After months and months of preparation, the day has finally come. Early tomorrow morning, I’m going to board a plane in Nashville that will be the first flight of many on a worldwide journey that may last over a year.  I’ll be spending a few days in Palm Springs and Los Angeles before flying across the Pacific to Australia.  After a month traveling there, I’ll head to New Zealand for three weeks for lots of outdoor adventures.  By December, I’ll start traveling around Southeast Asia.  I’m hoping to visit Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos.  By February, I’ll make my way to Brazil where I plan to stay for six months.  After that, I’m not sure where I will go.

At a very young age, I had a strong desire to explore the world.  I was fascinated by other countries, their history, their languages and their cultures.  I spent hours pouring of maps of the far reaches of the globe.  While I have been fortunate to have traveled a decent amount in my life so far, I have wanted to travel extensively, to really get to know the countries I’m visiting for more than what a typical US vacation allows for.  It has been an unfulfilled dream of mine to become fluent in a foreign language, so I’m also hoping to develop fluency in Portuguese while I’m in Brazil.  Additionally, it has been a dream of mine to write a book, which I’m hoping these travels will provide subject matter and solitude for this pursuit.

I’ve spent the last nine years or so of my life as a corporate restructuring (aka chapter 11 bankruptcy) attorney.  While practicing law has been a lucrative and challenging career, I knew that I would need to leave it behind (for a while, maybe longer, maybe forever) in order to fulfill my dreams of extensive world travel, intensive language study and ultimately writing a book.