5 Hard-Won Lessons That Every Traveler Needs To Know

it's pretty wild that we've been traveling fulltime for four years now and we honestly never could have predicted what this journey would look like keep going that's 368 okay go go go okay okay okay I think we might have taken woo a wrong turn somewhere along the way oh guys I don't know what we were thinking I don't know how we're going to last a whole month in this place as promised the crowd went from a couple dozen people to easily a few hundred standing here I convinced Stephanie to give the Grasshoppers a try no no no no oh my gosh it's the bathroom who does this fit no no okay I'll just keep going always an adventure we never know what we're going to be facing in these airbnbs I think you can tell that we've had a whole lot of Misadventures and that's kind of what Trava really is of course you do get all those wonderful special Unforgettable moments this is so magical we are definitely the very first people here today and this site it's absolutely magnificent but for every one of those special moments there are literally hundreds of challenges and mishaps and frustrations so we thought let's not keep all our mistakes to ourselves this could really be helpful to anyone who's thinking about packing up their bags and heading off for life of travel we've taken everything we've done wrong over the past four years and we're sharing it all with you guys we're talking about getting rained out feeling lonely travel burnout and of course we're going to get into the topic that we know you guys care about the most which is how to make it all work on a set budget because of course you don't need to be a budget traveler we're certainly not budget Travelers but you do need to somehow make those finances [Music] work by the way if you're new to our Channel I'm Jillian and this is Stephanie and we've got our two little travel companions here Jasper and Huxley so the four of us have been traveling the world fulltime for for 4 years now and sharing it with all of you guys as we go yeah so you'll notice that it was pretty nice outside the sun is shining it's nice and warm by now we've gotten much better at being in the right place at the right time weatherwise it sort of it's a work in progress we still have a lot of hits and misses but we were really really bad at it when we first started traveling full-time yeah I mean here was our inary we started in laiv in November then Istanbul in December and then we were in Florence in February so what all of these places have in common is that they can get pretty cold and rainy in the off season which we weren't prepared for at all no no we were pretty shivery so that kicked off four years of trying to do a much better job of planning around the weather and it's something that honestly we've never really thought that much about before but it turns out to be really important when you're traveling full-time well if you were wondering if the is rainy in May I can assure you that it absolutely is guys this is kind of crazy but hurricane Agatha is headed our way and there's supposed to be 100 mile winds hitting our place by tomorrow morning yeah here comes the rain huxley's getting lift Jasper's walking we're partially covered final leg of the journey it's crazy hot here and like I said we're staying in a very unconventional Airbnb with no air conditioning for full month and we're already dying of the heat at 7 in the morning weather does really impact how much you can get out and enjoy a place if it's too hot or too cold or too rainy might not be able to make the most of your time so we're going to give you guys a few quick examples we plan the entire month of August in Athens one year and that was just that was a total mistake I mean it was really too hot to go anywhere between the hours of 10:00 a.m. all the way through until 6:00 p.m. basically all day yeah so we would sort of scuttle out in the early morning hours we do our best to see a few sides and then that was it for seeing the city but apparently we didn't learn our lesson because the next August we decided to stay in Belgrade which is pretty much the same situation yeah thank goodness for air conditioning and we also have done the reverse so we've booked Southern European destinations during the winter and we discovered that there's really no such thing as a winterized Mediterranean apartment yeah I mean there's no insulation no essential heating just lots of freezing cold tiles so that was our experience in Malta in January one year we also tried ismir in March when turkey was going through this huge cold snap I mean I think you guys are getting the picture so weather can really make a difference especially when you're traveling to Regions like South America where there are a lot of microclimates it can be really hard to line up visits to multiple countries when you've got one over here that's having a heat wave and then the other one is in the rainy season so like we said we haven't quite perfected our approach it but we keep trying we do have a couple websites that we can recommend there is one called climates to travel and then another one called weather spark so we use these websites at our very earliest stages of planning our trips this is long before we even consider buying a ticket to go anywhere I mean ideally You' just toughen up and deal with whatever weather comes your way that's spoken by someone who went to Military College we found that it's better to understand what you're going to be heading into yeah so realistically you will enjoy your time there a little bit more if you're feeling prepared our final destination