Hi, I’m Sam. I live in England, I work full time, and somewhere in the gaps around all of that I’ve managed to see more of the world than most people would expect from someone who’s never had the luxury of just packing up and going. 29 countries. 23 U.S. states. 4 Canadian provinces. 210, 081 miles, give or take. None of it happened instead of a career; it happened alongside one, squeezed into weekends, long weekend flights, and every last day of annual leave I could get my hands on. If you’re picturing someone who quit their job to travel, that’s not this. This is what’s possible when you just refuse to let work be the only thing on the calendar.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about travelling around a full-time career: it’s mostly logistics. It’s “can I get from a Thursday business review to the airport in time for an evening flight,” it’s using every last day of annual leave like it’s a competitive sport, it’s saying yes to a long weekend in a place you can barely pronounce because the flight was cheap and you had the days. I never took a gap year or spent months backpacking with nothing but a rucksack. I just refused to let a 9-to-5 be the whole story.
It started with a simple, slightly stubborn goal: see all 50 U.S. states. That’s still ongoing, with 23 down, though it’s slowed lately, partly life, partly COVID, and because I’ve discovered a new, exciting way to travel. What I didn’t see coming was a cruise to Alaska, booked purely to tick off one more state, turning into an entirely new addiction. Watching a glacier calve into the sea from a cabin balcony at sunrise will do that to you. Eight cruises later and it still hasn’t got old: new ports, new ships, new reasons to book the next one, and somehow the excitement never really wears off.
These days there are usually three things on the go at once: the state I still need to cross off, the next cruise, and whatever’s close to home in the UK and Europe. It’s less a bucket list than a running rotation. I’ll be deep in planning a Mediterranean long weekend one month, then checking cruise itineraries for next spring the next, then suddenly remembering I still haven’t set foot in Oklahoma. Nothing ever really finishes; there’s always a new region calling, a new ship sailing somewhere I haven’t been, or a weekend just waiting to be filled. That’s rather the point. The goal was never to tick every box and call it done. It was to make sure travel stayed part of ordinary life, not something reserved for a holiday I might take someday.
