The World Beckons – Travel Bug Cure Found!
It’s not a fantasy, I realise – the big travel dream is actually beginning!
As long as I can remember I have had a desire for long term travel. And I’m not talking about the 2 or 3 month trips that we’ve done in the past. I mean seriously experiencing the world, living in exotic destinations, living rough, climbing mountains, living and socialising with the locals, getting to know other cultures, eating the food, smelling and breathing the foreign air.
A couple of years ago I started getting more involved with my fantasies of long term travel. I always had the daydreams, but now it was getting hard to think about anything else.
By nature I’m a planner and schemer and organiser! All my spare time was spent reading travel blogs, googling everything I could on long term travel, buying books/eBooks and talking about it out loud!
I was getting more and more excited about the prospect of long term travel by the minute. Des was sick of hearing about it! Every day I read someone else’s story of how they turned their travel dreams into a reality and I wanted us to do the same. So many others had given up their ‘conventional’ life for a life of travel.
So I started asking myself, if they can do it, why can’t we? Their life sounded so exotic and exciting and I wanted that for our life. So I decided it was time to talk seriously to Des about my ideas. I had been dropping hints, so the idea wasn’t totally new to him. I showed him the blogs I had been reading and explained how others were living this amazing travel life on a small budget. I told him about couchsurfing, housesitting, caretaking, Teaching English, volunteering none of which really excited him.
Des shares my love of travel but he was unconvinced that this life was for him.
Time passed and Des saw I was really serious about us becoming ‘travel entrepreneurs’ ‘nomads’ world adventurers’ or whatever label you put on it, and of course I am so so glad he will be boarding the plane with me on the 5th April 2014 on our amazing journey together around the world.
We’re going to love our new offices!
So, decision made! Yay
From that moment I started saving every cent I could. Putting my financial skills into overdrive I started a thing called VAULT to save money, more about the vault in a later post. I would buy only the essential food and wine! (no cutting back here) took off my acrylic nails and other unnecessary beauty regimes, no more clothes, we stopped going out regularly, and even stopped using the drier (mother was proud of me!) so our power bills would go down.
I told my friends I was on a saveathon! The vault grew nicely and today it’s filled up and ready to take us off on our journey. I knew if we cut back we would have more for later, it was an easy sacrifice.
As for everything else, we would figure it out as we went along!
Plans – there are no Plans!
Everyone always asks me what our plan/itinerary is… That’s the fun part, there is no plan!
There is only loose framework… stopover 10 days in San Francisco, a month or 2 or 3 in Mexico, a month or 2 in Guatemala staying with a local family to learn Spanish, travel through Latin America, tango with Des, check out the Panama Canal, Diving in Belize, Nicaragua, Honduras, back to Quito to see Mishel and her family, Peru, Cusco, live here around Machu Picchu, Salt Plains in Bolivia, Bike the Death Road, Brazil for Christmas, Trekking in Patagonia, Iguazu Falls, Pantanal, Antartica and everything else in between that I’ve may have missed.
Did I say no plan? – actually very little booked!
April Fools is the day we leave our beautiful home and garden for our world wide adventure – it’s not a joke, its not a fantasy, its actually happening, some call it sabbatical, some call it retirement, some call it unemployment, some call it nomad or maybe just completely mad!