Laura and I are asked quite frequently how we are doing this gap year and what exactly we are doing. For a while it was hard to articulate because for myself I was still trying to find my stride. We are certainly traveling and doing a lot of tourist activities but we are also trying to live as if we are not always on vacation because we can't be. Between teaching H, continuing my programming education, working on getting the blog to a point that I want to show it off (on the code side of things), editing through photographs and writing here, it is a constant line to walk that sometimes feels like it is all in sync and then other times feels like we aren't doing any of those things particularly well.

Leading up to the trip I worked many hours getting the blog to the point that I was happy with (deadlines are a good thing) but in the process, I left the code a bit messy. This is leading me to do a refactor of my code. At this, I know, my scrum masters at my previous job are now rolling their eyes. It's good though and necessary for myself. With all of the blog work, I severely neglected to learn outside of my comfort zone so I need to get back into some of my classwork. I then would knee-jerk over to course work and neglect blog feature work. Between class and blog programming I found that the actual blog was not getting any content from me so I need to find time to actually think and write about what is on my mind or have experienced. All of this lead to realizing some crucial things that needed to be changed. First up, a calendar.

This is what I came up with:

Sunday/Monday - Programming class work

Tuesday/Wednesday - Blog feature/refactor work

Thursday - Photo editing

Friday - Blog writing

Saturday - off

Having dedicated days eases my mind quite a bit for what I should work on. For educational work, I tend to spend maybe 1-2 hours a day. On the blog features, I will spend 3-4 hours a day and then maybe 1-2 hours on photo editing and blog writing. I don't allow myself to work on something like photos on a Sunday unless I have gotten myself to a good point on my course work. Now at this point, if you are still reading you may be asking yourself, "How does he actually stick to that, have fun/travel and find time to relax?". If you did I would tell you that its a fantastic question and that it isn't easy. These are some steps I/we have taken:

1. Slow travel. Take double the amount of days that you feel you need for a town, I can not stress this enough. For long term travel, it is critical to keep up the stamina. In Rome for example, we spent just under two weeks there but honestly only went into the city/did tourist things every other day. We would leave late morning and come back early evening on most days. This was crucial because it never made us feel like we had to do too much in one day and thus be exhausted. Spend at least a week in a location, strive for two. Another advantage of this is that often you can get a discount for a week or more at an Airbnb.
2. Try as much as possible though to have an off day between tourist days. Sometimes that is easier (Rome or Vienna), other times it's really hard (Barcelona). The common key there though is that in Vienna we spent a week in while Barcelona we spent just 4 days.
3. If tourist-ing on a Sunday for example, I try to do a little course work before or after going out and then try to do even more the next day to make up for it. This helped me not get too caught up on HAVING to do something between 8-10 am for example.
4. Don't beat yourself up if it doesn't go to plan, it rarely does. Some weeks have been really solid, others...not so much. The important part for me is to just keep pushing forward, be honest with myself and try to critically look at the barriers and fix them.
5. Don't forget to have fun. Try to take goofy photos along with "good" ones. The goofy ones are going to mean more in the end anyway. Step away from any of it if/when the family needs me to.

This is obviously a work in progress, we have only been doing this for just under three months and I'll be excited to see where things are, come March. Thanks for being on this journey with us.

-Jonathan