Jeff Schenker - "Where are they now?"

I have been on vacation living a life of leisure for the last seven years. How is that possible? Before I started traveling, I asked myself the same thing.

It’s actually hard to believe as I sit down to write this that I have been out of college for eighteen years. When I think about what can happen in eighteen years, I recall that’s how old I was when I first walked into the “Skin House”. The rest was fate. A lot has happened since then and I have to say the last eighteen have been much more exciting than the first eighteen. Mathematically, I have spent 40% of my post university life on vacation, quasi-employed, or just plain screwing around. That’s just over seven years! So how does one live a life of leisure without being old and retired? It started like this.

I moved to Harrisburg in 1993 after being in the 5th graduating class in the relatively new Plastics Engineering Technology program at Behrend. Plastics are the future! The job thingy I had, however, was the most boring, unrewarding, unsatisfying, meaningless way to spend 8 to 12 hours a day… 5 days a week. But hey, it paid better than the furniture delivery job I had back in Erie and that’s all that mattered. Or did it? I lived for 5:00 PM and the weekends! Going out for lunch was my favorite part of the job… and I was good at it too!

Living in Harrisburg was fun. In the early years (those being the ‘90s), I regularly attended the Penn State games, SKN reunions, and countless weddings. I saw just about everyone who was coming around. The opportunities to go mountain biking and camping in the summer and skiing in the winter were endless. I bought two jetskis and spent one summer racing one of them in Maryland. I had a lot of cool stuff. But something was missing.

Then one day in the spring of 2001, I jumped on an amazing new opportunity at work. I got myself laid off from my crap engineering job! It was brilliant. With my severance check in hand, I threw my mountain bike in the back of my truck and spent the next two months driving around the USA. 11,000 miles later, I knew what had to be done. I would go back to Harrisburg, find another high paying miserable job and save my money with the discipline of a Buddhist monk.

Fast-forward to 2004. In March, I sold everything I owned, quit my job, and bought a backpack and one-way ticket to Mexico. What was supposed to be a 12 to 18 month trip around the world turned into a three year adventure only in Latin America. It took me over two years just to get to Argentina! The experiences were life changing to say the least. I speak a second language now (Spanish) and I am armed and dangerous in Portuguese. Give me a few months in Brazil again and I would be trilingual. I finally came home in 2007, three years and one day after leaving home.

I needed money. Thanks to some good luck and some help from Jim Schaffer, I scored a summer job at a fishing lodge in Alaska. This paid well and it only required four months of my time during the June to October fishing season. This job worked perfectly with my lifestyle; 4 months of work and 8 months off. I spent my off time between South East Asia and South America. Most recently, I just finished an 18 month contract working as a tour leader in Central America for Gap Adventures, an adventure tour company. I actually had a job that paid me to be on vacation. Job duties included sailing, snorkeling, repelling waterfalls, kayaking, white water rafting, laying on the beach, climbing volcanoes, exploring Mayan ruins, … and of course, going to lunch, a skill I honed well back in my engineering days.

So just where am I now? As I write this, I am freshly unemployed and sitting in a coffee shop in Nicaragua’s premier surfing village, San Juan del Sur. But I won’t be here for long. I am planning to visit family in California and Pennsylvania in July before my nomadic lifestyle continues. At the end of August, I will be sailing in the Greek Islands followed by a trip to India and Nepal. I have a travel blog I’ve maintained since 2004 and will keep updating it during the next set of adventures. Stay tuned. www.travelpod.com/members/jeffsadventures

Jeff Schenker