How Our Year Off Came to Be

It was late Spring 2020, just a few months into the Coronavirus pandemic. Mike and I had been working from home together in our 830 square foot condo in Queen Anne, and like most people going a little stir crazy. But this shake-up in our routine allowed us to slow down and reevaluate what we wanted out of our lives. Up until that point, for the past four years that we’d been together, we were busy all the time – happy hours with friends, clients or coworkers, birthday parties, family gatherings, or weekend trips. Usually, our weekends were booked out weeks in advance, rarely having a quiet night at home during the week. It, of course, was all fun, we loved the social interaction and all the memories we created but now without it, we were able to finally slow down and take a long hard look at our lives and what we wanted for us as a couple.

One day Mike was off playing golf (May 31^st to be exact – which just so happened to be a week after our original wedding date but that’s a story for another time) and I decided to send him a link to Glassdoor job listings for English speaking jobs in Paris. I don’t know where the idea came from but it was the catalyst that started us thinking in a new direction. Not more than a week later we had a new life plan: quit our jobs and move to Paris for a year starting on March 1, 2021. Then, we would come back to Washington and move to Bellingham to start a family. With so much uncertainty about when things might get back to normal, we were certain of one thing: we wanted to take a year to travel and enjoy ourselves before trying to have kids.

From there, we started researching the French visa process, apartments in Paris and English-speaking jobs. The idea eventually evolved, and our thought process went like this:

“If we’re working in France, we’ll only be able to travel on the weekends and during holidays.” –> “Won’t we want to travel more than just that if we’re in Europe?” –> “It would be so much more fun to NOT work.”–> “Holy crap, we can afford to do that!” –> “Let’s live in Paris since that would be amazing and we’d have a home base to travel from.”

Needless to say, that is not how things evolved.

As we all know things got worse with the pandemic, the lockdowns in France kept coming, most of the world still bans travel from the US. So, we pivoted. If you know us at all, you know that pivoting has been the name of the game this past year. We looked at other options and decided that traveling the US and visiting National Parks would be a great plan B. We researched Sprinter vans, rented one to try it out for a long weekend, talked to friends who had done long road trips and started to get excited about this new option.

We waited a long time to make more solid plans because we were still hopeful that Paris would happen. As luck would have it, my mom decided to buy a new house just north of Tucson in a town called Marana, Arizona. She closed in the beginning of January so we decided that we would spend the month of March in Arizona and from there either buy a van or move to Paris, if by some miracle France was open by April. It wasn’t more than a week before the end of January when we realized that we wouldn’t be able to buy a van in March if we didn’t have jobs to get approved for a van loan (that is also a whole other story for another time – conversion van loans are difficult to get apparently). We had to figure out which van we wanted, how to finance it and closed the deal before the end of February when both Mike and I were finishing at our jobs. We got right to work and ultimately bought our van on February 26^th.

Now here we are in Arizona getting ready to head out tomorrow on a trip to see Sedona, the Grand Canyon, Bryce, Zion, Capitol Reef, Arches, Canyonlands, Mesa Verde and Four Corners. Mike is three weeks into his temporary retirement and I’m just a few days in and we feel so lucky that we’re able to have this adventure and spend this quality time together as newlyweds. We can’t wait to see the US with the help of our van, Big Deb, and hopefully get to spend some time in Paris this year as well.