Tattooed Travel

Three months ago the unthinkable happened. Our world changed in what felt like a blink of an eye. For someone who clung tightly to the fabric of consistency, the reality was excruciating.

I looked for damn near any way to escape, and as it turns out, you can’t really escape from your own mind. We didn’t take a vacation, we didn’t immediately ditch our lives and leave everything behind. We didn’t even take any time off work.

Despite assuming that we would leave the country in May of this year, plans changed a little. I’m still working on my back piece, we want to hike, to see more of Colorado, and we have some summer plans in order to relish what our state has to offer. For the summer, that is.

Last Sunday, after almost a week of back and forth between Chase and Emirates trying to get miles transferred, we finally booked our one way ticket to leave the USA.

While nerve-wracking, it was more of a “funny ha ha we’re booking a flight” than “oh fuck we’re booking the flight“. I don’t think my tiny lizard brain has quite comprehended that we are entirely upending our lives to go trot around the world for x amount of time.

This flight alone is crossing an item off my bucket list. For those that have known me for any serious period of time, are aware that I used to be a profound aviation nerd. I watched the unveiling of the Airbus A380 and vividly remember adding “tickets for a flight on the A380” to my Christmas list at one point. Destination unimportant, I just wanted to see that monster plane in real life.

Our flight from New York to Dubai just so happens to be on this aircraft, and we took a solid ding out of our Chase points in order to splurge on business class. Now, my only experience in business class being this past December from London to Denver, and I was languishing with what I now know to be COVID. So fingers crossed this is a less harrowing experience.

We will be leaving Colorado on July 30th for a little trot around the upper peninsula of Michigan, then off for a brief stint in New York (which, by the way, is more ungodly expensive that I could have imagined), and off to Dubai on August 13th. From there, we’ll spend a couple days in Abu Dhabi before our actual honeymoon in the Maldives. It’s still a honeymoon if it’s almost 10 months later, right?

From there we have a general itinerary mapped out (and by we I mean me, I wave ideas in front of Colton’s face and he goes “Okay!” with a thumbs up). We will go until we can’t, don’t want to, or have had enough. In all honesty I can’t tell you how long that will be. We have plans for our home, we have no intentions of selling our belongings, and a hopeful means for income.

From there, I don’t really know what. After over ten years of imagining this trip, it hasn’t even remotely set in yet that it’s happening. I’m sure the night before as I’m staring at my tiny hardshell suitcase that needs to contain my life for a year the ““oh shit” factor will set in. For now though? We wait. We plan. We enjoy what Colorado has to offer.