Tempting potential life change?

A regular REI customer -- I've seen her probably 5 times in the last 3 years and we've exchanged e-mails a few times (typically my looking at photo albums she's posted) -- was in the store again yesterday.

(Sorry for the interruption, but "Gabriel's Oboe" was just on Pandora. From The Mission soundtrack, by Ennio Morricone. One of the most hauntingly beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard. Chill-inducing. Do a YouTube search for Gabriel's Oboe. (I know I should figure out how to insert links here. Sorry.))

She's a guide with Backroads. She leads bike tours all over the world, and was leaving yesterday afternoon for New Zealand (just in REI to pick up a few things before leaving).

She's suggested before that I should consider coming to work for Backroads as a guide. She brought it up again. This time with a slight difference. She's spending a month or so in New Zealand and then a couple of months in Vietnam and Cambodia. Then a few days back in Dallas to visit the parents, and then heading to San Francisco (apparently that's the HQ) where she is going to be managing hiring and training for the company. So, the chief of hiring tells me just to call and in short order I can be leading bike tours in Tuscany or "heli-hiking" tours in the Canadian Rockies. Then she says once I've become established as a guide I can essentially write my own schedule -- like, for example, teach fall and spring and then guide during the summer in China or Bali or Tibet or.... pretty much anywhere. Or give up teaching altogether.

So, here I am. Unattached. No potential attachments that I know of, and no one who's going to be especially distraught if I'm gone (except REI managers, perhaps)(and yes, I know there are some few who'd miss me in my absence -- to a certain extent). No debt. No particular reason I NEED to be any particular place. No particular career to speak of. All I'd need to do is get rid of whatever crap I've accumulated, buy a laptop and an iPod, and hit the road! What's wrong with that picture? Travel, "customer service", cycling and hiking, a simpler life -- unencumbered by many possessions. I'm having a hard time coming up with a significant downside. But then I may be blocking out a raft of reasons not to take a leap into the unknown. I wouldn't get rich. But then that's never been my raison d'etre.

I've got a few months to cogitate. But I'd be a fool not to seriously consider it.