We are selling our house. We tried to do this just over a year ago, with the intention of being close to a station so I could easily get to work in London. We got no viewings after six weeks and decided to pull out, as the market was clearly poor for sellers at that particular time. However, we kept up our hopes that it'd get better.

I then realised there was no such thing as easily getting to work in London. Our plans changed - I would get a job in Guildford, and we would focus on getting a nice house in a quiet leafy area.

I got my job in Guildford. However, our plans have changed again, and this time we're selling but not intending to buy anything straight away.

Getting away

We're getting rid of all our excess junk. We'll temporarily move into a flat in Guildford, until April/May when I'll quit my job (Dgym has already quit his and is doing freelance stuff), we'll put our stuff into storage (i.e. somebody's garage) and ride off into the sunset on our bicycles.

When i say "the sunset" I mean Europe. What we really want to do is find a nice country to live in, buy a house and, er, live there. It was initially Dgym's idea and to convince me, he suggested it as a bike tour. I could hardly refuse that, but the whole idea has been growing on me. Since the start of the year I've been seriously questioning the whole miserable mortgage-paying, commuting, office-working existence I've been living. The commuting bit got a bit better but when I get old I don't really want to look back over my life and see nothing but working shitty jobs to pay off the mortgage.

Staying away

We're going to make a clockwise tour of Europe, starting in France, going across to Poland and down through Eastern Europe, then along the Med towards Spain & Portugal. We'll carry camping gear and stay in a mixture of tent/B&B/hostel depending on what's around, what the weather's like and what we feel like. We have a few countries on our list and may add a few more. When we find somewhere we like the look of, we'll stop there for a while and get a feel for the place, perhaps rent for a while and do a little work.

We'll probably spend the rest of the year touring, but there's no real time limit so long as we can financially sustain ourselves. Ultimately though, we want to decide on somewhere to live, and buy a house there. (There is always the possibility that we won't find that place, and we'll end up back here but I don't much fancy that ;)

Financially

We'll make a decent amount of money from the sale of our house and hopefully will still have a fair bit left after buying abroad - we'll keep that in high interest savings, possibly investing some of it.

Internet connection would be a big plus wherever we live. I'm aware this may be a problem in a lot of areas, and we may have to pay a fair bit to get it but it could be worth it as there's plenty of freelance work (and other ways to earn money) online these days. We've also got our own self-driven projects we're keen to try out. I'm hoping that whatever we truly want to do will fall out naturally from actually having the time and space to do it, and I'm confident that we're both smart enough to be able to pull it off. Maybe I'll end up fixing bicycles for a living. ;-)

So there's the plan. If anybody's got any experience in any of the above, do post. There's a lot of research to do over the next few months before we leave, and a lot more to do once we're out there. It may work, it may not work. But now the idea's there, we have to do it. I spoke to my mum on the phone today and told her about the plan. I thought she was going to flip and tell me how dumb I was being, but she was all for it.

Shiny toys^Wserious work tools

To help with our coding-on-the-go plans, we've just ordered a couple of Panasonic R4 laptops. Sweet. Now I just need a means of handlebar-mounting it. ;)