The Blog of John Patrick Larson

Tracy and I have a theme for this year: World Tour.  The gist is we’ll be finishing out our lease at our current place at the end of April, and setting ourselves up to live abroad in various countries as we make our way around the world for the duration of a year.

I’ll no doubt have plenty of tales to tell about this experience, but before it falls to far into the shadows of memory, I’d like to first recount the origins of this vision which has steadily morphed into a “wow, this is not just a cool idea, we’re actually doing this.”

It was June 8th of last year when a friend forwarded me a notice put out by one of his associates:

I’m converting my million-dollar+ mountain-retreat in Breckenridge, Colorado back into a members-only club for entrepreneurs.
…
We’re going to open the doors in September, so I’m looking for a host-couple (husband + wife) who would like to live
there rent-free as entrepreneurs come and go / hang out.
…
This is the perfect opportunity if you are either retired of if you have an internet business.

The ideal couple would have one person with entrepreneur experience and the other person who’s a friendly people-person or host.

I was struck by how good a fit Tracy and I would make, and that afternoon we spent an hour exploring if we’d actually be game to do something that cool and adventurous.

We ultimately agreed that we were.

I reached out to the fellow looking for his couple, proudly throwing our hat in the ring.  Four minutes later I got a reply that he’d already found someone, but appreciated my contacting him all the same.

Easy come, easy go, right?

Lucky for me, my fabulous wife had developed a certain affinity for doing something that cool and adventurous as a product of our lengthy consideration of the opportunity.  That evening she broached the subject directly: “So all this talk about living in Breckenridge for a year got me thinking: I want to do something cool like that.”

“Go on,” I replied.

“Well, we’ve been thinking about a trip to Thailand, right?  And we wanna make it long as possible, since it’s super cheap once you get there and already paid for the flight.”  “Yep.”  “And there’s a lot of countries we want to go experience, pretty much all of which come with that overhead of a flight to get there and back, making each pretty expensive.”

“I’m with you.”

“What if we took a year and just lived everywhere we want to experience, without having to fly back to the US between each country?  We could sell most of our stuff, put the rest in storage, have the kitty stay with my parents, and just travel and live abroad for a year, without all the carrying costs of having a place in the US.”

(I don’t know if her words went exactly like that, but that was the gist: it all sounded immediatly so clear, simple, and above all affordable.)

“Holy shit, that’s awesome.  Yeah, we should probably do that.”

(I don’t know if my words went exactly like that, but that was the gist: I was immediately sold, and stoked.)

The rest of the night we discussed in animated fashion the vision and logistics.  We further explored the feasibility of it all.  It felt like we were somehow cheating or forgetting something important: surely there must be some loophole we were exploiting or some pitfall we were failing to consider in order for this large-scale dream appear so doable.

But no, with our mutually entrepreneurial careers, my ability to do work and earn money abroad with just laptop and wi-fi (as battle-tested in Argentina), our lack of a mortgage (fuck yes), and Tracy’s super supportive in-town parents whom we then (rightly) assumed would take the cat, this dream was our for the living if we were so bold as to do so.

We were/are.

Today, over six months later, plans are coming along swimmingly.  Everything is falling into place, and for how much of an upheaval in lifestyle this is it sure doesn’t feel stressful.  Our intended plan around the world keeps evolving.  To track it, last week I made a map with pins and string detailing the plan, which you can see here.

Super big thanks to Tom Schaff with his simple email forward that sparked all of this.