Paddling Like Mad

It’s been quiet on the dropout front.

The radio silence is mostly because I’ve been in shock at losing the remote part-time job that’s funded the past nine months of our dropout lifestyle.

I’m slowly emerging from the fog, helped along by the news that maybe the job has only gone into hiatus for a while, rather than vanished completely.

Part of me wonders whether this latest setback is the result of a self-congratulatory thought the week prior to getting the news. It was a quiet thought, noting that I seemed to have managed to find a balance of  work, play and child care. I was just about to add exercise into the mix when I got the email saying my startup employer had “reached the end of the road”.

I spent a week panicking and being spectacularly unproductive. Then Darling Man and I had a long talk and decided that now was the time to act upon some ideas we’ve been talking about for years.

Darling Man quit his low-paid six-day-a-week job so we could both focus on these projects. And we’ve been busy eating, taking photos, talking to people and trying to work out a business plan.

Actually, we’re trying to work out what a business plan actually is. At the moment all we have is a piece of paper that has the  words “business plan” underlined at the top and the words “make some money” underneath. At some point I added a doodle of a flower because I had spent far too long not writing on this piece of paper. Business-minded we are not.

I feel like we are making progress. Mysterious underwater-paddling kind of progress that is hard to see. I just worry that Darling Man and I are, in actual fact, kicking up a lot of froth but not actually going anywhere.

But we’re giving it a shot… And you won’t be surprised to learn that our new venture will revolve around street food. We’re planning to offer street food tours in Ho Chi Minh City.

Seafood – one of my favourite Saigon street foods

We begin beta-testing soon, with people who have kindly agreed to be our guinea pigs.

I’m excited about our new venture, even if it does mean we will be location dependent for a while. We are aiming to make this a lifestyle business that will give us the flexibility to travel a bit. Darling Man wants to go to Burma and we were actually organising a visit there in October last year when I got the news that Dad had died. And not much has gone to plan since then.

Standby for more details of our street food tours. We’ve started a Facebook page here, so drop by and have a look.

This is what street food “research” looks like when your assistant is two years old.

Wish us luck! I have a feeling that our lack of business experience means we’re going to need a fair bit of it.

By: Barbara

A career girl who dropped out, traveled, found love, and never got around to going home again. Now wrangling a cross-cultural relationship and two third culture kids.