My Gap Year at 50 – better late than never!

In a light bulb moment, sitting at my desk feeling jaded and restless with my mind wandering off to faraway places I smashed into the keyboard the words: travelling the world on a budget. Google produced a whopping 78,400+ results but glaring at me on the first page was the answer to what I was looking for.

With my 50^th birthday only 12 months away I had been brainstorming ideas for a memorable, exciting, slightly risky and most importantly affordable celebration idea. My budget was tight, but it was my 50^th so somehow, I had to make it happen.

Anxiously awaiting the arrival of my recent internet purchase, How to Travel the World on $50 a Day, I continued day dreaming at my work desk about the grand adventure I was going to have.

As soon as my guide book arrived I ripped into it and read it cover to cover. I was completely fascinated by what I was learning. Fairly quickly the unhappy and overworked me was starting to image a new me: happy, reckless and adventurous and travelling the world for a year on a shoestring budget.

I was convinced this was what I wanted to do for my 50^th yet I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that my husband Richard was not going to be on board.

All great travel ideas begin with an enthusiastic discussion about where, when and how much it will cost. Typically, it’s the latter that brings me unstuck.

Over the last 10 years my ideal holiday had been all about rest and relaxation, luxury accommodation, great food and wine and all conveniently at my fingertips. This all comes with a hefty price tag and my budget could only cope with my deserve it all mentality for about a week to 10 days. That was not enough time to get through my gigantic travel bucket list. Thankfully my new book was opening up my mind to a new way of thinking. I was filled with nervous excitement about my plans and ready to embrace the new me.

As soon as I finished the book I announced: ‘I know what I want to do for my 50, I just need 12 months off and $40k’. That was my actual pitch to my unsuspecting husband.

To my utter surprise, he wanted to hear more. I knew that to convince him, I needed to pay attention to the finer details. I’m a spur-of-the-moment kind of gal. He is a practical, number crunching kind of guy. Time to pour some wine (hopefully the last expensive bottle we will be drinking for awhile).

As soon as I mentioned budget travel I knew I would have his attention. A good friend of ours has travelled the world on a shoe string budget so with his encouragement, and armed with my new book, we started talking about how to pull this crazy idea off.

Organising our home and work life appeared to fall into place quite easily. After all, our kids are all adults and are financially independent. Our business could operate without us providing we could find a suitable manager who would take care of it – and the dog.

Richard started crunching the numbers and after only a few glasses of wine, he announced that if we could save some serious cash over the next year we could actually make it happen.

The sacrifices had to start straight away; our spending habits had to change dramatically. Goodbye take away coffee, hair appointments, spur of the moment dining out, fancy wine and internet shopping.

The rule for our gap year was we had to live off $100 a day and this had to include everything: flights, food, accommodation, transport, tips, tours, clothes, the lot.

My excitement in planning every detail soon got out of control.  An enormous laminated world map covered our dining room table for months whilst I painstakingly developed our itinerary.

For me planning is an obsession. In no time I had our whole 12 months sorted. Richard was scratching his head wondering how on earth we would get through my itinerary on budget.  This is when he imposed rule number two for our gap year: not only did we have to do this on a budget, but now I was not allowed to plan anything in advance.

My gap year dream of travelling the world for my 50^th was quickly turning from a dream into a nightmare. Not only am I hopeless at budgeting, I’m also ridiculously unstable without a plan in place.

Genuinely full of self-doubt, I tried to reassure myself that there is no real adventure to be found living within my comfort zone!