7 practical things I’ve learned in 7 months on the road

Over seven months ago, I was bouncing between cafes in Los Angeles trying to wrap up work before the trip of a lifetime. Quitting our jobs to travel around the world for a year was a big risk, but it felt like a bigger risk not to take it.

So, on March 5, my husband Nick and I boarded a plane out of the country and began our year-long sabbatical to travel through (predominantly) the Global South. 

Here are some practical lessons we’ve learned along the way:

#1: We weren’t the only ones who thought of this. 

We didn’t know anyone who’d taken a trip like this. We’d read a few blog posts from people who took “adult gap years,” but those seemed few and far between. This all changed in Kenya. There, we joined a 20-person safari group to drive from Nairobi to Cape Town in a big yellow truck. Guess what! Virtually all of our fellow travelers had quit their jobs to travel for a pre-determined amount of time too. Very few were the travel bloggers or influencers we’d figured we’d meet along the way. They were data scientists, doctors, vets, lawyers, business owners, army captains, architects, supply chain managers, city planners and a whole bunch of other things from all over the world. And they too were surprised to find out there were so many like-minded people. We had all been living in our own bubbles.

Some of the friends we made on the drive from Nairobi to Cape Town! Here we are in the Masai Mara for a (chilly) morning game drive!

#2: Long-term travel requires serious stamina. 

I started my career in New York finance and left for a unicorn start-up. I felt like I had the whole “stamina” thing down. Nope! Long-term travel would test me in new ways. For one, we lost our weekends. That’s weird to say, right? But it was true – we were busy go-go-go’ing all the time and had budgeted exactly 0 time for breaks. A month in we changed course and built in break days so we could take time to relax. 

Plus, we started to get sick all the time. I keep thinking we must be immune to most viruses in the world now, and yet, new ones keep finding us. Passing through airports, train stations, and driving in a big truck with 20+ people translated into colds, flus, and one (really, really bad) back injury. We learned to take extra special care of each other when we were sick; nothing makes you feel better faster like a doting spouse. And, more practically, we started to carry a mini pharmacy with us and learned to navigate the health care systems of a long list of countries.

Finally, there was the home sickness. This hit about 5 months in. We missed so much of what we were used to at home in LA (and especially missed our cats). The only way to solve this was to find a second wind, and thank goodness we did! A week in Bali solved the problem. Bali – probably the most California-esque place in southeast Asia – allowed us to relax, eat (really, really good) familiar food, and enjoy cheap local spas. By the end of that week, we were ready to go back to the unfamiliar.

#3: We will never travel with more than a backpack again.

Truly. We have been traveling for over 7 months with a backpack each, a small day-bag, and have even mailed a lot things home. Why did I ever travel with 3 pairs of shoes and dresses I never pulled out of my bag?

Here’s what we have with us right now:

• 3 packing cubes’ worth of clothing

• One “Scrubba” laundry bag so we can wash our own clothes

• Toiletries and liquids (sunscreen, hand sanitizer, etc.)

• Important documents, passports, and electronics like laptops and kindles

• One tube of art we’ve collected from all over the world

• One impractically-sized-for-this-kind-of-travel hand-carved box from Zimbabwe that I will treasure forever and couldn’t not buy

That’s it! (And if you saw the box from Zimbabwe, you would understand it was a worthwhile purchase.)

I sprained my back in Morocco, so my incredible husband carried ALL of our bags for THREE MONTHS. Good thing we packed light!

#4: The best travel involves time for the little things. 

We’ve had incredible experiences this trip so far – going to pizza school in Napoli, seeing rhinos fighting at a waterhole in Namibia – but in the moments in between we’ve taken time to enjoy the little things, and it’s made me appreciate slowing down more. Taking time to watch street performers – not for a few minutes but for an hour – or to feed stray cats or to lie down and read a good murder mystery novel have been some of the happiest moments on our trip. When we’re back home, I’d like to make sure we take more time for these overlooked gems.

Meeting the locals in Gili Air, one of our favorite places on the trip so far.

#5: Mental space breeds creativity. 

It took me a solid 4 months to stop thinking about life back home, work, and what we’d do when we got back on a daily basis. Long drives in Africa without wifi helped a lot though; my brain finally detached. What I didn’t realize though was that my brain would fill this newfound mental space with new levels of creativity that I hadn’t felt in a long time. I started writing a book! Then two books! It had been a decade since I’d written creatively, even though I used to love doing just that. I didn’t realize how long it would take to make the mental space for something like this, nor did I realize how empowering it would be to rediscover an old passion. 

#6: Camping revealed an inconvenient truth. 

I used to think that the reason I could only get 6 hours of sleep on weekdays was because my work schedule was demanding, and I was stressed. I can confidently say this is BS now because, for the most part, I continued to stay up late and not get enough sleep on this trip. That is, with one exception – I got the best sleep of my life camping in Africa, even though we had to get up at 4AM almost every day, and even though the animals at night were often very loud and very close. 

How could this be? 

Because of my stupid phone. Not being able to charge my phone at night and not having consistent access to wifi meant I stopped scrolling at night. Suddenly, I could sleep.

The sun rising over Lake Naivasha in Kenya. By the time I took this photo, we'd been up for a few hours. Most days we got up at 4AM in Eastern/Southern Africa so we could do morning game drives in the national parks.

#7: We are coming back changed people. 

I know, I know, this is a very cliché statement to make, and we both knew we would change on this trip. I don’t think either of us anticipated how much what we would see and experience would affect us though.

• We’ve personally seen the evidence of how horrible humanity can be in the Killing Fields in Cambodia.

• We learned the history we were taught in school wasn't always robust enough while in Vietnam.

• We learned about things we were never taught in school – like Great Zimbabwe – and wondered why such important history and accomplishments were excluded.

• We met the Masai people in Kenya and learned they happily sleep 5-6 people and a goat in a house made of cow dung, ash, and sticks, the size of our bathroom in LA. 

• We met the San people (bushmen) in Namibia and were amazed to find we could easily communicate so much just using hand gestures. 

• We’ve learned from experience that the list of things we’d consider “western comforts” was not nearly expansive enough. In most of the places we’ve been, regular bathroom access and clean tap water don’t exist. Soap and toilet paper were total luxuries. 

Nick learns to shoot a bow and arrow with a San bushman in Namibia. 

I could write a lot more about this topic (and might), but for now I’ll say we’re coming back better people with far greater empathy and concern for life outside our own bubble at home.

Want to know more about any of these topics? Let me know in the comments!

Note -- This is a repost of an article with the same title originally posted on LinkedIn on 11/1/23 for Maria Laposata's page.