Facing Fears And Changing Your Mind While Traveling. Cycling Around The World With Doug Walsh

If you spend years planning your dream trip, what happens when life gets in the way? Do you change your plans or do you plow on regardless? Is the journey more important than the destination, and are you living in a way that honors that choice? In this wide-ranging interview with Doug Walsh, we talk about how fears and expectations can shape our travel experiences, and what we can learn about ourselves as well as the places we visit along the way. Doug Walsh is a former game strategy author and travel writer. His novel, Tailwinds Past Florence, is a romantic adventure with a time travel twist based on cycling around the world with his wife Kristen. Show notes * Planning a trip around the world for six years and some of the highlights * The generosity of strangers * Learning about ourselves on long trips — especially when we have to face our fears along the way * Holding plans lightly and pivoting when necessary * Dealing with travel burn-out * Maintaining a healthy relationship while traveling with a partner * What happens when you get home after a big trip? * Recommended books You can find Doug Walsh at DougWalsh.com Transcript of the interview Joanna: Doug Walsh is a former game strategy author and travel writer. His novel, Tailwinds Past Florence, is a romantic adventure with a time travel twist based on cycling around the world with his wife Kristen. Welcome, Doug. Doug: Hi, thanks for having me on, Jo. This is a real treat. Joanna: It’s exciting to talk to you. Let’s start with the big question which is why on earth did you decide to cycle around the world? Doug: It was one of those things where I remember the night vividly. My wife and I were sharing an upstairs office. She was in business school at the time. I’ve been working from home as a video game writer, writing strategy guides. And we knew we weren’t going to have kids at that point and I just turned to her one day and I said, ‘Hey, what do you say, when the dogs get old and aren’t here anymore, we take a year off and travel?’ At first, we were like, ‘We can rent out the house, take a ferry to Alaska.’ We live outside of Seattle in the Northwest of the U.S. and we could take a train across Canada, fly to Paris, go to Thailand. And then little by little that just morphed into, ‘We’ll sell everything we own, buy bicycles and we’ll spend three years traveling the world by bicycle.’ Not really sure how it evolved into that. It just snowballed. We were always active. I did a lot of mountain biking. We used to do triathlon when we were younger and it just kind of seemed like instead of hopscotching around the world and just seeing places, we can go slower, stretch our dollars, see the world 60 miles a day, and just let it come to us. I’m not really sure that’s a good answer in hindsight, but it’s how we ended up there. Joanna: A lot of people are unhappy with the way their life is going. And so they want to change their lives by doing a big trip like this. But it doesn’t sound like that was where you guys were. Were you escaping something? Doug: I think there was some burnout going on especially with my job. We left on the trip in 2014, but it took a good six years of paying off student loans and car payments and credit cards and all that. We had a lot of debt. We were very irresponsible when we were younger. We got married right out of college and just immediately went from having no money to...