Working a Job is More Difficult Than Your Bikepacking Epic

I love reading about adventures on bikes, and good photography is always a plus. I also like hearing about setups, gear reviews, and the sort.

The thing I like reading the most? How an adventurer tailors his or her life around spending weeks or months at a time on a trip. To me, that is the single most difficult thing about long distance bikepacking. It's not the gear, it's not the route planning, it's not mental stamina; that can all be dealt with once we're on the trail. Building the kit and the setup and stamina is gained through spending time on the trail. If you don't have the time, none of it happens.

Tailoring your life for travel is far more difficult. I work a job that only grants me 2 weeks vacation. No unpaid. No ability to purchase extra days. My wife has nearly a month of vacation, but student debt and even our meager amount of bills requires that we have a somewhat steady income. And we're not consumers either; no cable, no huge flat screen tv, no car debt, no kids, no home debt, really the only thing we owe anyone is my college loan debt, which is average and rent/utilities. We're saving for a house, just so we can reduce on monthly housing payment someday.

We pinch pennies, but that doesn't mean we can just quit our jobs and hope for the best. The job market seems to favor STEM fields, which neither of us are really in, and so we depend on years of stable experience to get us a living income. We have friends who have tried quitting their jobs in order to travel or bikepack across the USA every couple of years and their wages suck and they've got little or no savings. It hard to ask for $40k (or even $25k) a year when you're prospective employer thinks you'll just leave in 18 months to travel.

Neither of us are dedicated employees, it's not like we feel we need to stay at our jobs, but we also don't want to be 40 yrs old with no savings still working post-college jobs. Have you been traveling so much that your wages have suffered, or making bank while traveling a month every year?

The ideal? Getting a job with a living wage that may not give PAID vacation days, but provides the ability to take a few weeks of a year unpaid. We could easily budget around $60k a year, especially if it mean 5-6 weeks a year to travel and adventure. Unfortunately, ideals take time to find. Did you find the perfect employer or perfect job and fit the rest around that career?

So, anyone up for writing about a real challenge on their blog? The challenge of fitting life around adventure or adventures around life. Or maybe even the challenge of giving up potential future happiness to live life today? "The Pros and Cons to being an Explorer."This is a far more revealing and personal narrative about life on two wheels than talking about your touring setup or latest trip to Patagonia, but it is also the story that is most likely to help someone else live the good life.