“How did you do it?”

So many people ask us this question. It’s easy to get trapped in the routine of working life and hard to see a way to give it all up for a life on the road. Yet, once you’ve quit your job, sold your house and started pedaling towards a new adventure, everything falls into place so quickly that you can’t quite believe you didn’t do it years ago.

First, we need to dispel the myth that we won the lottery, are spending an inheritance or are sponsored by a host of companies. No one has given us a cent to do this trip. We have not spent the money earned by the rise in UK house prices either. The profit from our purchase and sale of a London flat is tucked away for another house someday, completely separate from our travel fund. Instead, we are paying for our trip entirely from money we tucked away during our six years in London. Read more about how we saved for our trip.

Once we’d stashed away enough cash to sustain us for a few years, the next challenge was actually putting our plans into action. We’d dreamed of a big trip for so long but handing in our resignation notices was the hardest thing we’d ever done. It’s no exaggeration to say that both of us came home feeling ill and literally shaking from the uncertainty of it all. It’s no small thing to work for years - getting a university degree, choosing a profession, moving slowly up the career ladder - and then give up your secure job with benefits for a life on the road. Our bosses, colleagues, friends and families were supportive but we knew that the weight was now on our shoulders to make this work.

With the wheels firmly in motion, everything else was easy by comparison but hectic nonetheless. In fact, we’d started concrete preparations for our trip about a year in advance, only quitting our jobs three months before our departure date but we were busy right until the last minute, liquidating our life and clearing up all the loose ends. Our list of chores looked something like this.

12-15 months: Put house on market and start selling furnishings and unnecessary clutter. We could have rented our house but decided not to because of the hassle of finding and keeping a good tenant and uncertainty about where we will settle next.

12 months: Move into rented accommodation, to give the most flexibility for leaving on a set date. Continue to thin out possessions. Do research on what you plan to take, make a preliminary equipment list. If you don’t have a bike already, put this at the top of your list of things to research and buy.

6-9 months: Start buying supplies for trip. Test them and make sure they’re appropriate. If you’d like to set up a website for your trip, this is a good time to do it while things are still relatively quiet. We run our website using Wordpress software with our own server. Other options are CrazyGuyOnABike for no-fuss journals or any number of blogging sites.

6 months: Take the bike out for several day and weekend trips, ideally loaded to get a feel for how everything will pack together in practice and how heavy the bike is going to be. Spend at least one night in your tent if possible. Figure out how you will manage your money from abroad.

3 months: Quit job. Start cancelling any services, subscriptions and credit cards. Give notice on your flat. Tell friends and family. Arrange shipping or storage for any key possessions and mail forwarding for any post that arrives after you leave.
2 months: Put up ‘for sale’ notices at work and on bulletin boards to clear out everything you don’t want to take with you or store. Services like Craigs List are also excellent and Freecycling is great for everything that you don’t want to throw out but which doesn’t really have a monetary value either.

1 month: Clear up all the loose ends and allow enough time for goodbye parties.

1 week: Your home should be virtually empty. Don’t leave cleaning it until the last minute, a recipe for disaster.

Departure day: Pedal away for your great adventure. Go easy on yourself for the first few weeks as you adjust to your new lifestyle. Setting ambitious physical or financial targets before you’ve found your groove is likely to be depressing and discouraging. Remember, it’s supposed to be fun!