Travel Plans Update

We're slowly making this sabbatical more real and right now that means we have more plane tickets! On a whim, I searched for tickets from Australia to Thailand and discovered our currently preferred, budget airline, Jetstar, was running a sale. So, we scooped up some tickets to Phuket in late October to do some rock climbing for a week or so and perhaps some snorkeling for the days our poor arms give out from climbing. The rock climbing we want to do in Southern Thailand is actually across the Andaman Sea from Phuket, so we'll be taking a ferry adventure after our flight, but at least the flight details are figured out for now. 

After basking in the glory of finding a good ticket to Phuket, we went to bed. But, following the theme of the last ticket buying spree, Brandon got up in the night and searched for return tickets. He figured that if there was a sale to Thailand, there could be a sale back to Australia as well. And, my wise husband was right! So, I got woken up at 11:31 pm to give permission to buy flights from Bangkok back to Melbourne in mid-late November. Which, I sleepily gave. 

The reason we're flying out of Bangkok instead of Phuket is that we'll also be visiting a city in Northern Thailand as well called Chiang Mai. There's some more rock climbing there as well as other adventures. It's also cheaper than Southern Thailand and by staying there about three weeks it will hopefully give us a more local Thai experience. 

Chiang Mai has an airport, but of course it is much more expensive to fly in/out of than Bangkok or Phuket. Chiang Mai to Bangkok is a 12-15 hour train ride, whereas Chiang Mai to Phuket would involve multi-day travel including a bus, train, and ferry. Definitely an adventure, but definitely exhausting. So flying out of Bangkok does indeed seem like our best choice. 

We'll still have to figure out how we're getting from the Southern Thailand rock climbing region to Chiang Mai in the North. Maybe plane, or maybe we'll be swayed to try an authentic Thai bus and train combination. We shall see. 

Katie's last day... woot woot!

Today was Katie's last day of work!!! It makes this whole sabbatical thing that much more real. We celebrated tonight with one of Katie's now former coworkers and his wife. We hosted and served a three course meal of first veggies and hummus, then chicken shawarma with all the fixins, and finished with Guinness chocolate brownies and homemade ice cream. And of course for each course we provided a beer paring, respectively a German lager, a Saison, and finished with our favorite Creme Brûlée stout by Southern Tier.  It was a great way to celebrate and kick off the start of her year off.

I didn't think to take any pictures while they were around, but at least here's a picture of our beer pairings.

How should we blog?

People have already been asking, where's the next blog post? Well writing the next set of blog posts have been sorta tough because there have been a few questions that have been weighing on my mind now that we've started this blog. Questions like...

• What kind of things should we post about?
• How often should we post? 
• How many pictures should we post?
• Where should we post our pictures to?
• How often should we post links to blog posts or pictures we've taken on Facebook? 
• When we write, who are we writing to/for... ourselves... our friends and family following us... the general public? 
• What is that balance of adequately sharing/documenting whats going on without seeming like we're trying to rub what we're doing in people's face?
• What style of writing should we use? Should we write from the perspective of a singular person, using pronouns like "I/me", or will we stick with the general "we/us" pronouns representing the duality of this blogs authorship even when a post may only be composed by one author?
• How concerned should we be with spelling and grammar? 
• Should we do stream-of-consciousness style posts or should we always refine/edit? 
• How short/long is a good post? Is there too short a post? Is there too long a post? 
• Should we try to be funny, or serious, or something else?
• How personal should we get? 
• How "professional" do we have to be since people from our professional lives/jobs are also reading this?
• How much should we sensor ourselves? 
• Do we sensor our topics?
• Not that we would do this a lot, but can we swear? 
• Is it worth possibly offending people we care/respect even for the sake of true honesty?
• Can we talk about/post pictures of beer/alcohol even if some of our friends and family disagree with our views on drinking? 
• How do we balance and intermix the sabbatical/travel topics with all the other stuff we're interested in writing about? 
• We like thinking and reflecting on lots of subjects, including the hard and sometimes touchy ones...
• Should we really share those with the general public? 
• Is this the place to do that?
• Should we talk about our faith as Christians? Should we include things we're wrestling with? Should we write/share about stuff we think we've got figured out (statements of faith, share our stories, etc)?
• Should I write about random tech/software things that I'm hoping to explore during our time off?
• Should we write about the logistics we've gone through in taking a sabbatical with the hopes it might help others do something similar?
• Should we share about past traveling experiences? 
• Should we post links/talk about random things we like... like food, music, activities, stuff on the web?
• Should we be concerned with our own and others privacy?
• Are there security concerns?
• How much work should I put into providing our readers easy ways to follow only the topics they care about? Which topic labels do I pick? Is it even worth doing at all?
• Should we try out video blogging?
• Should I update the look of the blog?
• Should I turn on comments on the blog?
• Should I provide ways of people to contact us?
• Should we "micro-blog" and post small updates with twitter or other social media sites?

