Deciding to do the trip of your life
Updated: Sep 10
June 2–3, 2025
📍Location: Zurich, Switzerland
What makes us want to travel? The excitement of new places, striving to learn new culture and meet new people... The change of scenery. The new charge of energy. Take all of these and multiply it n-times. That is how badly we needed this big trip of our lives: just packing our bags, leaving for another country and blending in there. And not planning to come back in the foreseeable future.
Let me give you some numbers:
➡️ We are both in the second half of our 30s, no kids yet
➡️ We have been together for 13 years
➡️ We have been married for 10 years
➡️ We have overcome the famous marriage crisis of 7 years
➡️ We both worked for the same employer for 5-6 years
So, it was this moment for us: let's change something, let's do something big. After several ideas and at least a year of thinking about different stuff we decided to do this: we quit our jobs, did necessary research, packed our 3 suitcases and flew to Miami with the goal to buy a truck, a travel trailer and explore the whole North America in this entourage.
Friends and family at home call us brave, new acquaintances here in the USA are usually astonished as to where does the financing come from. But everyone understands the greater sense behind our idea: why to wait until retirement, you never know in what health condition you will meet it, whether you will still have this drive to travel by then and whether you will even live to see your older days. So many things happen in this world (good and bad), so we decided to spend our savings now for the thing we love the most: traveling, discovering new places, meeting new people, getting amazed every single day on our journey full of adventures.
On June 2, 2025 we finally could grab our three packed suitcases and leave Switzerland. However, Zurich clearly wasn't ready to say goodbye...
It all started without any signs of trouble: bags checked, security cleared, and the familiar pre-flight buzz. We boarded, and then the atmosphere shifted. We waited an additional hour while all the passengers were checked and plane could take off. Then a strange, biting chill settled into the cabin - the kind of cold that feels like a warning.
Two hours later, when we were already flying over the Atlantic Ocean, the captain's voice cut through the hum of the engines. The news? Some kind of engine trouble. The twist? According to the captain, we could have still made it to Miami, but they don't have a service center for our plane there. So, we were flying back to Zurich.
And just like that, we were on the world's longest U-turn. For the first time ever, we flew a Zurich-to-Zurich international route and returned to where we started.
The logistics that followed were a test of patience. The airline tried to pivot us onto a multi-stop connection through Germany, but we knew better than to settle for a grueling detour. We played the long game, waited out the lines and scored exactly what we wanted: a direct flight the following afternoon. One unexpected hotel stay later, and attempt number 2 was a success. Hello USA, cheers Miami!
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