What actually happens when you step away from your desk, shut your laptop, and trade the working week for an eight-month wander across continents? For Kate Cranney – scientist, artist, and science communicator – the answer turned out to be both simple and profound: you remember what matters.
Kate’s career has never followed the tidy zigzag of a professional development plan. She’s worked alongside Indigenous ranger programs in the Torres Strait, created science content aboard CSIRO’s research vessel, and built a professional life defined by curiosity. Adventure was already in her bones. Yet this year, she did something even more radical than taking the next bold job: she took a break.
She and her partner, Mike, spreadsheet enthusiast and logistical ballast of the relationship, packed their lives into panniers and set off. Patagonia. Scotland. The mountain passes of Central Europe. They lived lightly and moved slowly, camping where they could, befriending supermarket ravioli, and relying on the generosity of strangers through the Warm Showers network. They had heat waves in Italy, sleet in Austria, and the wide, wide quiet in between.
The landscapes were spectacular, of course, but something quieter was happening at the same time. When you’re living out of bags small enough to buckle to a bike, you learn how few things you truly need. When strangers open their homes to tired cyclists, you rediscover how much kindness is floating around in the world. And when every day demands endurance, navigation, flexibility and humour, your internal compass starts to shift.
Kate realised that “enough” is smaller than she once assumed. That discomfort – physical or professional – is temporary. And that community can exist anywhere: in a village square, at a kitchen table, or on the shoulder of a Scottish road while someone hands you a biscuit and points out the best route over the next hill.
When she eventually returned to Brisbane, Kate found herself in a place she describes as the “liminal space” between chapters, job hunting with a surprising sense of calm. The old anxieties around career identity and direction had eased. Eight months of weather, exertion, and uncertainty had taught her something essential: challenge is survivable, and often instructive. And, whether it’s a blistering Tuscan heat wave or a period of professional drift, the bad parts don’t last forever.
That shift shaped the lessons she now shares with anyone contemplating a travel career break. She says to interrogate your fears rather than obey them. Start tiny if a huge leap feels impossible. And remember that a career isn’t a fortress you must defend; it’s a landscape you’re allowed to wander. Stability and adventure aren’t opposites. They’re seasons, and you can choose when each one arrives.
In the latest episode of The Outlaws, Kate and Shayla dive deeper into these ideas – from micro-ambition versus grand dreams, to the quiet rewards of long-term travel, to the strange alchemy of science communication, where logic meets creativity.
It’s an episode for anyone who’s wondering whether they’re allowed to want something different, even just for a while. And it’s a reminder that stepping away from your life is sometimes the smartest way to step back into it.