As you can see there is a lot to figure out (or at least shows how much I'm over-thinking the whole thing), and we're doing so kinda on the fly at this point. So please be patient as we "find our voice". We may never fully get to where it is all organized/figured out, but hopefully we'll still have some valuable and/or interesting things to share from time to time, even if it means sifting through some posts that are of no interest to you, like this one may be. If you have any tips/advice or things that you'd like to start seeing, see less of, or see more of, please let us know. We welcome any suggestions. 

Cheers

What is Moose In A Box?

So why pick "Moose In A Box" as the name of our blog? The name comes from the drawing you see on this blog. Admittedly, this drawing is a bit silly. That's probably why Katie and I like it. It's become a little bit of an inside joke and shared identity between us. But we also came up with some deeper meanings that relate this drawing to our sabbatical and more generally our life philosophy, treating it as a metaphor if you will. So here we go, here are the metaphors:

A Metaphor About Winging It

I was a doodler in school, just not a very good one. But I had my go-to characters that I'd like to draw. One of which, as you may have guessed now, was a "moose in a box". It came about by me realizing one day that I could draw a pretty good cartoon moose head, but that is about as far as my drawing skills/patience with drawing would take me. So as a short cut, I simply drew part of his body and then put the rest of my beloved character in a box. Then I would add a label to the box to point out that my drawing was indeed a "moose in a box" in case there was any question.

So reflecting on its origins, this moose in a box kind of represents how we sometimes do things in life. We start with using the skills and knowledge that we have already attained, but by all means we are not experts on every facet of what we are trying to accomplish. So when it comes to moving forward, in both completing the picture of a moose or in life in general, we have a choice for how much time and effort we want to spend. I choose to not take the time to figure out how to draw the perfect full and complete moose, but I still ended up with something really interesting and valuable, at least to me. And so too in life I feel it's valuable to not try to control and become experts on every facet of what we're doing/planning. It's ok to wing-it, to take that short cut, or to leave things a bit more open ended because where that can take you can also be pretty cool.

The Box Metaphor

Katie and I don't always follow the status quo. You could even say we're the type that tend to "think outside the box". But at the same time, we'd argue that we're not doing anything that has not already been done before in some way or another. The pieces are all there, we just may use some others tend to ignore or arrange them a bit differently.

For example, instead of following the usual path for our wedding, what we valued did not line up with what seemed to be the average standard template for weddings. That's not to say we think those weddings are dumb or anything. Quite the contrary, we've been very blessed to attend and even be apart of many standard weddings for friends and family that we've thoroughly enjoyed. But we also saw how much stress such an event can potentially cause, both financially and psychologically, and it just didn't seem worth it to us. So after some deliberation, we instead did a much more intimate ceremony with just our family and focused most of our wedding weekend on letting them live life with us instead of stressing about wedding details because that time of community, fellowship, and support was what was most important to us. It wasn't the most novel execution of a wedding in the world. Lots of people look at the stresses of weddings and decide to elope or slim down in one way or another. But we're definitely among those willing to ask the question "why are we doing this?" and make life decisions that take us down less predictable paths as a result of trying to answer that question.

So we don't see ourselves so much as the type that are truly "thinking outside of the box". But perhaps we do view the box of life a bit differently the some others do. For us we have found that there is a moose in the box. Or there is a least a moose in our box. Maybe we put it there. Or maybe it was always there. Maybe everyone has moose in their box too, but they just don't recognize that it's there. Either way we know and see that there is a moose in the box and are excited about the possibilities that that brings.

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You may have noticed that this blog post is tagged with the label Moose In A Box. If we write any future posts that relate to these metaphors about living life just a bit differently that we talked about in this post, we'll try to add the same label.

Sabbatical FAQ - Part 2

We get a lot of questions about our sabbatical. Here are some of our answers.... (part 2)

What's going on with your beard? Are you growing it out for your sabbatical?
As many of you know I love having any reason to grow out my beard. For example, I grew my beard out in honor of the first major release of software I was a part of. It's fun having those goals of "I will not shave until X happens or X gets done." So to answer your question, yes I have indeed been growing it out in anticipation of the sabbatical. In a couple weeks I plan on doing something crazy with it while it's this long. Then after my last day of work I plan on doing some kind of crazy/fun shave so that I can start my time off "from scratch" so to speak. And then I get to grow it out all over again.

What's going on with both of your jobs?
Katie is quitting her job with her last day being at the end of May. She gave them about 7 weeks notice with the hope she could minimize the impact on her fellow physical therapists, assistants, and on the clinic in general.

