Unreal, right? If I were to pay for this adventure with cash and book individual flights, it would cost almost $6,000 (using the cheapest option for each leg on Expedia.com). The best part is, the dates of this adventure aren’t set in stone – as long as I don’t change WHERE I’m going, I can change the date and time of each stop without penalty.

How did he do it? Well, frequent flyer miles, of course. But Steve is not a globe-trotting businessman who racks up miles by the thousands. Instead, he took advantage of various special offers to build up his frequent flyer accounts, using some of travel hacking tips popularized by Chris Guillebeau and others.

As far as affording the rest of the journey, Steve has a bit of passive income from an Internet business, but once the transportation is paid for travel can be done quite inexpensively, as most long-distance travelers know.

Once I’m not paying rent, car insurance, car payments, or fuel…my financial ties will be minimal (just some student loans and health insurance). When I don’t have my money promised elsewhere, I can use the rest of my money to live VERY CHEAPLY overseas (hostels, couch surfing, etc.).

Just another example of how travel is more accessible than many people realize. It just takes desire, willpower and perhaps a bit of creativity. Check out Steve’s entire article for the blow-by-blow details of how he racked up the miles and planned his journey.

Photo credit: JaGa via Wikimedia Commons.

Where does your road lead?

It’s a great question, and it was posed by Nico Crisafulli in a piece he wrote for AirTreks. As he phrases the query:

How can we travel like we want and still maintain the nested, domestic life we spent most of our early days expecting, preparing for and nurturing.

The author suggests there are at least six means to this end. “At least to an extent.” Here are two of his suggestions:

Get a job in another country – This may be your best bet. International jobs place you where you’d otherwise be traveling, allowing full-immersion cultural experiences to happen every day and to feel as though you’re on the road without actually going anywhere. Weekend trips can be exotic excursions and a night dining out can be Cahill-worthy. Perhaps don’t even leave your company but work remotely. Many companies are now allowing this to save money. Find out if your employer allows for this and if so, jump on it.

Career break – I talked about this before but a career break may be just thing you needed, a sort of transitional awakening to show you what’s important in your life. You may discover that it wasn’t actually the crock pot you wanted all along. Plus, as we’ve been told, a career break doesn’t have to equal career suicide.

Or, as he notes, you could also:

Just. Let. Go. – Then there’s the other route – to open your mind and accept alternatives to the traditional. Of course this would be the more difficult option since it challenges long-standing belief systems forged over decades. Fortunately, the white-picket-fence lifestyle is getting pretty tired in the new age. The general attitude of the 2010s is choose for yourself what to do with your life not what tradition tells you.

It’s an interesting topic, and one that many of us have grappled with. Check out the entire article for more of his thoughts and suggestions.

Photo credit: Bob Riel

At the Perito Moreno Glacier in Argentina.

We recently heard Lillie Marshall discuss her experiences from the one-year leave of absence she took from teaching in order to travel, and about the Meet, Plan, Go! event that is being held Tuesday evening in 13 cities across North America. So now is a good time to check out a recent story that was published by the U.K. Independent about why an extended career break can be a good career move.

Career breaks are no longer the sole preserve of university graduates looking to broaden their horizons on gap years before plunging themselves into the world of work. In fact, about 90,000 people every year – 60 per cent of them women – take some sort of career break. Typically, these individuals are in their late twenties or early thirties, although an increasing number are in their forties and fifties.

A career break is a period of unpaid leave from work which is agreed with your employer, who will allow you to return to a similar role on your return…The most common length of break is four to six months, although a year is not unusual and some take up to two years.

Yes, the title of the article does mention that this can also be a good career move. And the story points out one example of a woman who reaffirmed her commitment to her job and career while she was away and turned that enthusiasm into a promotion soon after she returned. There are others, of course, who decide to change careers entirely:

Ms Morgan-Trimmer speaks from experience. She embarked on a four-month world trip that took in South-east Asia, Australia and New Zealand while she was working for a gap-year company. “My inspiration was that I was jealous of all the youngsters I was advising,” she recalls. “One of my main aims was to be brave and try new things. It’s easier when you’re away from home because you’re forced to face challenges.”

