When I reached my early 20s, I saw something I thought I’d never see. My bank account rolled over into five digits as I passed the $10,000 mark for the first time.
I rarely tell people this because I don’t want to come off as boastful.
I’m saying this now because a lack of money is a huge obstacle preventing people from traveling. So I want to write about what I did to save up so much money to see the world.
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A few years ago, when I was preparing to travel to Belize, a friend of mine asked me what my plans for the trip were. Specifically she wanted to know if I had a place to stay arranged before I arrived.
When I told her no, she was aghast. What would I do if I got there and there wasn’t a room available anywhere? She wouldn’t have been able to handle traveling so far away without making those arrangements beforehand.
I guess that’s what separates me from a lot of people. I get a big thrill out of not knowing what is going to happen next; it’s adventurous.
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A few months ago I got back from Morocco where I had been living and traveling for two months. Rather than quitting my job, I took a leave of absence so I could go back to my position when I returned.
This is the fourth time I’ve had an employer let me take time off to travel for a month or so at a time. I wrote about my first two times in a previous post.
However in that post, I didn’t go into much detail about how I negotiated the time off.
Since then I’ve asked more employers for extended periods of time off to travel. I’ve gained a lot of experience in the best way to ask in order to get travel time off.
So I want to go into more detail about what I’ve learned about getting a month or more of travel off from work.
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I got back from Morocco about two weeks ago. In total I spent over two months there with most of that time in Casablanca.
Casablanca is the largest city in Morocco and the commercial center for the country. It’s definitely not as interesting a city as Marrakech or Fez, but it has a quiet charm about it. I’ll always hold it near my heart because of the time I spent there.
And the city will also be special to me because of a fisherman I met there. The time I spent with him taught me a lot about life, travel and what it means to be poor.
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There’s a natural tendency to stick to the middle ground and do what everyone around you is doing. It’s like something is pulling you in line with everyone else. I can certainly see why that happens. Everyone likes to feel like they belong so if you do what everyone else is doing, you won’t feel excluded as an outsider.
But some of the best things I’ve done for myself happened because I decided to do things others weren’t. In fact, I think you could miss out on some really great experiences by doing what everyone else does.
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It’s still crazy for me to think about it, but in just a little over a week, I’ll be on a plane flying to Morocco where I’ll be living for the next two months. To be specific, I’ll be in Casablanca where I’ll be teaching at an American high school. It’s part of a program I registered for while earning my graduate degree.
If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, some of this information will be old news. But I haven’t really shared all the details. So I want to get some of that information out. It’s been quite an interesting experience so far, and I haven’t even arrived there yet.
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“How do you get to travel so much?”
“Why is it that you always seem to be traveling somewhere?”
I’m asked questions like these on a regular basis. It’s rather surprising too since I really don’t feel like I travel all that often. I travel roughly three to four times a year, but there are people out there that travel way more than that. But if you consider that the people who ask me these questions travel maybe once every couple of years, I can see why they’d think I travel a lot.
After some self-reflection I’ve realized that I have different habits from those who don’t see much of the world. These habits have helped build a lifestyle where travel becomes a big part of my life. What is more, I’ve noticed these same habits in other regular travelers.
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