Snowshoeing in Yellowstone National Park
Welcome to Professional Hiatus!
After the last few years of semi-serious discussions on the topic of extended travel, we’ve decided now is the time to put our careers on hold and do a little international sight-seeing – a professional hiatus. We sold a car, rented the house, left our jobs and flew out of the U.S on October 2nd, 2012 bound for Quito, Ecuador. The goal is to travel for roughly eighteen months and set foot in all seven continents. We felt this amount of time was necessary in order to see the places we have dreamed of for the last several decades.
We created this blog primarily as a means of documenting our journey as well as to provide a medium in which to keep in touch with our family and friends (present and future).
Sporting appropriate temple dress in Bali, Indonesia
Travel has consistently been an important part of our lives together as a couple. In our eight years together, we have traveled across the United States exploring the network of National Parks as well as regional climbing destinations. It was through rock climbing that we first were introduced to one another and though neither of us has climbed in some time, the sport played a big role in shaping how we view and approach life. Perhaps the most important take away for us was in developing trust in each other as partners. This has served us well in marriage and will be handy on the road as well!
Professionally, we are a software engineer (he) and veterinarian (she) respectively and are both happy in our career choices. A common question we receive is why we would want to give up our careers to travel for such an extended period. We simply answer that neither of us consider this break as a decision to give up our careers. At the conclusion of our journey, we both plan to resume work in our respective fields and continue our professional growth; though perhaps with a bit more perspective, humility and patience.
Trekking to Everest Base Camp in Nepal
Other personal interests include spending time outdoors in general, snowboarding, hiking, photography, hanging out with friends and sampling ethnic foods. Thai and Indian foods are our first loves but we look forward to challenging these preferences in the near future.
The coming year should be full of eye-opening experiences and we look forward to sharing our stories and images generated along the way. We hope this blog will provide other would-be travelers with the inspiration (aka swift kick in the pants) to head off on a little hiatus of their own.
Thanks for reading!
– Kenny and Laura
A little map consultation on the Chao Phraya river in Bangkok, Thailand
Is This Your First Time Here?
- You can check out our originally planned route around the world by clicking here.
- To follow our actual route, you can go here.
- To see how and what we packed for the entire trip, have a look at this page.
- Or check out our Frequently Asked Questions page here.
Get in Touch!
You can keep up and communicate with us via your favorite social media sites: like Professional Hiatus on Facebook, follow Professional Hiatus on Twitter, follow Professional Hiatus on Pinterest and/or follow Professional Hiatus on Google+. We are the most active on Facebook, but post almost identical posts to Google+ and Twitter.
Completing the Colca Canyon trek in Peru
If you are a “super stalker” and want to get notifications when we reach a new destination, you’ll need to follow us on Twitter and look for tweets beginning with “location update”. If you are a “super stalker” but don’t want us to know it, you can always keep watching the right side bar of this site where it displays our current location.