She also uncovered a hidden talent for scuba-diving. “I was the typical chubby girl who was always last to be picked for the teams at school, so to be told I was good at a sport was a pleasant surprise,” she jokes.

Her return to Britain saw her set up a business advising other would-be career breakers. “I had found it hard to organise everything before I left, particularly boring stuff such as council tax, so used my experiences to help make it easier for others.”

There is more information in the full article. But don’t just read that one story. You can check out my book and my overview of career breaks, for one, but if you’re in or near one of the 13 Meet, Plan, Go! cities then make plans to attend that event and meet other people who have had this experience. I’ll be a panelist at the Boston event, so if you’re in the audience stop by and say hello!

Here is some of what he has to say about what location independence is and isn’t:

This is not about being an endless nomadic; it’s about finding a working style that suits you. This is not about entrepreneurialism; while owning your own business makes it quite easier, you can still roam a bit more freely while working for someone else…

The common feature of people working towards location independence is that they’re working on a life that works for them, not the other way around. Just because you are setup to work from the road doesn’t mean you travel 100%; I myself tend to alternate between periods on the road and then stints back at home base here in the UK. Yes – another myth – I have a home base, like many other location independent professionals do. You don’t have to live out of a suitcase if you don’t want to.

There are as many ways to be location independent as there are ways to be a 9-to-5’er (does anybody really work nine to five anyway?). Think about the characteristics or attributes of the life that you want, then find ways to make that happen.

Check out his full story here. By the way, Andy also runs the Sharing Travel Experiences website and a while back he ran an online interview with me. If you somehow missed that, you should check it out.

How did you know you didn’t fit in to conventional society?

There is no reason why we should drive on the right side of the road or the left. The idea of getting a job and working at one company until retirement is only about three generations old and it is already dead. The concept of retiring at age 65 was created in 1935 with the Social Security Act in the U.S. Even that has to change because of the increase in average lifespans. Everything around us is just an idea. If you realize that, then it is easier to see that there is no set plan for life and we are free to do whatever we want.

Encouraging words you would pass on to readers: If you could have had someone there when you took the leap of faith, what would you have needed to hear the most?

The only real risk in life is dying or getting sick before you have a chance to do the things you want. When you start getting older and more and more of your friends and family get sick or die and you lose energy and motivation, you really start to understand how short life is. I don’t want to sound like a parent telling his children how tough life was in the past, but it is all true.

We live in a time of great affluence and opportunity. It is easy and cheap to travel around the world, start new businesses and even become famous if we are willing to put in the work and are able to commit our energies to a single focus. The greatest times in my life have been when I didn’t have much money, didn’t have many possessions and was working insane hours to accomplish something. The “good life” is not an easy life. Easy makes us fat and lazy.  Even if you completely fail, there are unlimited opportunities to start again. Our parents never had these opportunities. Our grandparents couldn’t even imagine this level of wealth and choice. There is no excuse for not attempting great things in life. The only barrier is our own fears, which are generally unfounded, and our unwillingness to do the work required.

Check out the entire interview with John. It’s good stuff.

Retirement Doesn’t Always Reward You with the Time or Ability to Travel – Have you ever really thought about the person you will be when you are 65? What will your health be like, what will your sense of adventure be like, and most importantly, will your health be able to support your sense of adventure?

What activities are you saving for your retirement – bungy jumping in New Zealand, climbing mountains in Nepal, hiking the Great Wall of China, or horseback riding in Mongolia? Will these things really be possible at retirement age? We spend all of our life waiting, waiting, waiting…until we are free from the shackles of work. However what if when we are unshackled, we can’t do it? Consider taking a mini-retirement now, while you know you can trek the Inca Trail.  If people can have a mid-life crisis, then why can’t you have a mid-life retirement?

