A new perspective for a New Year

This time last year we were excited to begin the New Year knowing that in a little over 2 weeks we were heading off on our travels.

We had a year ahead of us that we’d set aside for this adventure.  I had taken a sabbatical from work and Calv had packed it in completely.

The tagline of this blog is ‘..change your mind; change your life..’

It turns out that that is exactly what we have done!  I took the decision in September to hand my notice in and work as a freelancer going forward.  And Calv, being a lorry driver, can work via an agency which gives us the freedom to travel as and when we choose and not be constrained by the limitations of holding down a full-time, permanent job.

So we truly have changed our lives!  We have a completely different perspective now; we want less things which, naturally, means we need less cash!  This isn’t to say that we don’t ever want for nice things, but we understand that we will need to do a bit extra work if we want something special.  We’re now working for a good reason, not just to mindlessly spend money on things that we really don’t need.

We understand that this is a life choice and that it isn’t for everybody, but we have reached a stage where it works for us.  Perfectly 🙂

We have talked about so many options for how to live our lives going forward – almost anything was on the table.  Ultimately though, having met all sorts of people on our travels, we both came to the conclusion that we don’t actually want to live in the van – even though within a week or 2 of being home, living in a house, we were craving the lifestyle that we’d enjoyed all year!  (We’ve settled in now though and are ready to do the work on the house that’s desperately needed).

We were seriously considering moving further north, and there were several places that we fell in love with (Norfolk was 1 such place, but the quality of the internet signal went against that 1; another was Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire).  Ultimately it all came down to the weather – you can’t beat the weather on the South Coast and, along with the fact that this is where most of our friends and family are, this was the deciding factor.  Who knows what future years will bring though – I’m certainly going to keep looking for suitable properties in Woodhall Spa…!

What we’re hoping to do going forward is travel for about half the year.  This year we’re intending to head back up the west coast to visit the highlands and islands, which we missed as we ran out of time.  We’re hoping to do this April, May and June – so hopefully plenty of time to do it justice 🙂

We feel that we rushed our trip around the UK (even though we only really made it briefly into Scotland and than rushed back down the west coast).  We think that you need at least 2 years to go around this country properly, and we know that we have missed some amazing areas even though we might have been close by.

We know that many people are envious of our new lifestyle.  We did save for a couple of years to enable us to embark on this journey, and believe that with a bit of careful forethought and planning anybody could do it if they want to.

At times, of course, we are envious of other’s lifestyles – e.g. holidays in the Indian Ocean, Caribbean etc!!

But we’ve made our choice and, for the next few years at least, we’re sticking to it.  We’re more relaxed and happier than we’ve ever been.  Nothing beats being in charge of your own destiny 🙂

I still have to finish the blog of our year away together with some posts noting the favourite places we visited etc.  So keep an eye out 🙂

Keep travelling!

Author: MandoraTheExplorer

Having given up full-time work we currently work a year to travel for 4-5 months, and we're hoping to continue this until we can retire properly! Currently living, and loving, life to the full :) View all posts by MandoraTheExplorer