My sister and I spent a week in Santorini to celebrate my 30th birthday. Somehow that became a sacred tradition, and for the next decade I made a trip every year to celebrate my birthday.

I called one birthday road tripping from Seattle to San Diego in a Mustang convertible and another touring castles and distilleries in Scotland with a friend.

One year, I celebrated aging by eating tapas and watching flamenco groups perform during a solo stay in Madrid, and another, I ziplined through the Monteverde cloud forest in Costa Rica with my mom.

For my 39th birthday, I spent an afternoon on a floating spa on the St. Lawrence River during a trip to Montreal. In each of these places I had the excitement of discovering new neighborhoods, languages, customs and cultures.

For my 40th birthday, I planned a whirlwind trip through Europe with several stops with a friend to kick off the next decade. It was in the final stretch when I realized that this tradition had run its course.

One trip a year was no longer enough: I wanted more.

my 40^th The birthday trip ended up being the last.

This tradition had started during the time in my life when I was making less money, had fewer vacation days, and held junior positions where taking too many days off was discouraged.

The limited PTO I had was used to celebrate friends and family when they reached traditional “adult” milestones: weddings, engagements, bridal showers, and baby showers.

My birthday week abroad was a way to make sure I remembered to celebrate it too.

By 40, the wedding season was over and the friends had settled into lives focused on their partners, children, homes and careers.

Meanwhile, I was single and childless, and after diligently climbing the career ladder, I looked around and realized I really didn’t want to be there.

The thought of spending the next 25 years working at jobs that brought me very little joy, motivated only by the promise of a week or two living “the life that could have been,” suddenly felt intolerable.

Somehow, this tradition created to expand my travel experiences had, in fact, reduced them to a box on a shelf that I only removed once a year and then put back for 50 weeks.

I wanted to know what it was like to experience the places I visited on a deeper level, not just as a tourist.

Over time, I have built a life more focused on traveling.

So, a few months after that 40th birthday trip, I adjusted my budget, started saving as much as possible, and looked for a tenant to rent out my house so I could also have passive income.

Shortly after I left my job and two weeks later I took a flight and spent the next three months traveling through Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Slovenia.

I returned home long enough to figure out how to make a travel-focused life more financially sustainable.

I got freelance work at my old agency, found new long-term tenants for my house, and began earning a certification in astrocartography, a practice that uses the birth chart to identify the best places in the world to travel.

Now I can work from anywhere in the world on a schedule that I set, and at the same time I gain experience in that practice.

It feels good to finally be building a life centered around travel instead of one where it’s a rare pleasure.