My commitment to blogging has been consistently inconsistent. It happens a lot with us travel bloggers. Magnetically drawn to adventure, we have a hard time sitting still long enough to tell anyone about all the adventures we’re having. But it’s a new year, I’m setting intentions and being older, I’m valuing history more–just like I’ve heard people say you do. 

Since I can’t go back in time, I’ll do the next best thing–use the Throwback Thursday trend to fill in some of the blanks. Beginning at the beginning: How I got into this wild and wanderful way of living on the road. . . 

I had just returned from Australia and over lunch with a friend, it came to me. “I think my four seasons are going to be Spring, Summer, Fall and Travel Somewhere Warm!” 

She nodded and smiled her understanding and we toasted my freshly hatched plan. But then, eventually, escapes from Wisconsin winter started turning into something else. What had started as flirting with foreign countries was turning into something serious. 

A couple years later, I was back in Australia for a second time. This was my longest trip yet. I’d left early on New Year’s Eve, traveled for twenty-four hours and landed in Australia in time to ring in New Year’s Eve. A month in, I was stepping off a city bus, looking up at the surreal blue sky above Melbourne when a revelatory thought streaked across my mind. I think I could be at home anywhere. 

The bus doors slapped shut behind me while something inside me cracked open, into a room chock full of possibilities. Biking the path along the river a few days later, I had a second revelation: There is no right way. There’s only the way that’s right for you. This threw a switch in the room of possibilities, lighting up Panama, Colombia, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Canada–every place I’d ever been, and reframing them as places to live rather than places to visit. I watched myself interviewing, entertaining the thought of moving completely. Gulp. Wisconsin had been my going from and returning to my whole life. 

After staying in Australia for exactly the maximum three months the embassy said I could, I flew home on Thai Airways with a brief layover in Bangkok. I’d arranged to stretch the hours into a week. Since my next layover was at LAX, and some of my dad’s family lived near there, a two-day layover had been scheduled. As I threw my big and smaller backpack into my aunt’s trunk, she remarked, “I can’t believe you’ve been living out of that!”

“Me neither!” I surveyed it all. “I didn’t need this much.”

But I never got on the plane. I bought a new ticket for a month later, landing back home on Cinco de Mayo. Easter was on 4/20 that year and Wisconsin got snow.

That trip stretched the rubberband to a point I wasn’t sure it could keep snapping back. Not only had I survived in strange places for four months, I had thrived. A wildness had gotten under my skin. I could feel the wind in my hair, even indoors. Something, somewhere else was calling me.

Three things came together to start forming the picture of, and making a plan for, the gypsy life. Then there were three things that fell apart to take that picture out of my mind and into my world, kickstarting a plan into action. 

I’ll tell you all about the first three next Thursday.