Have you ever just wished you could give it all up and just ‘drop-out’ for a while?
Stupid question! Of course you have.
Have you ever stopped for even just a second though and wondered if you could actually do it?
Not such a stupid question eh?
This is where we are (Mandi – edging close to 50, and Calvin – well past that landmark!). Calv was constantly saying to me he wanted to just give it all up and disappear in the van. It got me thinking – why can’t we just do it?
I spent some time (maybe an hour..) looking at how much I could save and other money that I might be able to raise (like selling the house!) and how much we would need for a year off, and came to the conclusion that actually this was possible. Let’s face it, we’re none of us getting any younger and if we don’t do this now (whilst we’re still relatively young) who’s to say we’ll ever get the opportunity again?
Having checked with Calv that he was serious and really wanted to do this (his answer – ‘Can we go tomorrow?’) I raised the prospect with my boss.
So in August 2015 I asked him if I could have the whole of 2017 off, and also could I have 6 weeks off in the summer of 2016 too? Please?!
A week later I got the go-ahead. I now had a year off and a job to come back to!
The idea is to spend most of the year travelling around our own beautiful country. However, Calv has now wimped out of spending too much of the winter in the UK – he wants to start off in Spain (which I have modified to Spain/Portugal/France) for a couple of months. Then we would start our UK tour heading east along the South Coast and hugging the coast (with daytrips inland) for the rest of our journey – hence the title of the Blog – ‘TurnRightOutOfPortsmouth’. It doesn’t matter where we’re going – it just depends what direction you’re pointing in when you ‘turn right’!
turnrightoutofportsmouth 