Late autumn of 2016 we were having a soulful conversation; we had been seriously dating for 2 years and had just moved in together. We were discussing about our hopes and dreams for the rest of our lives. These kinds of conversations were fairly regular for us by now, as we were crazy enough to make plans about children and marriage on the first week of our relationship!

This time we were talking about our bucket list. For those who are unfamiliar with the concept it’s a list of things you want to do before you “kick the bucket” (if you’re unfamiliar of the concept it means to die). We both had a lot of travels in our bucket lists, while comparing our lists we noticed both had a working holiday in Australia written down in our list.

Naturally this was a problematic for me as I knew for certainty that all the working holiday Visas were granted to people under 30, and at that time I was already 34. Convinced I had lost my window of opportunity, I urged Petra to follow her dreams and look in to the possibility of the trip down under. Being the amazingly stubborn optimist she is, she refused to succumb to my pessimism she did some research. Few weeks later she re-introduced the topic to tell me that she had discovered that New Zealand has an age limit of 35, and that it might be a better fit for my sense of comfortable climates.
We did some research together about New Zealand and just absolutely fell in love with the idea. We knew about the magnificent scenery of the Lord of the Rings filming locations and the badassery of the Maori people, but learning about the climate, culture and the geography sealed the deal at least for me.

We had chosen our next dream destination, but we needed to find out when we should go there. A year long trip with 5 months of prepare time is not very plausible. Petra contacted the New Zealand embassy in London and learned that if we arrive to the country before I turned 36 (19.10.2018) we should be fine. After visa application being accepted we would have one year to enter the country. Our Timeline gave us about 2 years to get to New Zealand so we just needed to make a decision if we would seize this opportunity.

We were both mentally very exhausted with our volunteering stuff with the various student organisation’s and we felt very overwhelmed with the decision first. We tried to rationalize our decision that it’s the most likely time we would ever get to do a long adventure like this. Petra was well on her way of graduating and I had been struggling with my priorities for years, so it seemed we had a possible gap after graduation and before building the “grown up paradise”. Well Petra did graduate, while I’m still working on it.

For me it was very scary to make the decision to commit to this plan, as I always felt like the circumstances were not ideal and so much more things should be done before leaving. I guess it’s natural to be scared when your life is about change drastically, but I haven’t regretted anything yet! Hardest thing for me was to accept the concept to start over from nothing when returning back to Finland (whenever that will be). I will be close to 40 years old, with a decade of engineering studies without a degree and not much possessions and possibly not much working prospects. I will have heaps of experiences and loads of people to give me new perspectives.

Most of all I will have the bragging rights that I got off my ass and followed my dreams.

We made tons of preparations and research for the whole year 2017 and half of 2018, including getting married in a very humble ceremony in April 2018
More on the preparation part later on.

We applied for our visa on January 2018 and booked the tickets to Australia on February.
-Petri

Here’s a videoclip ofour reaction when booking the tickets: