Oh, the places you'll go

When Scott received his first paycheck from his new job, the first thing I did was calculate how long it would take us to pay off our student loans, now that we were working with two incomes again.  I know.  Super lame.  Fortunately for me, I married a man who hates debt as much as I do, so he didn't serve me with divorce papers when I asked told him I was going to start throwing his entire income (along with a large portion of mine) to our loans.  Although our student debt is staggering (an MBA and a JD don't come cheap), by my calculations, I concluded we would be able to move from red to black within two years, barring any additional "unforeseen disruptions" in our cash flow.  Considering the fact that we've seen a sizable amount of our income shunted off into the black hole of loan repayment for pretty much the entire six years we've been married ($56,088.33 and counting), the prospect of being completely debt-free in two years is pretty tantalizing.  This got me thinking of what we would do with the extra $2,507 per month that will suddenly be classified as "disposable income" once we've paid in full the loans that financed the extra letters at the end of our names.  Just one year of saving the money previously earmarked for loans would exceed $30,000.  Not too shabby.  At first I thought, "We'd finally be able to afford to buy a decent house, cable television and a new car!"  That would definitely be a very grown up thing to do, right?  Buy a nice house in a good neighborhood, get the little luxuries we currently forego, put down roots, and continue to work our way up the career ladder in our respective fields.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I don't want that.  In fact, I want the exact opposite of that.  I want to pare down my possessions to the bare essentials, toss it all in a storage locker, and go be homeless for as long as my savings will sustain me.  Sometimes the only thing that gets me through the workday is staring at the travel photos on my wall and reminding myself that there is an amazing world outside the confines of my office, and at one point in time, I was actually there.  The more time that passes, the more I realize that I don't want to be that person who spent her entire life being an extremely adept attorney, but was too practical and too "mature" to take big risks and do all the things she really wanted to do in life.  I want to see new places, experience different cultures, eat weird food and meet new people.  I want to scuba dive The Great Barrier Reef and walk the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.  I want to see the Leaning Tower of Pisa during the day time and eat really good sushi in Japan.  This has been a persistently nagging desire of mine for quite some time.    The first time I pitched it to Scott, his response was  not quite as enthusiastic as I had hoped.  This, of course, was almost two years ago, when our life circumstances were quite different.  When I put the idea out there again two weeks ago, his response could not have been more perfect: He brought home a huge, laminated map of the world, which he promptly hung in our bedroom.  He presented me with a dry erase marker, and told me to start circling the places I want to go.  The answer is everywhere.  With my favorite travel companion on board, I am determined to make this happen.