For me, back in March I broached the subject of quitting to take a sabbatical with my managers at TechSmith. Everyone agreed we'd like our paths to cross again after all this is done, so steps were taken to make that as easy as possible for both TechSmith and myself. So the current plan is to return to the employment of TechSmith when I am finished. My last day of work will be mid June. The exact date of my return has not yet been set.

Are you doing this because you hate your jobs?
Hate is too strong a word, but seeking a break from our jobs has definitely motivated our decision to pursue this sooner rather than later. Don't get me wrong, we have both been blessed with great jobs, and there are many aspects we love and will miss. But over this past year both of our jobs have had their stresses. Katie especially has been feeling very overworked, and it has been a struggle for her to find the motivation to go in each day. For me, I have been struggling off and on with motivation to work on my current projects and with software development in general. We are both hopeful that this break will be rejuvenating and plan to continue to pursue our careers in some form or another when we are done.

How long have you been thinking about this?
We don't remember the exact date we got serious about it, but it has been well over a year. We sat down with our financial advisor in the summer of 2014 to see if it was even feasible and what kind of time frame we'd be looking at. So that was probably our first, "let's make this idea real" moment. But the ground work was being set well before that. Even while we were still dating we'd joke and dream about what early retirement would look like and how cool that'd be.

I thought you weren't going to start until 2016?
We were, but then we changed our minds. Once we started bouncing the idea around with other people, pretty much everyone said don't wait. Also the 2016 mark was a little arbitrary in the first place. We thought it sounded good for Katie to work a whole five years first, but four is really just as good. So with that being our only real reason to wait, and us realizing that planning over a year out was risky since a lot can change in a year, we decided to move it up to summer of 2015.

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Interested in more FAQ? See our first FAQ post

Our First (or Second) Airplane Tickets

Buying airplane tickets is stressful for everyone. Or, at least it is for me and Brandon. And, it turns out that finding tickets for a sabbatical is even more stressful and time consuming, because (ironically) of the freedom and open-ended nature of it. When buying tickets for a regular vacation, you have to abide by a relatively strict time table with allowable time off work, typical daily schedules, other commitments, and such. But, when considering a whole year of free-time those boundaries go out the window. Where do you go first? What time of year is best? Where do you fly out of? Where do you fly into? Is it cheaper to stay a few days, a week, or a month? Is it cheaper to by all one way tickets? Is it feasible to buy a round-the-world ticket? Is a multi-destination ticket a good deal? These are just a few of the many variables we have had to consider. 

After much deliberation about whether to go to Australia or Thailand first, we decided on Australia. It was tempting to go to Thailand first, as flying to Bangkok is a bit cheaper than flying to Australia from the United States. And, making our budget last for a full year is obviously very important for us. In the end, however, we based our decision mainly on weather. We decided that if we're spending money to go to Thailand and we want to do a lot of rock climbing and outdoor adventures, we should try to avoid the rainy season (July to October) as much as possible. Thus, we are going to Australia first and then Thailand. 

Then, we looked at round-the-world, multi-city destination, and one-way tickets to determine the most affordable route. We had heard from a few people about round-the-world tickets, and they do exist! However, there are several stipulations for their use that are not conducive to the type of travel we want to do, so we have had to rule those out.
Multi-city tickets allow you to link together a variety of flights and cities into one purchase. It turns out that this method of finding tickets at good prices is a bit of a scam. We discovered it is much, much cheaper to buy multiple one-way tickets than do a multi-city ticket. 

So, after all that deliberation and finally settling on a date of departure around mid-September, we set out to find our first one way ticket from Michigan to Melbourne, Australia. Yay! But, not really, because stress was not yet alleviated as ticket prices fluctuate depending on day, time, and any other unknown airline whim. During our two weeks of deliberation, ticket prices had risen about $150 per ticket fueling our frustration. Checking prices on and off for a week was nerve-wracking and finally, we just had to commit. So, we sat down one night and committed to finding and buying a ticket. After 1.5 hours of searching, we bought a ticket. After all, if you don't buy a ticket after 1.5 hours, you just have to repeat that 1.5 hours of work the next time you search, because the flights have all reset themselves. As we had just watched The Imitation Game dramatizing Alan Turing's life and the Turing Machine, I felt this flight finding phenomenon rather similar to his experience with breaking German code (though of course not nearly as weighty or world-important). 

We ended up buying a good ticket overall with good layovers and flight times. Yay! But, not really, because as usual we could not shake that nasty feeling of spending more than we wanted and missing out on something even better. We had bought it thru Expedia however and had a 24 hour cancellation, full refund guarantee. We went to bed, and I went to work the next day, telling one of my coworkers that we had bought a ticket to Australia, but joking that my husband had probably returned it in the middle of the night and found us a different ticket instead. 

