Over the course of seven months — from February until August of 2016 — I applied for 565 jobs, or about 81 jobs per month, until I landed the one I accepted based in LA.
During our 44 days on the road, my application volume dropped considerably — I applied to 21 jobs and took 10 phone and in-person interviews.
That said, the seeds I'd planted before we began our trek kept me busy during the journey. I scheduled my phone screeners for the late afternoon to have time to get to our hotel, cool off, and shower. (Once, I didn't make it and took the call from a gas station parking lot a couple of miles from our final destination.) I had to plan my first two in-person interviews around when I'd be near an airport so that I could fly to the interview and back.
For one, I was in rural Texas, and I asked for an interview the following week, giving me time to bike the couple hundred miles to El Paso, where I could fly to LAX. I planned my third in-person interview for a couple of days after we were set to finish the trip. The two in-person interviews brought with them about $725 in airfare expenses that I covered myself. Thankfully, family in LA let me stay for free and even drove me to my interviews.
While we'd hoped to have jobs lined up by the time we finished the ride so we could leave our old jobs on one coast for new ones on the other coast, things didn't work out that way. I tried a number of strategies — such as using a family member's LA address to appear like a local candidate and being upfront about wanting to relocate and willing to do so for the right opportunity — to get around the fact that I was applying for jobs in a city where I had no professional network.
But in the end, it all became easier once I was in the right place — where I'd be working if I were to get an offer. As it turned out, we had a lot more time on our hands now that we were unemployed and not biking like it was a full-time job, so it only took one month until my husband received an offer and I landed one right before Labor Day.
It was a big risk walking away from the professional networks and home we'd built in New York, yet the mental and physical benefits of taking the break from working and challenging my endurance are ones I will always be grateful for. There were days we faced 3,000-foot climbs and 50-miles-per-hour wind gusts pushing us backward, but still we inched forward.
Our one-and-a-half month adventure cost us four months of earning full-time salaries — a tradeoff for being able to make the adventure happen at all, given neither of us had the amount of vacation time needed to complete the ride. That's a reality here in the US, where one in four workers go without any paid holidays or vacation time at all, and the average worker receives a combo of 10 paid vacation days and six national holidays, according to CBS News.
Taking the time off before securing our new jobs is a privilege we were truly only able to afford thanks to the generosity of friends and family who helped us keep our costs low.
The happy ending to this chapter of our story is that we were able to see our combined incomes grow 67% while also trading New York's costly living for LA's slightly more affordable cost of living.