically convex. When I looked to the future, I saw the best parts of myself move to opposite corners. I couldn’t stomach that as a reality.
I quit my job with some savings, but they wouldn’t last forever. For real – I was 27 – my 401(k) and a years’ worth of savings was a nice cushion, not a full-on retirement.
When I quit, I was left with a whole lot of question marks. The thing is, they did’t scare me the way I thought they would. They feel more right than anything I’ve done since graduation and that feels like a success to me.
When I quit my job, I jumped without a parachute, and built it on the way down. I figured out how to cut my expenses at home and while traveling. This means I gave up my lease, car, insurance payments, and more. I cut my annual expenses in half immediately.
Life on the Road
Then, I started ‘slow traveling’. Basically, I get by-the-month leases in places rather than stay in hotels now. I can stay just about anywhere in the world for less than $700 a month, but in many places, my rent is closer to $350. Now, I eat in because I have a home everywhere, make friends, and go on budget-busting adventures regularly.
I started off by freelancing, then realized that people wanted to learn how to travel solo, so I started teaching them. Then, I built a course to streamline the process, and work with people one-on-one, too.
But it hasn’t all been rainbows and giggles.
Most of my last few months have been spent at this makeshift office at my mom’s house thanks to COVID-19.
Coronavirus killed my freelancing gigs, because nobody was paying for travel writing. I stopped traveling for five months to live in my mom’s house in Germany. I put a lot of money in to ventures that didn’t pan out.
Here’s the truth – I’d much rather be doing this than be stuck in my corporate cubicle back home. Any of these setbacks are better than corporate life, because I get to take complete ownership for every. Single. Thing.
Whether or not my work is successful in anyone else’s eyes is TBD – but what is that success anyway? Is success measured in Instagram followers, or money generated? Time spent, or things that make me feel gratified?
Are You Glad You Did It?
Yes.
When I quit, my year of expenses was my ‘in case I have to go back to corporate’ money. I still have 90% of that money, but invested it because I don’t need it as a fall back anymore.
Besides making this life financially work for me, I FEEL better. The other day, I had my first anxious night of sleep in over a year. I woke up feeling so grateful, because I haven’t felt that way in so long. Now, I’m so much more in control and in touch with what goes on in my work and life, that I can make changes on a dime to prevent those awful nights. In the past year, I haven’t cried over my work, lost sleep over KPI’s, or stressed about someone else’s ideas of what I should do to be successful.
Life as a digital nomad isn’t always glamorous – but it IS always worth it.
Success to me is what I allow myself to feel. In my solo traveling, corporate escapee, solopreneurial life I am choosing to create a value for myself that is higher than in any office. I hope that in writing this, it gives me something to look back on in a month, a year, or 5 to give a fond smile to, knowing that my confidence in these moments carried me to where I am.
How does that old saying go? If you want to make God laugh, make plans – or something like that. Well, two weeks ago I planned to go on a two-week vacation. Today, I quit my job and decided to stay.
I packed enough underwear to do laundry once while I was traveling. Now, it’s me, my (very small) backpack, and no plans for the foreseeable future.
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Today is my first day, but it’s not my first rodeo.
I’ve taken time off to travel in the past.
After college, I took 6 months and spent time in Colorado and Brazil
After my first ‘big girl job’, I took 4 weeks and visited Canada, took a huge US road trip, and moved to Florida
I studied abroad for 5 months, and worked abroad for 3 months (separately, but both while in school)
So maybe that’s why this doesn’t feel all that climactic to me.
Yesterday, I Quit My Job.
Today is my first day of officially being off the corporate grind.
No, I’m not just taking a break. No, I don’t have a baked out plan.
To be honest, it doesn’t really feel like anything. There was no wave of relief that came over me. I didn’t experience a huge shift in my life. Which means that this is 100% right for me.
I’m happy with my decision. In fact, this is exactly where I wanted to be at 27 – a little bit tan, a little bit surprised with myself, a little bit hungover in a hostel lobby. My life is punctuated with bowls of pho and long walks through foreign cities.
Yes, I will thrive. Of course, I can sustain myself. Yes, I do have a skeleton of a plan.
