Susan buys a ticket and makes a decision

When debating whether or not to interview for another job at Microsoft, it didn't take much time for me to start thinking about the many things I wanted to do outside of Microsoft. Over the years, I had accumulated a pretty long list of things I wanted to do but didn't have time for. One of them was biking in New Zealand.

Back in 2001, my friend James Miller introduced me to the concept of bike touring and took me on my first 20-mile bike ride (a circumnavigation of Lake Sammamish). Over the next several years, my newfound love for cycling took me to duathlons, road racing, a solo ride down the Oregon coast, cyclocross racing, up the length of the UK ('04), and around the states of Colorado ('05), Vermont ('04), and Hawaii ('07). I even brought my bike along when I travelled to South Africa in December of 2007.

New Zealand is known as one of the best places in the world for bike touring: epic scenery, friendly people, and quiet roads. In fact, about 5 years ago I picked up the book Bike New Zealand at Half Price Books. Additionally, the hiking in New Zealand has an awesome reputation: there are nine "Great Walks" that are well known and described by Peter Potterfield in his Classic Hikes. Hearing him talk about New Zealand at REI one night last year made me even more certain that I would travel there ... sometime. When I had time.

I knew that the summer was quickly coming to a close in the southern hemisphere, and that if I wanted to get a great start to some time away from Microsoft, New Zealand would be an option. Furthermore, airline flights are incredibly cheap these days - roughly half of what they were a year ago.

While thinking about travel options, I still needed to do some work to make sure that I reallydidn't want to interview for another job within Microsoft. I talked with a variety of people hiring software engineers both inside and outside of Microsoft. Their eagerness to talk to me convinced me that I was hireable and that I need not be extremely stressed about finding a job immediately.

After working for Microsoft for over 8 years, I realized that as I tried to make plans to leave that I had very strong financial and social ties to it. Knowing that the economy is terrible and unlikely to get better any time soon made me nervous from a financial standpoint (will I be able to find a job when the money runs out?), and not having a group of people to see and talk to every day was scary as well. One of the biggest unknowns was how I would handle having a lack of structure to my days and to my life as a whole. Could I independently create the structure I needed to continue to be a happy and healthy member of society?

There were still many unknowns regarding the future of the economy and my ability to handle them two weeks after the announcement was made, but I knew that an opportunity like this wouldn't likely present itself again. I was 30, single, without debt or children.

So it was with both trepidation and excitement that I placed a call to Qantas airlines on February 10.

I'll be leaving for New Zealand on March 1.