Tuesday was a day Kim Dinan, 35, spent a lot of time thinking about, but wasn’t sure would ever arrive.
“For it to actually be here, I felt like it was justification for my deepest dreams,” Dinan said. “I was right to believe in this feeling I had that I wanted to do more.”
On Tuesday, Dinan’s first book with a publisher came out. She took her baby and drove around to various bookstores near her Cincinnati, Ohio, home and stared at the book.
Her book, “The Yellow Envelope,” came out a little more than five years after she wrote a post titled “Why I’m Quitting My Job to Travel” on her blog, www.so-many-places.com.
If You Go
• What: Author Kim Dinan will read from her new book, “The Yellow Envelope,” which chronicles how she and her husband quit their jobs and sold all of their things to travel for three years. Books will be for sale at the signing. For more information, visit www.so-many-places.com.
• When: 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 12.
• Where: Vintage Books, 6613 E. Mill Plain Blvd., Vancouver.
It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision. At that time, Dinan and her husband, Brian Patton, were living in Portland. They both had jobs, cars and a house, but Dinan couldn’t shake this feeling that she missed out, that something wasn’t right. She developed anxiety and couldn’t stop looking backwards.
“I had always wanted to travel, and I had always wanted to write,” she said. “Life just kind of carried me down a different path. I took a traditional path of college, got a job, got a different job, got married. It wasn’t a bad life, but I felt like I missed the potential of my life. I was afraid I would not get to do these things I wanted to do.”
Dinan was working for Portland as a sustainable coordinator for the water bureau. Patton was a senior contracts and procurement specialist for Multnomah County. When Dinan told Patton how she was feeling and that she wanted to give it all up to travel, he was concerned.
“It’s like you’re disassembling you’re entire life,” Dinan remembers Patton telling her. “It seems impossible.”
He remained skeptical until he realized how serious she was. They started saving money and downsizing. After three years, they saved about $60,000 and got rid of most of their stuff.
“We didn’t do anything. We never saw our friends. We never ate out. We cut out everywhere we could. We cut gym memberships and magazine subscriptions,” she said. “We had no fun for three years.”
They bought a one-way ticket to Ecuador, since that was the cheapest one-way ticket they could find. Before they set off, they met with some friends for a final dinner.
The friends felt compelled to give a gift, but since Dinan and Patton just got rid of everything, they didn’t know what to give them. The friends gave Dinan and Patton a yellow envelope with a check for $1,000 inside. They told Dinan and Patton to give the money away however they see fit. There were three rules: don’t overthink it, don’t feel pressured to give it all away and share your experiences, if you want to.
“We decided we weren’t going to plan anything,” Dinan said. “We would just give it away when it felt right. Initially, we thought it would be easy. When we got out on the road, it was hard.”
Dinan said she and Patton immediately started overthinking how to give the money away. Furthering the problem, they didn’t speak the language.
“One thing I learned about giving directly to someone is it is uncomfortable,” she said. “You don’t know how someone is going to respond. It’s not your culture, so you don’t know if culturally you’re doing something that is not acceptable. We overthought it way, way too much. In the beginning, we missed some opportunities to give.”
Dinan’s book chronicles her and Patton’s travels and how they gave the money away. The book focuses primarily on their time in Ecuador, India and Nepal, and what traveling taught Dinan about herself and her marriage.
“I was really a control freak before,” she said. “I was very regimented. Traveling taught me to just let go. I can’t control everything. When I stopped trying to control everything, the most beautiful, magical things happened.”
While traveling, Dinan said she missed family and friends most of all.
“You don’t really have a community,” she said. “You’re relying on your traveling partner to fill all the roles. He was my co-workers and my friends and my mom.”
It’s changed how she looks at life now. The two ended up moving back to Cincinnati after Dinan got pregnant and have lived there about two years. Dinan works as a writer and Patton got a job in the same field he was working in prior.
Dinan said one of their biggest fears about traveling was once they returned nobody would hire them, but Patton found a job pretty quickly. Dinan said the plan is to work for a while and then she’d like to travel more, especially to Iceland, Ireland and Thailand.
For now, she can sit back and reflect on her trip and how it allowed her to live out so many of her dreams. It also helped her appreciate her current life more.
“When you see the world you see how truly incredibly blessed you are,” she said. “Even being born in the United States, you have things people will never ever have and you have them just because you were born here. You’re incredibly lucky and it’s not because of anything you did.”
