Long Term Travel

Many people dream of spending their lives traveling the world and taking the time to explore new locations and cultures. But that dream doesn’t often include tips on how to manage your life while you’re away. Everything from managing your mail, keeping your home safe, and even accessing your money can be more challenging when you are on the other side of the globe.

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A fellow travel blogger recently posted a link on Facebook to this page: The Travel Experience In 35 Gifs: From Quitting At Home To Shitting Abroad (take a look!). Auston and I about shit our pants laughing at them. For us, they were about 90% accurate and 200% hilarious. Nothing explains trying to get your travel visas sorted out better than Bruce Willis crawling through an air duct with a lighter as his guide in “Die Hard”. In fact, that was our exact experience when applying for our Indian visas. Then we died laughing at the GIF expressing what it’s like to introduce yourself to the people you meet abroad over and over and over and OVER again. Honestly, sometimes I’ll just enter a hostel with my head pointed to the floor in hopes that nobody notices me as to avoid that conversation entirely. Especially when I know I’ll just be staying a night or two. 

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Traveling long term entails experiencing the highest highs and the lowest lows as anyone who has done it knows or understands as a follower of travel writing. We’ve returned home twice in the past year of being abroad and undoubtedly if we could, we would have returned more often. Seeing our family and friends only twice in one year? We’re too close with our family for that to be anywhere even bordering sufficient. Still, I do believe it’s good for individuals to pull themselves away from the comforts of home to focus on themselves for an extended period of time because it builds a type of strength, character, and understanding that may be difficult to achieve otherwise.

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Like many long term travelers, people frequently want to know our secret to traveling long term. “How is it possible and how you can you afford to travel so much?” “How can I afford to travel,” they ask, curious how they can travel more themselves. And although David likes to spend money as though we are rich, this is certainly not the case. Surprisingly, we spent more money living in Chicago than we do traveling. A month’s expenses in Chicago cost us roughly $4,500 per month, while traveling around the world only cost about $3,200 on an average month – that’s for both of us. Places like Europe were more but destinations like India or South East Asia were cheap enough that David could spend to his heart’s content without me freaking out. Travel credit cards with airline mileage bonuses are a huge help, and even living in Spain we still continue to apply for credit cards for travelling. We just recently booked our trip from the US to Spain for just $25 in taxes and 25,000 miles each, one of our best deals yet! Once I reach a spending limit on a particular card, I will get the bonus points and then I like to compare credit cards quickly to find another card that will give me a good offer. Cards like British Airways or United Mileage Plus have great credit card offers that have helped us bank miles.  If the card I currently have charges an annual fee, I cancel the card after the bonus is received.

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From the early planning stages of our trip and now living in Madrid, we are constantly asked how we could afford to travel around the world for so long and to so many distant places. Some people are eager to know the secret in hopes of taking some big trip one day. Others simply tell us that “It Must Be Nice” in a lackluster, half-assed acknowledgment, assuming we must have some massive bank account or special permission that allowed us to break away from the typical way of life. The reality is that we just made a choice many years ago to change our lives and we had to make a lot of difficult decisions and comprises to get there. But one thing is for sure, the $300 around the world flights that took us across the globe certainly prolonged our ability to travel and took us to incredible destinations like Ethiopia, India and Japan.

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This is the follow up post to Part 1: meeting people through online social networks. There are great options for meeting people online, but let’s not forget about the old-fashioned face-to-face concept! After all, don’t you want to be sure your new friends don’t have abhorrent body odor or a screeching laugh that makes you cringe? These are important things to keep in mind people! So let’s get offline and outside to meet people.

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Friendless

There’s no denying it. We’re new in town and we need friends. Remember the good ol’ days when you made friends simply by turning to the guy next to you in class and making a smart ass comment. Then bam. Friends. Nowadays as an adult, not so simple. Sure you can make friends at work, but if you’re job is at all like Auston and my former careers, that can vary. Most of the people we worked with were significantly older than us, married with kids or grandkids, and paying a mortgage. Sure they’re nice people, but I just don’t see us tossing back beers together at the bar on a Friday night.

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On one of the first nights we spent in Madrid, Auston’s cousin Taylor asked us if we had any travel pet peeves. Off the top of my head, I couldn’t really think of any, though there were surely many. I could only come up with a general pet peeve I have about elevator buttons. When you walk up to the elevator, you push the up or down button and it usually lights up. Why then, do so many people feel the need to push the button again if it’s already lit up? The light means it’s been pushed! I don’t know why it gets to me, but I developed that one when we lived in a high-rise in Chicago. Anyway, Auston and I got to thinking and we do have a major travel pet peeve.

High-rise in Miami

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Taking a trip around the world should be a romantic experience for any couple in love, shouldn’t it? Well we can’t speak for other couples, but it was no romantic getaway for us, at least some of the time – ok, many times. In fact, it was quite the opposite. We’d never fought so much in the seven years we’ve been together. It’s safe to say that by the end of our trip around the world our relationship was strained and apparently not aging well, so much so that if it had a face it’d look like Michael Douglas.

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Auston and I knew after completing our backpacking trip that we wanted to return to Spain to continue studying Spanish. Our goal was to spend at least six months in Madrid but we also wanted to go to France for a couple months to visit family and perhaps start dabbling in French. Unfortunately, according to the Schengen Agreement, Americans can only be in certain European countries (including Spain and France) for a maximum of 90 days within a 6 month period. Sure, we could leave after three months and go to another country in Europe, since we can spend up to 6 months in the UK. But as fluent English speakers, we’re not looking for English immersion – even though we’d need it to ever understand British English! So we interpreted this Schengen policy as “Americans must scheme their way into Europe if they want to stay more than 90 days”. As Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother would say, “Challenge accepted!”

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