After a year or so of growing restless I finally took the plunge and decided to get out of DC. This was a tough decision because I actually like DC. Of all the cities I have traveled to, DC has always felt the most comfortable and home like to me. I didn’t dislike my job, friends, or life in general. The problem was that for the past three years I have felt restless. I wanted to get out and see something different, pushing myself to grow in ways that I wasn’t able to in DC.
About a year ago a friend of mine moved to Hong Kong and has been bugging me ever since to visit. Asia has never been particularly high on my list of must sees; I always viewed it as the type of place that I wouldn’t turn down a trip there, but if planning my own I would probably go elsewhere. About a year ago I realized that a perfect combination of direct flights from Chicago, my sister’s birthday (in Chicago), the Willis Tower race, a change in my company’s time keeping system, and the best weather of the year occurred in early November. I decided to bank as much vacation as possible so I could take a three week trip. In early spring I started to burn out. I was teaching two to six classes a week, two weekly front desk shifts at the yoga studio, giving two bike tours a week, and working a full time job in addition to still trying to have a social life and stay in shape. I was enjoying everything but I knew it was unsustainable. In July I took my sister to the west coast to celebrate her graduation. My ulterior motive was that I wanted someone to ride STP with me and knew she would deal with a 200 mile bike ride if I just kept telling her it was a good idea. I decided to burn more vacation time than I planned but after two weeks I still hadn’t satisfied my restlessness.
It was around this time that I started to toy with the idea of leaving my job and travelling around Asia for a few months. As a last minute plan, I hadn’t saved up specifically for this trip so the length of my travelling would be capped at a few months and limited to countries with a low cost of living; Southeast Asia fit my requirements perfectly. I am terrible at advance planning when no one else is affected; organizing events for groups is not a problem but I just can’t do it for myself. So, even as I write this from Hong Kong, I still do not have a good idea of what route I will take. The rough itinerary, without date projections is:
Bangkok –> Phnom Penh –> Angkor –> Laos –> Chiang Mai –> beach time –> Singapore and Malaysia –> Philippines
I will do my best to upload some photos and trip reports to this blog. Additional photos will be available at some point on Facebook as well.
