The Gap Year Site

1. Groundwork: Money and Supplies
2. Takeoff: Europe by Train
3. Plan B: Willing Workers on an Organic Farms (and non-organic Railroads)
4: Pit Stop: Home for the Holidays
5: The American West: Zen and the art of auto mechanics / NOLS Mountaineering
6: Ultimo Aliento: Mexico by Bus… in August
7: Fifteen years later: Reflections, sage advice and all that

1. Groundwork:

I decided to do a gap year sometime during my senior year in high school (1990). I still don't remember exactly how and when I came up with the idea - but my dad likes to take credit for it to this day. His only stipulation was that I be financially self-sufficient for the entire year. I spent the summer living at home and working as a lifeguard at city pools and day camps. My high school boyfriend, Matt, had decided to do a gap year too, and we were planning to start traveling together in the fall. His dad got us round-trip tickets to London with his frequent flier miles (thanks Geoff)! Matt was working in a travel bookstore that summer and he found us our trip bible, entitled Work Your Way Around the World by Susan Griffith. (Invaluable.) I borrowed an old backpack from my parents that they had used for similar adventures back in the day. It could hold a sleeping bag, a few clothes, some books, and not much else. Perfect. The only mistake we made was that we each impulsively decided to cut our hair really short right before the trip. We both regretted this.

2. Takeoff:

We kissed our anxious parents goodbye in New York City and boarded a plane for London. The first month of our trip was somewhat planned. We had purchased unlimited 30 day Eurail tickets www.eurrail.com, and had a list of people to visit in several different cities. Stops included: London, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Bremen, Berlin, Munich, Geneva, & Montpellier. Berlin was considered "Eastern Europe," and was excluded from the Eurail pass, so we had to hitch hike. (The Berlin wall had officially come down earlier that year, but Germany was not yet unified.) When we got there, we saw the decimated remains of the wall, and went into East Berlin, which looked like something out of a weird 1950's twilight zone episode. Checkpoint Charlie had already become a museum, and was a powerful place to visit. www.mauermuseum.de/english/frame-index-mauer.html  The end of the line was Nantes, a small village in the South of France, where our trip stalled temporarily. For a couple weeks, we stayed there in an empty place belonging to friends of Matt's parents, played house, and rode mopeds around the countryside. Originally, we had planned to work on a Kibbutz in Israel at this point. We reneged because the situation in the Middle East was not improving. (Remember the first Gulf War?) We hadn't made a plan B.

3. Plan B:

Luckily, Susan Griffin's book came to the rescue. We secured two spots on an organic farm in the Loire Valley. (Willing Workers on Organic Farms www.wwoof.org  is another good way to find this type of work.) We worked like slaves from before dawn until after dusk, herding goats, feeding animals, milking cows, making cheese, pitching hay, and we had only one half-day off per week. As a city kid who always dreamed of being a farmer, I was in heaven. In the end, we were given just enough cash to purchase two train tickets to Paris. We were headed back to London, and then to Wales; Griffin had come through again with a gig at the Festiniog Railway Company. www.festrail.co.uk In the summer, the railway brings tourists through Snowdonia National Park on antique steam trains. However, no tourists come during the blustery months of Nov-Dec, so we helped refurbish the steam engines and rebuild the dry stone wall that lines the tracks. I was getting used to manual labor now. I was also getting used to my blonde ‘fro.

4. Pit Stop:

We left the UK in mid-December to spend the holidays with our families in NYC. After more than three months of traveling, I think we had spent $1500 between the two of us. Or maybe that was each, I can’t remember.  It was a little odd to reconnect with high school friends, who’d been immersed in the totally different but equally new experience of being college freshmen. At this point Matt and I decided to set off on some solo travels. He went to Nepal to teach English, and I decided it was time to discover America. One February morning, I made my way to the Port Authority Bus Station, where I embarked on my first cross-country road trip: NYC to San Francisco by Greyhound Bus. (tip: don’t ever take the bus across country if you can help it; if you must, sit up front… really.)

5. The American West

My fascination with “real America” had been sparked by some of my favorite books: On the Road, Dharma Bums, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I had romantic notions of becoming wilderness ranger, fire lookout, truck driver, ranch hand, or just a nomad with a motorcycle and the tools to fix it. In reality, I had never spent the night in a tent, didn’t know the difference between the Parks Service and the BLM, and had almost no experience driving anything motorized, let alone fixing it (although I did have a brand-new driver’s license). All of that would change in the next 4 months. It took a little time to get situated, but, with some luck and persistence, I managed to get an apprenticeship at an auto shop in SoMa. I also took a (free!) 6-week auto mechanics’ class at SF City College. www.ccsf.edu  Meanwhile, I juggled 2 jobs as a waitress and coffee barista. I stayed with my aunt and uncle at first, then moved into a shared apartment. It was exciting to discover a new city and to feel more independent than I’d ever been, but it was sometimes hard to get the full experience being underage (not like in Europa!). I bought an old pickup truck and fixed it up, with help from the guys at the shop. I left SF for Wyoming in May, where I took a 30 day wilderness mountaineering course with the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) www.nols.edu It completely kicked by butt, but taught me just about everything I needed to know about the mountains. It took me many more years to master all the skills I learned in that one month. I would definitely recommend NOLS to anyone who wants to get really proficient in backcountry skills & ethics (or become an instructor in the outdoors).

6: Ultimo Aliento:

After NOLS, Matt and I reunited in NYC for a trip to Mexico. Back on the Greyhound, we headed for El Paso / Juarez, where we switched to the much nicer Mexican buses. (My pickup truck had met an untimely end… that’s another story.)  It was the last journey of our gap year (and of our relationship, though we didn’t know this at the time). It was a fun, romantic, sweltering and mosquito ridden month that was inevitably leading us towards our final destination… COLLEGE. As the month drew to a close, a series of bus rides brought us slowly up the Baja peninsula, the California coast, and back to SF, where Matt hopped on a plane to Rhode Island. I continued my epic west coast bus ride up to Portland, where I wandered onto the Reed College campus for orientation with little more than a bedroll and change of clothes in my bag. Well, of course I carried the usual freshman stuff – anticipation, apprehension, uncertainty, hope, goals, curiosity, hormones. But I also brought a new kind of confidence, a lot of good stories, and a head full of ideas for future adventures, that, for the first time in my life, I really knew I could make happen.

7. 15 yrs later:

Wow. There’s so much I could say about the impact of that year. Advice? Do it. Did it change my life? Absolutely. Did it impact my future career choices? Directly. Do I still get all nostalgic thinking about it? Well, that’s obvious. Were there drawbacks? Yeah, there were. Maybe I should mention those – cause that’s the part you least expect. Both Matt and I actually had a pretty hard time adjusting back to academic life. I know for me, it felt like I was squeezing myself back into a box that didn’t fit anymore. Matt & I both contemplated dropping out of college at different points, which neither of us ultimately did. But I think the adjustment to college was a little more complicated after the gap year. Instead of suddenly having more freedom, like other frosh, we had more constraints. So be ready for that, too.

Be ready for anything. 

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”

 – attributed to Goethe