A Spark Reignited

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My mind has always been able to wander and dream big. I often ask people: when your thoughts are clear—maybe you are driving alone, taking a walk, or just scrolling on your phone for ten minutes—where does your mind take you?

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For me, my peaceful refuge has always been travel and planning. I love spotting a beautiful building in a magazine or a stunning landscape on a show, and immediately hunting down its coordinates. Zooming in and out of digital maps intrigues me. I love looking at far-off locations and wondering what there is to discover.

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But for a long time, that wonder was put on pause.

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After living for four amazing years in Southern Italy, our family returned to the Washington, D.C. area in 2024. Almost immediately, I fell into a deep slump. Every single day, I forced myself through a 50-minute metro commute into the office, putting on a positive face for the professional world around me.

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Inside, I was hollow. My heart, my mind, and my stress tolerance were completely pegged. After decades in a high-paced, high-stress career, I was entirely burnt out and deeply mourning the life we had left behind in Italy.

 

In desperation, I placed a sticky note on my computer monitor with three letters: BAM. It stood for Bare Ass Minimum. I would ask myself what did I absolutely have to do each day in order to keep my work portfolio functioning and honor the importance of my position.

 

As a textbook Type-A personality who tied her self-worth to job performance, this was an incredibly hard mindset shift. But my stress was starting to manifest physically, and I had to set boundaries. BAM was my daily reminder to stay out of the trap of late-night emails and toxic, self-inflicted overworking. I did enough to keep things afloat, but created mental boundaries for myself. We often are our own worst enemies when it comes to trying to please others.

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My daily relief came on those long weekday metro rides. I started watching long-term travel documentaries on YouTube and stumbled upon a blog about a family who traveled the world for a year.

 

Just like that, a spark was reignited.

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A Crazy, Well-Planned Idea

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For the next few months, my daily commute became a covert strategy session. I kept my growing dream a total secret. When you share a big dream too early, people tend to introduce doubt and fear. I needed a bulletproof plan before I shared my innermost thoughts with anyone.

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I systematically tackled the logistics:

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• Retirement: I calculated the exact date I could retire with enough years of service, aligning it perfectly with the start of the kids' 8th-grade year.

• Budget: I built a detailed spreadsheet of our dream destinations and extrapolated the daily costs. When I compared it to our high mortgage, car payments, and utilities in Bethesda, the math shocked me—traveling the world didn't have to be more than our traditional suburban life.

• Schooling: I worried about hindering the kids' education, so I scoured the legal requirements for homeschooling to ensure we stayed fully compliant.

• Logistics: I mapped out how to sell our current house, store our goods, and keep our rental property in Washington State secure for our return.

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The Walk in Rock Creek Park

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On a sunny Friday evening in the fall, I asked my husband, Joel, to go for a walk along the Rock Creek Park corridor in Bethesda. For the first time in months, the chaotic noise in my mind was gone. I felt total peace.

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"I am going to tell you something I’ve been thinking about for a long time," I told him as we walked. "I don't need you to say yes or no right away. I just need you to listen."

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I let it all out. I told him about the months of secret planning. I told him I wanted to retire in 20 months, homeschool the kids, and travel the world for a full year starting in August 2026.

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Joel stayed calm, but the practical questions came immediately.

"How are the kids going to do school?"

I dove into the details of accredited online school programs. Doing this during 8th grade would give us invaluable quality time with them before high school—something I had missed out on by working since they were babies.

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"What will we do with the house?"

We would sell our Bethesda home and put our essentials in storage. Our rental property back in Washington State would remain occupied by tenants, giving us a guaranteed place to land when the year was up.

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"Where would we even go?"

Our route was already mapped. We would start in South America to hike Machu Picchu and trek through Patagonia. We'd hop to Europe for the winter fairy tales of Christmas markets and skiing. Next, Southern Africa for a self-drive safari and the ancient dunes of the Namib Desert. Spring would take us to the historic palaces of India and elephant sanctuaries in Thailand. Finally, we would wrap up the year with a two-month campervan road trip across Australia.

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"Sounds amazing... and expensive."

I countered with data from the spreadsheet I had been developing. Because we were cutting out our heavy suburban overhead, living mobile on a strict daily budget would cost almost exactly what we were already spending to live in Bethesda.

 

Joel paused. He looked at me, smiled, and said, "Well, it sounds like you have really planned this out. Let’s do it."

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