Frequently Asked Questions

Here are the answers to some of the questions we get asked the most:

“Are you kidding?”

No.

“Are you crazy?”

Yeah, crazy like a fox!

And not a crazy fox either, a sane one.

“Are you rich? How could you possibly afford this?”

No, we aren’t rich, we didn’t have a trust fund, and we didn’t win the lottery. We saved up for the trip, and we used the proceeds from selling all our stuff. We also borrowed a little & took some out of our retirement savings, too.

“Did you really sell everything?”

No. Just the house, the cars, the furniture, the appliances – and all the other things we don’t really use.

“Did you really keep only 4 suitcases worth of stuff?”

OK, not exactly. But “Four suitcases, a couple of carry-ons, a camera bag and a few boxes in storage” didn’t seem like a good title for the blog.

“But Marc, what about your career?”

What about it? I don’t have a staff job anymore, but I started doing freelance jobs with my former employer within 1 week of returning. I’m still looking at all my options, but prospects look pretty good right now.

“Is it nice to be back in the real world?”

This one really cracks me up. As far as I can tell, I never left the “real world”.

If you mean to say. “Is it nice to be back in America?”, the answer is yes.

If by “real world” you mean the familiar cycle of commuting, working at a job, taking the kids to school and working in the yard on weekends – we didn’t come back to that.

“Why did you take a bunch of cruises?”

The short answer is because we really like cruising!

We figure a lot of other RTW travelers will say we’re “wussing out”, and that taking a bunch of cruises isn’t really traveling. And they’re partly right – but we’re not taking this trip to impress anyone. We’ll talk more about the role of cruising in our adventure later.

“What are you gonna do next?”

We’re not sure. For now, we’ve settled into an apartment in Dallas, where we’re working toward paying off our remaining debts and diving headfirst into the world of homeschooling, among other things. Then again, there’s still a lot of world we haven’t seen…

Still have more questions for us?

Then email Marc (or Danielle) [at] 4suitcases [dot] com.