Cure your Hurry Sickness and Return to Simplicity – Many Americans are plagued by ‘Hurry Sickness’.  The more we speed up, the less we can slow down. Not only do we multi-task at work but we multi-task our leisure time as well – watching TV and surfing the web, or working out on the elliptical and reading a magazine. We are no longer capable of simply doing one thing and being happy about it.

This has also made us a very impatient society – some may even say rude. How many times have you pressed the “door close” on the elevator, even though someone else is trying to get on? And how often do you catch yourself tapping your foot and huffing away while standing in line for something? We always seem to be in a rush to get nowhere fast.

A traveling career break will force you to slow down and learn to be patient again. As you immerse yourself into other cultures you will observe simplicity and patience that Americans have somehow lost. Sure it can be a frustrating experience letting go of how you expect things to get done, but it will open up your eyes to how the rest of the world operates. In the process you will actually have time to take it all in and appreciate a new, simpler way of doing things.

See the entire article for eight more reasons to consider a sabbatical.

You started your world-wide travels with (and I quote) “deciding to take a chance in life”. Could you give us a little background into that decision-making process?

Well, my wife and I were both over 30-years-old and entrenched in our work lives when we decided to take our first round-the-world trip. Frankly, we weren’t sure we were ready to stop everything in order to do this and then re-start our lives when the trip was over. We also had to get over the normal doubts over how others would perceive our decision. In the end, though, we also didn’t want to go through life knowing we had passed up an opportunity to have an adventure together and to do some long-term travel.

The way we dealt with it was for my wife to ask for a leave of absence from work. Her employer was gracious in granting her the leave and keeping her job open. Since I was already making a transition to being self-employed, it was easier for me to manage the time off. Of course, by not stopping work completely we didn’t have as much time available to travel as we could have had by simply quitting altogether. Our trips were measured in months, rather than years. I have to say, if Twitter had been around a few years earlier and I’d been introduced to all of these other amazing people who were managing long-term travel between jobs, then our outlook might have been different.

Still, it was a good compromise given where we were in our lives. And it did have an unseen benefit, in that we began looking at our travels in a particular way – not as an open-ended adventure, but rather as a sabbatical that would be limited in time but that would have a lasting influence on our lives.

You also refer to the term “life sabbatical.” What does that phrase mean to you?

As I mentioned earlier, the fact that our trips were not open-ended encouraged us to view the experience as a sabbatical. Academic sabbaticals stem from the notion that there is value in taking time away from the everyday rigors of a job in order to rest, reflect or conduct research. The goal is to return to work with renewed energy and ideas. And the word sabbatical derives from the word Sabbath, with every seventh day meant to be devoted to family time and contemplation.

So I took to calling our trip a “life sabbatical” because it seemed to imbue it with more meaning than if I simply looked at it as a travel adventure. It helped us to view our journey as a way to learn about ourselves and the world, while also recharging our energies for the next phase of our lives. I actually think it would be a great thing if more people were able to schedule these “mini-retirements” periodically through life. Not only can we not bank on being able to fulfill all of our travel dreams during the traditional retirement years, but this time away from work really does give us an opportunity to recharge and even re-evaluate where we are in our lives and careers.

See the entire interview for my answers to a number of other questions. While you’re there you should also browse through his collection of interviews with other travelers and writers.

Mike Elgan recently penned an article for Computerworld about this very trend:

Sell the house and the car. Put up all your possessions on eBay. Pack your bags and buy a one-way ticket to some exotic location. The plan? “Telecommute” from wherever you happen to be. Earn an American salary, but pay Third-World prices for food and shelter.

The digital nomad, location-independent lifestyle once seemed so impossible, exotic and unlikely that only a few people dared even attempt it. But now, a lot more people are doing it, and it seems like everyone else would like to. Could it be? Is the digital nomad lifestyle about to go “mainstream”?

