I never did much travel when I was younger. Many New Zealanders in their early 20s do what’s called The Big OE, or the Big Overseas Experience.
Some take a gap year after school and spend a year overseas working and travelling around then come back home and go to university or other form of tertiary education, or they simply work.
Usually, however, it’s once they’ve finished university they take off on a two year working visa to the Motherland, the United Kingdom. Or they take a year or two just travelling around the world working where they can, depending on their visa. Sometimes they stay and settle, sometimes they return.
If they return, they get a job, get married, buy a house, get a dog, maybe have children, renovate the house or sell it for a bigger one (rinse and repeat), work for 50 years, maybe do a bit more travel, maybe buy an investment property, maybe have grandchildren, retire, maybe some more overseas travel, or travel around the country in a campervan, then die. It’s generally the Kiwi way.
Not me. I was terrified of travel ever since I was young. Particularly flying. But that’s another story. So I hardly ever did it. Instead, I finished university, got a job, got married, had a baby, did a Masters degree, got divorced before buying the house, and then raised my child with my ex-husband. Spent a lot of time trying to re-create the Kiwi way with varying degrees of success (mainly low). However, I did end up buying a house, on my own.
Soon that meant I was able to travel. My daughter had left home and had got through her first year of university, house prices suddenly boomed and off I went to the financial advisor to talk how to fund travel. I also booked a clinical psychologist to get over my fear of flying. All this is another story.
What I did discover is that I’m a bit more of a free spirit, an adventurer, with a very low tolerance for boredom. It was my time to fly at the ripe old age of 43.