This joke was not too far from the truth! True to his penchant for exhausting all available options Brandon had gotten up in the night and with extensive research had discovered that buying a one way ticket from Michigan to Honolulu and then buying another one way ticket from Honolulu to Melbourne, staying in Honolulu for a couple days between legs, was cheaper than our already purchased ticket. The several day layover in Honolulu also had the added benefit of allowing us to hang out with friends who live there. We were planning to do this on our way home in November, but now we could see them in both September and November. What can I say? Skillz. My husband is crazy, but amazing. 

So, as you've probably guessed, we returned the Expedia ticket and bought a much cheaper ticket from Detroit to Honolulu. We will then spend a couple days in Honolulu with friends before flying from there to Melbourne. And, we finally feel really good about a plane ticket! Yay! 

Sabbatical FAQ - Part 1

We get a lot of questions about our sabbatical. Here are some of our answers.... (part 1)

What do you mean by sabbatical? Are you going to be studying or researching something?
Sigh... Words are hard. We've called this thing we're doing many different things: early retirement, primary retirement, gap year, year off, quarter life crisis, etc, but sabbatical seems to resonate the best with most people we've talked to. We are essentially just taking a year+ long break from our jobs. We are not taking a sabbatical in the same sense a professor or pastor would. We are not doing any research or anything.

Why are you doing this? 
Why not?... That's the short answer anyway. The long answer we will spread out over several blog posts. But we have definitely thought about this a lot.

What are your goals?
Lots of them, like...

• Use our time differently
• Try to feel less busy and over scheduled
• Explore what it means to live life day to day without a job.
• Use more of our time to invest in our friends, family, and community around us
• Take time to explore the world around us
• Do things that we can't do with the usual limited time off of work
• Do things now that we might not be able to do later in life

See, we have lots of goals. We do realize that some of those goals conflict with each other. Wanting to do ALL THE THINGS has made making specific plans for the year quite difficult, but we think we've struck a decent balance with our current general plan.

Where are you going on your travels?
What we know for sure is that we are spending this first summer off right where we are at now in Holland, MI. It's a lovely place, especially in the summers. We definitely plan to take full advantage of being near Lake Michigan beaches. Hopefully being here will also give us ample time to spend with the friends and family around West Michigan as well as maybe try to entice a few of our friends out of state to finally come visit us while we're still here.

In the fall we plan to do our first international adventure out to the Asia Pacific area with a couple months split between Australia and Thailand. And the plan is to visit some friends in Hawaii both on the way out there and on the way back. This helps break up the long travels as well as has the added benefit of getting to live life and catch up a few weeks with some pretty cool people that happen to live there.

The winter will be spent back here in the States. We realize most people would be trying to escape the cold and do their tropical international travels then, but we like the winter season and the adventures it brings. We'll most likely spend the first chunk of it doing Christmas stuff with family and friends in both Michigan and Illinois. And the rest of the winter will be dedicated to visiting some friends out West with extended stops in California, Utah, and Colorado. We're hopeful that there will be some rock climbing and snowboarding during those visits.

The rest of the year is bit too far out to have nailed down now. We have lots of ideas. Most of them involve honing in on that goal of spending time with friends and family. So there will be lots of crashing at peoples houses and living life with them for a short while. But we are hoping to mix it up a bit with them too. For example, we think that the Spring will involve time dedicated to the types of travel that our travel enthusiast friends and family would want to do. We've told lots of groups that if they'd like travel buddies, we're available for whatever adventure they like, assuming we can afford it. Sounds like at least a couple people are wanting to take us up on that offer. From the ideas we've heard about so far it sounds like we might be bouncing around Europe a bit. And if we do make it over there, we'll hopefully get a chance to see some friends that live out that way as well.

But wait, what about New Zealand? You should go there...
We know... we know... Believe us, it's on our list. We just don't have enough time to do it justice. Plus if we went to New Zealand, we would want to travel all over and that's just not the type of traveling we're looking to do this trip. We'll get there someday.

Are you keeping the place where you currently live in Holland?
We will keep it through the summer, but plan on giving it up when we start our travels.

What are you going to do with all your stuff? 
We see this as a great opportunity to pare down and clean house. So we will be getting rid of as much stuff as possible either by selling it or giving it away. The few things we decide to keep we'll put in storage.

Will you move back Michigan after you are done?
Not going to lie, a lot can happen in a year. But at the same time we have a great community in Michigan that would be really hard to leave behind. It definitely seems most likely we'll come back and live somewhere in Michigan, but we're not making any promises.


That's all for now... check back again later for Sabbatical FAQ - Part 2