RTW Planning

How Do You Plan Something Like That?

enjean2013 7 Comments

Another question that we have been asked is how we are going to plan such a big trip. It can seem daunting, but it has also proved to be pretty fun because we are so excited!

Choose Some Highlights

The first thing we had to decide was what we were most excited to see.  We both had some ideas about what we wanted to see around the world such as: The Parthenon, other ancient world ruins in Greece and/or Turkey, Machu Picchu, the Amazon, the most southern points in the world, Penguins, Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Himalayas, castles in Europe, The Great Wall of China, Angkor Wat, etc. We both love ruins, history, and outdoor beauty. Della was interested in visiting some of the countries from which her students come from: Burma and Nepal.

 Save Some Places for the Future

After thinking about the highlights we wanted to see, we had a huge list! So we had to pare it down a bit. We first took into account that some places are easier to get to from the US than others. For example, we ultimately decided not to visit South America during this trip at all because it is so much easier to reach than all the other continents. We believe that we can fly to many countries in Central or South America for shorter vacations in our future. It is easier to plan a two week summer vacation when you are only a couple of hours away via plane. It is much harder to plan that same vacation when you know you will be spending over a day’s travel time on each end (plus jet lag). This thinking led us to focusing on Africa, Europe, and Asia on this trip.

 Choose a Direction

Next, we tried to see how we could make them fit together in some semblance of order. We did not want to flit all over the world in big plane rides – we’d rather want to travel overland where we could to save money. This led us to the idea that we were generally travelling one direction around the world – either west or east.

 Consider the Climate and Crowds

The next step was to look at the weather. We knew that we would rather avoid the hottest time of year, the coldest/wettest time of year, and busiest tourist season in every location. Knowing we were leaving in July helped us get an idea of where we wanted to be and when. Many round the world books have collected average temperature and rain data about different locations.The website Price of Travel also has a lot of good information about climate and tourist season, both on its location profile pages and in posts about the best cheap places to travel during certain months.

Once we read all this information, we were a little overwhelmed. Then Eric’s nerd side came out and he decided to try and organize it visually. He decided to get some old-fashioned notecards and lay out an itinerary. First he made notecards for each month. Then, he made a notecard for each of the potential destinations and listed on the cards when it was best to visit the destination, when it was OK, and when to avoid. We then laid these cards out and tried to optimize for the “best” category.

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Using this system helped us come up with a general flow of the trip: Africa first, Europe next, and Asia last. We do get to Africa during the coldest part of the year, but it is the best time for wildlife watching. This also helps us avoid the worst of the summer crowds in Europe. Also, we will get to Asia during the best (least hot) weather months.

Consider the Costs

We also looked at the relative cost of traveling in all locations we wanted to visit. We wanted to stick to a $100/day or less budget for the two of us. This, unfortunately, made us reconsider visiting many of the countries in Europe. However, the great news was once we decided that many of the countries in Western Europe were too expensive for this trip, it made us start to research more about countries that we knew very little about. Suddenly, countries like Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Albania were on our list.

 Dive In

Finally, we had a general idea of the countries we wanted to visit and the order in which we could visit them.  The next step was to learn more about each country in an effort to plan the approximate amount of time we might want to spend there.

This became very tricky as we don’t want to over-plan the trip. This actually has been our biggest struggle in planning – attempting to plan too much! The beauty of a long trip is that we can shape the trip as we go. We can spend more time in places that we enjoy or less in places that we don’t. We will become exhausted if we are constantly on the move and should try to plan some down time in certain locales.

Still, we want to do a little planning, so we decided to start with guide books. We are true believers in Lonely Planet guide books and have used many to guide our research. One thing that has been invaluable is the Denver Public Library. It offers loans on almost all Lonely Planet books that are quite recent. We have been able to get the guide books from the library and spend time reading through the various sites – giving us possible time tables and ideas about the best way to travel from one location to another.

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Read Travel Blogs

The guide books are a great resource for learning about a destination, but it’s also nice to hear more personal stories to really get a feel for the place. Luckily, on the Internet it is now very easy to find such stories! Often, if we want to read about a place, we will just Google “<place name> travel blog”, and a ton of results pop up.

There are a few other web resources that we like to check. Wikitravel provides advice similar to a guidebook, so it’s a good place to use for cross-referencing. We also like to check Trip Advisor reviews to make sure that the places we are thinking of get good reviews.

Keep Track of It All

It’d be nice if we could remember all of this information we’ve found, but when you’re planning a whole year that’s somewhat hard to do! Our solution has been to keep track of what we have found in a set of Google Drive documents. This way, we can both edit them, and we will be able to access them from anywhere. Whenever we find a noteworthy link, we add it to the corresponding document for future reference.

Always Be Planning

It’d be foolish to say that we have come up with our final plan. We are hoping that part of the fun of this adventure will be experiencing some unplanned and surprising things! So, we are hoping to use all this research as a basic guide but will continue to seek out new information about the places we are going to go. You can check out the Itinerary link on our to see where we’re currently planning to go… but don’t be surprised if you see it change!

