For some time, R and I have planned to take a ‘grown up gap year’. For a long time it’s been a vague dream, an adventurous year away from work and a chance to transition away from London.
This January, we crystallised our plans. We’re selling our boat ‘Jessie’, and hope to start a three-month tandem cycle trip to Istanbul in September. When we return to the UK, we plan to voyage the British canal network for six months or so. Things are rather open-ended after that, but I am planning to start an MPhil in philosophy in October 2011.
It’s a strange time at the moment.
Right now, we’re painting and sprucing our boat, taking a few viewings in the hope that we find the right buyer soon. It’s a funny kind of limbo; we are both still working full-time, and it seems like we have a myriad of practical obstacles to tackle before we turn our wheels towards Istanbul. And yet we’ve set the wheels in motion – colleagues at work all know what we’re planning.
Occasionally on my cycle to work I try imagine what it’ll be like on that day when we totally shift gears, moving from a busy London life to nothing in the diary for three months. On other days it all seems unachievable. What if we don’t get a buyer for our boat? What if the sale takes too long and we can’t cross the Alps before the snow? What if I don’t do well enough in my philosophy exams?
I know in my heart that a big part of what we want with our ‘gap year’ is freedom from obligation and stress. I know that whatever specific shape things take, we’re guaranteed adventure and change. In one sense, we just can’t imagine what the trip will be like. I just need to be patient and wait for that first morning of the big cycle, whenever it comes.
things that might have been otherwise 