is the crater all the way up there it's something like 2,000 ft straight up from here no choice but just to press on wow this is one heck of a climb okay finally we finally made it up here and I'm just about to see the crater oh my goodness this is so beautiful oh it's an absolutely enormous Crater Lake I mean it's just so huge and spectacular tot totally worth the hike even the worst toughest hardest moments totally worth it all right next topic what to do with your time after you've already seen every site in town yeah and you can't possibly go on yet another tour or look at a whole other Church yeah I mean we found that it's just too much to be a tourist 24/7 when you're traveling full-time it's really helpful to have some sort of project something else going on in your life aside from travel so there's really no rule that you have to get out and be a tourist every single day when you're a traveler it's perfectly fine to spend a little bit of time on other things maybe have a hobby of course this advice doesn't really apply to people who are digital Nomads and they're still working Monday to Friday they probably have enough to do balancing work and travel but for those of us who are retired early like us or taking a career break or maybe on to sabatical it's really important to have something else to fill your time when you just can't go to yet another Museum so for us we do we have our shared hobby yeah which is our YouTube channel and Instagram it's something creative it learn means learning new skills like photography and editing but we also have other Hobbies as well so I love reading about the history of the places that we visit and I also do a lot of audio courses that I get from the digital library those are also about history and we both love to cook and we're really into fitness so we' make time to work out every day whether it's yoga or maybe a fitness class I'm heading off for my very first surf lesson not really sure how it's going to go I'm hoping that I can manage to stand up and maybe even catch a away well it went way better than I expected I'm just going to head back out and try a few more okay so you've planned to be somewhere for the right season and you've got a couple of hobbies on the go so what's the next most important thing that would be finding friends it sounds really sad but this is actually one of the things we do get asked about the most how do you make friends and create a sense of community when you're always on the move I mean obviously we all have friends and family back home and we want to stay connected with them while we're traveling even though they might not find find our travel lifestyle very relatable but we also want to meet people along the way and make connections with other Travelers and the truth is that is not always easy we found that it's kind of necessary to have some kind of social media presence where you can share a little bit about yourself maybe you can connect with other people you know fellow Nomads who are doing the same kind of thing as you yeah I mean it could be on Instagram it could be joining a Facebook group whatever it is you do have to put in a little bit of effort to make new friends yeah and actually the truth is that most of these are going to be online relationships and they will probably stay that way like rarely do the stars align and you get to be in the same place at the same time although it's always amazing when that happens and in fact we ended up having a lot of meetups in Romania of all places this it was a record number but for the most part we do end up doing a lot of Zoom calls and we stay in touch virtually and that brings up another point which is personality types I do think this lifestyle is a little easier on introverts which we both are because we just don't need as many social interaction yeah I think for us really once a week is just about perfect maybe two meetups a week it becomes a very taxing social calendar yeah so for extroverts who need as many social interactions as possible it can be a little difficult to achieve while you're traveling yeah I would say for extroverts it might be better to set up maybe a base for a few months in a place that's really popular with X yeah like somewhere like seigel y Mexico or quka in Ecuador yeah or maybe a place like shangai basically these are places where it's a little bit easier to plug into that local xack community or where you can meet a lot of other Travelers and just a quick note about being part of a couple obviously we have each other for companionship it's honestly a lot of pressure on a relationship when it's just the two of you all the time yeah it really is a lot of pressure and it makes it even more important to have those separate hobbies and interests that we talked about because eventually eventually you really do need a break from each other my gosh Julian what have you done to me oh this is terrifying so I'm really scared of heights like very very scared I do like to be up on mountains but I definitely do not like to be dangling in this rickety thing there is a lot of rust in this car oh my gosh oh we're coming in we're coming in for a landing oh I really hope it slows down oh my godo oo speaking of taking breaks at some point you might find you need to actually take a break from traveling yeah travel burnout it's a real issue it's when the travel experience is just it's no longer fun and exciting anymore it's just painful and you need it to be over so this is a personal thing and obviously it looks different for everyone I think for us it seems to happen when our plans go off the rails and we have to come up with