I was asked to be interviewed last week by the producers of something called the Ideas Project, a Nokia-sponsored site that explores what the “big ideas” are for the future of communications. I could have talked about anything, but I chose to address what I think will be the single trend that will do the most to change how people work: The location-independent digital nomad trend…

A perfect storm of micro-trends are colliding before our very eyes to facilitate the lifestyle of traveling while working, and working while traveling. These include the usual suspects, such as the declining price of electronics and bandwidth and of an increasingly globalized economy. But they also include trends that don’t seem that obvious.

The biggest of these is that the technologies, products and services that digital nomads use to work while traveling are themselves becoming popular among everybody, even those who never travel…It will get to the point where the only difference between an ordinary white-collar worker and a digital nomad is an airplane ticket.

I love that line: “the only difference between an ordinary white-collar worker and a digital nomad is an airplane ticket.” Do you have any experiences with the digital nomad lifestyle, or do you know someone who does? What are your thoughts?

Michael Bontempi just wrote about his own career break and travel experiences for the Briefcase to Backpack site. Like pretty much everyone I know who has ever attempted this, he had an incredible experience, time to reflect on his life, and no problem finding a new job and resuming a career when he was back home. Here is an excerpt of what he had to say:

My career break gave me the opportunity to reflect on my previous 14 years of experience and helped me to reevaluate my career path and evaluate if I was on the right track. Ironically, putting our 9-month plan together started me on the decision path for my next role. It came very natural to me to orchestrate all the moving parts that would be required to enable me to enjoy my career break and ensure that our life back home was in order at the same time.

So as I started my career search at the beginning of 2008, the one frequent question that was on everyone’s mind was “how I would be able to explain my career break to a new employer?” To be honest, this was not something I was overly concerned about. I had decided that when asked, I would tell my story as it happened. To hide the truth or try to spin this time into something it wasn’t would be foolish. Surprisingly, most of the negative reaction to my career break decision came from the recruiters I worked with, and very little concern from the potential new employer. In today’s competitive market, some could view a career break as a handicap, while most see it as a differentiator…

For anyone that is considering a career break with hopes of returning to a career, you will inevitably have many doubts, concerns and questions. But at the end of the day, the choice to take a career break is not just about the travel – it’s about you. It’s about trying to reflect on all that you have accomplished and what you haven’t and determining if the current path you’re on will eventually put more in that “accomplished” category.

Check out his entire story, and the rest of the Briefcase to Backpack site.

The study ranked the cities on 30 measures, ranging from the cardiovascular disease death rate to the percent of residents who bike or walk to work. Forbes.com published an overview of the results.

According to the index, Washington, D.C., residents are healthier than other Americans for a number of reasons. They have increased access to farmers’ markets, at 13 per 1 million residents, compared to a national average of 11. Fewer residents smoke and have diabetes, and nearly 90% have health insurance compared to a national average of 86%.

Still, Thompson was surprised to see the city rank first for the second consecutive year. “[It] is not mentioned in discussions of cities that have a strong fitness orientation,” he says. But the data demonstrated only a handful of weaknesses, most of them having to do with the limited number of recreational facilities.

Well, if Washington, D.C., was an unexpected contender, some of the other top cities are not as much of a surprise. The rest of the top 10 are: Minneapolis, Denver, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, San Diego, Austin and Virginia Beach. You can check out the entire list of 45 ranked metropolitan areas, or see a Forbes slide show of the cities.

What does it all mean in the end? Well, obviously, you can be fit anywhere. It’s a personal lifestyle choice. But this list does give you an idea of which regions care more about issues of health and lifestyle and thereby provide access to a more fitness friendly infrastructure. Just as with the list of bike-friendly cities that I recently covered, it’s one more piece of information if you’re looking to live in a place that shares some of your lifestyle values.