I am so happy to be taking the next step on the entrepreneurial, nomadic journey that I’ve always dreamed of.
Thank you for joining me and supporting me as I do my best to make you, myself, and God laugh.
It’s tough to say goodbye to new places and friends that I’ve grown to love. Rarely do I visit a new place expecting it to change me. ‘It’s just a vacation community’ I tell myself. Then, a week later, I can’t seem to remember what the world is like outside of paradise. Do people really work to support lives they can’t afford? Why doesn’t everyone make just enough coconut oil in their kitchens to support their surfing habits and rent?
Thus, travel can be professionally taxing. Everywhere I’ve been has challenged me to explore whether or not the path I’m on is ‘right’ for me. I’ve been resisting the idea of corporate America for years, yet I’ve accepted a position right in it’s core. What is really so wrong about living without a 401k and disability benefits? Where does the line lie between following a passion, doing what one is good at, and supporting a given lifestyle?
Traveling is hard. It is hard to accept that two weeks in an immaculate hostel cost me less than a week of rent will out East. My lifestyle on the road is less expensive than at home. No car insurance, rent, electric bills, or tuition. It’s difficult to see that as I nickel and dime my way into less expensive surf lessons, my instructor has to decide between traveling to see his family or giving weekend instruction.
It’s challenging to be away from my own family. I feel such deep empathy for my brother, and when he hurts, I hurt. When my best friend is going through something, it’s difficult to not be able to call. The world is getting smaller with technology, but until I can hug my parents from another continent, I’m not buying it.
Sometimes, it’s hard to swallow the things I see. Is that child alone? It’s 11pm on a weekday. She’s in diapers. Is she eating that? Oh, yeah. Yeah she is. It looks like so much fun to be a child in Brazil! They play all day in the streets without fear. Isn’t that better than the suburbs? Who’s at home waiting for them? Do they have access to medical care? Why is his foot turned like that?
With travel, every day is an adventure! What will I eat, and where will I find it? Where will I sleep, and how much will it cost? Who will I meet, and how will their story intertwine with mine?
Travel is a privilege that I try to never take for granted. Every day I learn a great deal about the way our world works.
I’ve been asked a few times this past week what my travel with my program means, and how we get to miss class so often.
In traditional university settings, students go to each class for 3 hours a week for 16 weeks. Here, we go to each class for about 5 hours a week for 12 of the 16 weeks of the semester. So theoretically I’m spending the same amount of time in the classroom.
Theoretically. This is an island, full of island people with an island mentality. I honestly had a professor walk past our classroom the other day, turn around, walk in looking surprised and say, “Well shit. You guys are here. I thought we didn’t have class today.” It’s a once a week class. He ended up giving us an assignment and sending us on our way after about 45 minutes. The assignment is due in over a month.
This is also the same professor who had us meet at a bar for our midterm. In his defense, it is a bar and restaurant management class, and we did apply what we have been learning in class.
Island people don’t do well with stress.
Standing over Athens last week, on the Acropolis
All joking aside…
We do go to class, most of the time it isn’t cancelled, and most of the time I learn a lot. All of my professors are Cypriot, have the highest degrees in their field, and are well traveled.
I have been learning a lot from them, and what we are discussing in the classroom I have been able to apply while traveling. For example, in my European Cultures class we have an assignment to study one part of a culture and do field work, then write a 12 page paper on our findings. Since cafe culture is big here, I have been spending time in each city I visit ordering whatever seems local (Italy- espresso, Cyprus- frappe, Greece- ‘coffee’). I will write about the differences in time spent at cafes, what people order, the size of the drinks, what people do once at the cafes, when patrons pay, etc.
In my International Marketing class, we have similar projects but with a distinct marketing focus. Yesterday, I gave a midterm presentation on the effects of public vs private energy in Europe for my International Business class.
The Coloseum in Rome
Where does all this travel come in?
We don’t have classes while we travel, but we learn more than we ever could in the classroom. We have what we’ve been talking about in the classroom in the back of our heads as we travel, and are more cognizant of our environment while we travel.