totally new travel plans so a little bit of context for you guys travel planning at least for us it's very time consuming we usually do it about 6 to eight months ahead of when we want to travel and it eats up a lot of hours in the week yeah a lot of hours figuring out which countries we want to go to looking for flights figuring out itineraries choosing airbnbs it's all like a finely woven tapestry and you just don't want to pull on any threads so when we run into last minute issues like when we suddenly couldn't go to Morocco and Portugal the other year because of Co yes or when we had big plans to hike up matchu Picchu and suddenly Pro Clos because of political upheaval so we still have to spend that time somewhere in the world we have to go back to the drawing board we have to go back to our travel planning but we don't have those 6 to 8 months left we have to figure it out right away and Jillian does not like working under pressure I do not but actually other things can cause burnout too like spending too much time in a place that doesn't resonate for us so for us that was metagene we spent a month there and just found it very very difficult certainly we notice that this is a city going through a lot of changes there is some homelessness you do need to be mindful of your belongings especially in crowds yeah definitely in crowds so I would say that it's a great place to visit if you're looking for a very Urban experience I mean you have to really love an urban experience and you don't mind what is pretty Lively street life it's definitely Lively here and you might have notice that we did more tours this month than usual for us going on tours really helped us to feel a little more comfortable navigating the city so what do you do about travel burnout well we found it could be really helpful to break up our travels with a trip back home yeah we don't technically have a home anywhere in the world but we still have a HomeTown where we can see our friends and our family and familiar neighborhoods so visiting home about two to three times a year feels right for us we'll travel for four or five months and then we come back to Canada for a month or two and that really helps provide a good reset apparently there's a way you can get right up close to the waterfall but you have to go through this little Tunnel right here oh my God that's it I'm going under the waterfall woo I'm just getting smoking wet and the water is just pouring down just look at that all right the big topic that I know you guys have all been waiting for let's talk about travel costs so when we first started traveling the premise was that we'd go to a lot of lower class countries where we could live large on a small budget and to some extent I would say that did work out we've been to a lot of inexpensive countries predominantly in Eastern Europe and also in South America and yes you can live very well for a whole lot less we were able to stay within a pretty tight budget during the first couple years of travel but it was kind of Hit and Miss with our airbnbs to be honest it was a lot there were a lot of misses it was mostly misses now the environment has totally changed the co discounts are gone inflation is very real the budget we started with 4 years ago would be totally unworkable today yeah we really had to ramp up our spending just to maintain that basic level of comfort that we prefer so there are a lot of little hacks that you can use to stretch your budget you can collect points for flights you can visit during shoulder season maybe choose to stay in less Prime locations maybe you're doing more DIY entertainment you cook at home more often but actually the biggest hack is just the most simple travel more slowly now we've met a lot of people on the road who are staying a few days here and a few days there and I can tell you that's really going to blow your budget yeah there are a lot of hidden costs when you travel quickly you're more reliant on dining out because you don't have time to get groceries and cook at home the transportation costs add up much more quickly you might feel more pressured to do tours instead of taking the time to explore on your own and of course the big one you're not cashing in on those juicy monthly Airbnb discounts so all of this becomes very expensive very quickly now you might not feel like staying a whole month in every sing single destination but if you can balance out that fast travel with a good amount of slower travel it can be very helpful for your budget of course we've got a lot more tips about how to plan your budget after traveling for four years I think we've stayed in probably 50 airbnbs I think we've really got a handle on how much this lifestyle cost yeah so if you're looking for all the details about how much we spend you can check out the next video right over here since we get so many questions and so many comments about how much we spend we just wanted to lay all over for you guys so we've looked at all of our spending for the past few years and we're going to tell you exactly what we spend every month to make this lifestyle work and by the way isn't this place just amazing so we're in kind of a remote part of Columbia's coffee region now technically this place is a little on the pricey side but we're going to talk later about how we make this kind of splurge work within our budget

Channel: Our Freedom Years

Views: 5,719

Keywords: how to retire early and travel, retire early and travel the world, life in early retirement, life after early retirement, our freedom years

Id: ZgPeki2cCng

Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 05 2023