This is a guest post by NZ Muse, a mid-20s writer who just completed a six-month trip around the world and lived to tell the tale. I took NZ Muse and her husband out for lunch in San Francisco when they stopped by. A lot of folks want to travel more for an extended period of time, but don’t because they’re either afraid they won’t have a job when they get back, don’t have the funds, or just fear extended travel in general. I feared taking a sabbatical because I didn’t want to risk making less since so much of my compensation comprised of a year end bonus. I also feared getting fired! NZ Muse’s travel is why I really enjoy Australian and New Zealand culture. They are much more relaxed about work and everything seems to always turn out alright!

When you make a life-changing decision, you generally expect some measure of shock and awe when you announce it to everyone you know. But due to the collective wanderlust that courses through the veins of most New Zealanders, the news that I was taking off to travel around the world for half a year didn’t make much more than a gentle splash.

American round-the-world bloggers usually speak of encountering serious pushback when they announce their plans to friends and family. For us, it was more like “About time!” or “Six months? Will that be long enough?”

In your 20s, farewell parties for friends going on their gap years are just as common as parties for birthdays, engagements, and anniversaries. I have plenty of friends who’ve already done their ‘OE‘ (Overseas Experience) and returned to New Zealand, and others who left for their gap year and still abroad a few years later. New Zealand can feel stiflingly small, even if you live in a big city. (A fun fact for American readers: our country is about the size of Colorado.) Escaping the country is a rite of passage that’s been around for decades and will probably continue to be for many more.

Long-term travel was never originally on my life list. I graduated university, started saving for travel, and laid out plans for three big trips: the USA, western Europe, and southeast Asia – roughly one per year, with a month allocated for each (we get four weeks of paid annual leave a year in New Zealand).

This was derailed, however, by my changing jobs and moving to a smaller company; I soon came to realise that taking a month off at a time would now be a lot harder. Around the same time, my wanderlust intensified. More and more of my friends started leaving the country, one seemingly taking off every other month.

My now-husband hated his job, I hated our mouldy rental house, we were planning to get married, and the time seemed ripe for a change. I started reading a ton of travel blogs, researched overseas volunteering opportunities, and kept an eye on STA Travel’s round-the-world deals for students and travellers under 26. And that’s when our tentative one-month European honeymoon turned into a solid six-month RTW trip.

Why six months? It seemed like a nice round number. It fit in well with the destinations on my bucket list and the lengths of stay in each country that we’d legally be entitled to (luckily, New Zealanders have it easy with visas the world over). And most importantly, it seemed about as long a trip as we could afford. Bonus: the Kiwi dollar was strong, and getting stronger.