quicko: a gap year

This is perhaps more common in England, but Australians are also very familiar with the idea of a "gap year."  Americans, being hard-working individuals with immense college debt and two weeks of paid vacation, are not.  Basically, one's "gap year" is the time in which one travels abroad, makes a tremendous nuisance of oneself, works intermittently in backpackers, pubs or anywhere else connected to a spare couch, and, potentially, has an existential crisis.  It's all very exciting and grungy and memorable, if one was sober enough to remember it.