“Life begins at the end of your comfort zone,” American author, Neale Donald Walsch, once wrote.
Where are you in your life right now? Are you still living in your parents’ home two years out of school, or are you working in the suburbs an hour outside of your dream city? Have you left the country before? Are you still clipping photos of your favorite vacation destination? Don’t use money or responsibilities at work as an excuse to skip out on these great dreams. Just execute a plan and it will happen.Being an internship hungry college student, I never studied abroad and only visited Europe once with my grandmother in 7th grade. While it was as enchanting as “Roman Holiday” and “Charade,” I was a 12- year- old with bent glasses, a fanny pack, and a grandmother who wanted us in bed by 9 pm every night. As I grew older, I felt an actual physical reaction to the photos of my friends drinking vino in Italia and seeing them come back with gold painted frames from Spain.
Graduating college and getting a full-time job gave me an open window to finally see strange places and unusual people. In my first year out of college, I traveled to the Bahamas with my best friend, and I am currently in my second year of post-grad life planning a dream vacation to Greece. How am I accomplishing this, you ask? No, my parents aren’t helping, and I do not get as many vacation days as my friends. I believe that these trips are possible and that they will cure this aching feeling of wanderlust. Here are some ideas that will help you quench your thirst for wanderlust and bring you one step closer to making that dream vacation a reality:
- Prioritize – As I stated earlier, as a young working professional, vacation days are limited if I want to fit in family time in Hilton Head or be home during Christmas week. These are once in a lifetime opportunities where you aren’t bogged down by your own family and age; capitalize!
- Financial Deadline – Once you’ve figured out a budget, (there are some really unbelievable bundle packages out there) mark a date in your planner that reminds you that money must be put toward this trip! Once money is paid, you can’t back down.
- Give yourself time - I started planning for my trip to Greece a year in advance. I waited for the perfect time to buy airfare, and also save up to buy a little something here and there with each paycheck. The extra time allows you to make sure each aspect of the trip is perfect and will put less stress on you in the long run.
- Research - My two Grecian companions and I make up the perfect research team! We use up too much work hours on Gmail-chat linking one another to the tourist routes to go to, or the locals’ way of life we could venture. It’s been months but slowly but surely the perfect itinerary is forming.
On, your mark, get set, GO! We are too young and too full of life to stay in the same city 365 days out of the year. Too smart and too wide- eyed too only know the confines of our hometown. Our lives as blossoming adults becomes stressful as we first learn how to handle utilities and credit card payments. I could barely grasp my benefits at my first job two years ago, let alone plan how to get myself across the globe without a parent to hold my hand. It’s essential to live and soak up the people on this planet. You’re going to get confused, there’s going to be many options, and there will be bumps in the road. But that’s alright.
“Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.”
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