Mine is a similar story; spent 10 years building a web agency in the UK, burnt out, then went traveling for a year and wrote a Web App book - http://www.fivesimplesteps.com/products/web-app-success - during the process. I wrote a little about it here - http://atrampabroad.com/the-trials-and-tribulations-of-writi...

Everything turned out well for us too - my wife was headhunted by Facebook (thanks to the Content Strategy work we started doing freelance during our trip), so I'm now in San Francisco, creating apps for myself.

If you have the chance, do it.