Learning Something New Everyday!

globegazers 1 Comment

Did you know that a braai is a BBQ grill?

Did you know that an ablutions block is a bathroom?

I didn’t. But now I do! At least they are in South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana.

We’re getting close to having our plan put in place for our self-drive safari! (More details to come)

How Can You Afford to go Around the World?

globegazers 1 Comment

This is another one of the questions that we get quite often when we tell people about our trip plans.  The answer is both really easy and really difficult. Traveling like this will definitely require a significant amount of cash.

The first answer is that this trip is a priority for us, so we have been saving money. We are extremely fortunate to be debt-free (except for the house) so we can afford to put money towards savings.

The rest of the answer is not as clear-cut. We believe that traveling in the way that we want to may be significantly cheaper than living a year in our normal manner here in the U.S.

In our initial effort to think about the budget for the trip, we gave ourselves a daily limit. We plan to spend no more than $100/day for the two of us. This would be an average of course, because naturally there will be bigger expenses on some days and less on others. We hope to get several of our large flights covered by airline miles, which will help keep the costs down. We also know as we move through different areas of the world, the cost of living will change drastically. We believe that there are places where we can spend much less than our $100/day and some places where the $100/day limit will be a struggle. In addition, we know that there will be certain “adventures” we want to experience that may cost more. But, based on our experiences traveling in the past, we think that the limit is reasonable.

Using the $100/day plan, we can assume we will spend approximately $3000/month. $3000 times our potential trip length of 10-12 months would get us up to ~$35,000 for the two of us. With our savings, as well as perhaps a little income from renting our house, this seems doable. It is quite a bit less than what it costs to live here in Denver for a year!

As for traveling cheaply, stay tuned to the blog for our budget posts. We’ll let you know how easy or difficult it turns out to be to stay within our budget. Also, we might give you some ideas about how to travel more economically and where in the world you can visit without breaking the bank.

How We’re Getting to Africa for $7

enjean2013 7 Comments

One of our first steps in planning the trip is to buy plane tickets. You may think this would be a big expense, but with a little effort you can get a ticket for really cheap. Like the title says, our main tickets to Africa from the US are only going to cost us $7 total!

Ticket Types

One of the early decisions we had to make was what type of ticket to buy. The big airline alliances do sell “round the world” tickets which allow you to group a bunch of different flights under a one fare. We looked into this, but in the end we decided it wasn’t the best fit for us. On one of the RTW tickets, you are only allowed a certain number of stops, and you have to plan out your dates far in advance. We want to figure out some of that as we go, so not exactly a match for us. Plus, we would have had to pay lots of money for that. But why pay money when you have miles?

Using Miles to Buy Plane Tickets

For the past few years, we have gone on many trips for very little money out of pocket.We do this by “paying” for the flights with frequent flyer miles.

We don’t actually rack up the miles by flying though. Instead, we get big chunks of miles by applying for credit cards with hefty sign up bonuses. It may sound risky, but if you are careful with how you use the credit cards (like we always are) then it can get you some great deals.

Getting credit cards is only a good solution if you are responsible with how you use them. Always make sure to pay off your balance in full every month!! You may worry about negative effects on you credit score, but in our experience our scores have stayed fairly constant.

For some of the cards, you only get the sign up bonus if you complete what they call a “minimum spend”. It’s usually a few thousand dollars within a few months. We don’t typically put that much on a credit card, so we’ve had to figure out some creative ways to do this. If you’re interested, let us know and we can share our strategies.

Getting to South Africa

Based on a variety of factors, we decided to start our trip in South Africa. We knew from research that the best miles to redeem to get to South Africa would be United miles. (We aren’t actually flying on United though. One other cool thing about miles is that you can redeem them on an airline’s alliance partners. United in in Star Alliance along with a few African airlines).

We also knew from the award chart that you need 40,000 United miles to get to South Africa from the US. Luckily, we also knew that the Chase Sapphire Preferred card offered a signup bonus of 40,000 United miles. We each got the card, completed the minimum spending requirement, and had our miles.

Then we had to search for the flight. Using the United website, we searched for award redemptions to Johannesburg from a variety of U.S. cities. Unfortunately, availability was a little limited so we didn’t have a lot of options. We were this close to flying via Nigeria until we read some horror stories about layovers there. On the other hand, we read some positive things about layovers in Cairo, so we ended up booking a ticket on Egypt Air. We should have time on our 12 hour layover to see the pyramids – pretty cool!

But, very little in life is free unfortunately. There are some fees associated with the journey: $3.50 per person. So, we can’t say we are flying to South Africa for free. It’s going to cost us a whole $7.

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You may notice that we still need to figure out how to get to NYC for our flight. No definite plans on that yet, but we are hoping we can figure out a way to use miles :-).

If you’re interested in learning more about how to travel for cheap, here are some resources we enjoy: