My husband is in the military, but we pushed hard for him to be stationed in Europe mostly so that we could ease some of this conflict. Of course every penny we spent on travel was still a penny not going toward FIRE, but we were able to travel so much and so (relatively cheaply) that it felt well worth it to us. We live in Germany for 34 months and traveled to 32 countries and probably 50+ cities around Europe. So we traveled *a lot*. Soe of these were longer trips; I think we had a few 12 day excursions--and most were 3-4 day weekends. You can see a heck of a lot in 3-4 days when it's only a 1-2 hour flight. We were somewhat budget conscious, but not incredibly so. (VRBO or cheap hotels, rather than hostels, for example.) We don't actually track our spending carefully, like so many here do, but it's very possible we spent $20k+ during those 3 years. I don't regret a single dollar of that, and in fact I look back and wish we'd pushed ourselves a bit more, since we ended up not seeing as much of the local and semi-local area as I'd have liked. We always put that off because we could do it any time and Prague and Iceland and Morocco and Scotland were calling us.
Anyway, all of this is to say that we found working overseas so be a wonderful way to get in a lot of travel (and to make it to even a Saturday exploring our local area was really a cultural and travel experience). It sounds like remote work is an option for you, which gives you many of the same benefits, but I also feel like there's something about living longer term in another place that enriches you in a way very similar to travel, but one that you can't get when you are just visiting, even if "visiting" is 6-8 weeks.
We now live in Japan (for the second time) and while we don't get to travel much thanks to DH's demanding (auto-correct change that to demeaning, but thankfully it's not that bad!) job here, when a Saturday includes a trip to Tokyo and during the week I get paid ~$40/hr to sit and chat with lovely Japanese people, I'm not complaining! And I still have at least some of that same feeling I get when traveling, because in many ways, I still am. A weekend in Hakone, a Sunday in Harajuku, A 3 day weekend skiing in Nagano--even those these things are local to me, I feel them in the same place of my heart that I did a trip to Vienna or Portugal. And living in a place you get to know your neighbors and their customs and how they sort their trash and what the bureaucracy involved in getting internet set up looks like, and that's pretty enlightening, too. Maybe those aren't the aspects of travel that appeal to you, but if they are, consider trying to find a job with a foreign company, if that's an option. As a side benefit they may also pay for relocation expenses, which is one less plane ticket you have to purchase! It's a very different approach than taking a mini-retirement with little or no work, but we found it to be a great compromise between taking time off from investing and moving toward FIRE, and getting to do some of the travel we'd been dreaming about for years and had assumed would need to wait until full and permanent FIRE was reached. I'm a worrier, and I don't think I could have enjoyed myself nearly as much is I was viewing every day away as a postponement of our FIRE goals, and every dollar spent as a step close to the edge.
