Time Travelers; No job? Don't sweat it. Burned-out, fed-up workers are taking time off to regroup. The 'gap year' isn't just for kids anymore.

Byline: Anna Kuchment, With Sana Butler in New York and Sudip Mazumdar in New Delhi

Two years ago Bill Wohler and his wife, Lynn Brinton, left their jobs for a dream vacation. Brinton, who was working long hours as a public-relations executive, took a six-month sabbatical and Wohler, a software engineer, quit. "I thought to myself, this job isn't so great," he says. "And how many opportunities do you have to travel together?" Childless and in their early 40s, the Menlo Park, California, couple bought a bright red Jeep and headed for the hills. During the next two months they camped their way from Montana to Connecticut and back, stopping to hike, swim, tour art museums, gab with locals and reconnect with far-flung relatives.

When they returned, Wohler still wasn't ready to go back to work. "I had more money saved up," he says. "So I ended up spending two months in Hawaii." Finally, one year after leaving his old job, Wohler began looking for a new one--and found it relatively quickly, despite the hole in his resume. "The person that hired me thought the trip was great," he says. "It showed that I had balance in my life--that I like to enjoy the rest of my life, not just working."

A generation ago, marathon vacations were strictly for the just-out-of-school set. The so-called gap year was a young person's last chance to explore the world before plopping down behind a desk. Now, midcareer workers are horning in on the trend. "Ten years ago it was really only 17- to 25-year-olds who took a year off after high school or university," says Richard Walton, founder of U.K. -based Global Vision International, which arranges volunteer expeditions of one month or more. "Now the majority of our clients are career breakers." Walton's six-year-old company has seen demand for its five- to 10-week excursions grow by 40 percent in the past few years. One of the factors driving the trend has been corporate downsizing. "Workers have always traded freedom for security," says John Izzo of Izzo Management Consulting in Vancouver, British Columbia. "But now there is no job security in this economy, so people are saying it's not worth it."

Workers use the trips as a break from their corporate routines or to embark on a major life change. Nancy Whitney, 33, left her job as a market analyst in San Antonio, Texas, to spend three months volunteering at a South African wildlife preserve, where she tracked elephants, cheetahs and leopards, dodged poisonous snakes and bonded with volunteers from around the world. She describes her time there as "probably the happiest days of my life." "It gave me the courage to say 'I'll never work in an office again', " she says. "Had I not [gone] to Africa, I'd probably still be ...