Adventures Around The World

Pre-Trip Planning

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    Exhausted with Trip Planning

    One thing we’ve found about a 100-day trip is how daunting and exhausting it is planning and booking such a trip. When you plan for a 1-2 week trip, you might look up 1-2 countries for things like voltage; what type of plugs; what type of money; do they have Uber (or how to get around); what are the tipping policies for the country; what prescription meds can you bring into the country; do you need a visa, etc. It might be an hour or two of research on the internet. But when you are researching 21 different countries, well, it’s 22 times that—a lot of work!

    This is all on top of trying to figure out what an itinerary is for a 100-day trip. We have discovered that we do better when we have a plan in place of what we want to do, see, experience, etc. than if we just “wing it.” This doesn’t mean that we’re “locked in” to a plan, but instead that we have all the options and relevant information to choose from. That means we can just follow the plan if there’s no reason not to, but also allows us to remain very flexible (as you may know from our Portugal trip last December). But when we get up in the morning each day, we know what is generally on the agenda. That way we don’t waste an hour (or many) stressing out about figuring out what we want to do that day, etc. For this trip, especially, we decided we didn’t want to spend valuable time on our trip planning out the latter part of the trip (our original plan was to keep the last 20ish days unscheduled). We are planning on having “zero days” on our trip, but we went to spend those days on getting supplies, doing laundry, talking to friends/family (more on that later)…and not on trip planning. So, we knew that for a 100-day trip to 21 different countries, we need a general plan and have stuff pre-booked. (And we have travel insurance if we need it!)

    With all this as a background, for the last 2 months, Jen has been busy researching what countries we’ll go to, what we want to do in the country, and what an itinerary might look like. Then, she’s been busy booking flights, hotels, and tours; and then starting to look up all the smaller details for each country. In the meantime, Scott has been researching what cameras we need for our trip, what prescriptions we can bring into the various countries, where we should campervan in Australia, and, most importantly, getting this website/blog up and running so we’ll be able to tell you all about all facets of our trip!

    We’re both pretty tired already with the trip-planning. But we’ve done this enough to know that the time spent now planning and figuring out all these aspects of our trip leads to a much more fun, relaxed, and amazing trip later!

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    How we chose our itinerary

    Once we decided that our primary goal with the trip was to see as much stuff as we could on the other side of the globe, we still had to narrow in where we’d target.

    Our main considerations:

    Nearly every place should be new to both of us. Again, the point is to see far-flung places that we couldn’t otherwise get to during our normal vacation time.

    And our plan was to save most of the “top tier” destinations for later, as those worked well as standalone trips that we could pull off during “normal” 2-3 week vacations in subsequent years. So most of the places that ended up on our itinerary were places we wouldn’t book a specific trip to go see. Our strategy here might seem a bit surprising to many. But our eventual goal is to visit as many countries as we can—hopefully eventually all of them, so being strategic about what we do and what we save is important.

    We knew we wanted to “anchor” the trip around a long African tour and safari—which definitely is a top tier destination for us. It’d be the easiest way to travel through, and between, a number of African countries. And, crucially, we wouldn’t have to book each day’s transportation, lodging, and day tours separately, which took a lot of planning stress out of the mix immediately1.

    We also wanted a diversity of experiences, and occasional “Western-ness.” While this adds a lot of complexity in terms of packing (and forces us to check luggage—sigh), we figured that we’d really appreciate regular changes in vibe on such a long trip. And since we haven’t spent such a long period out of the country before, we tried to intersperse more familiar-feeling destinations in between those that’d be more foreign to us.2

    We added a “zero day” roughly every week, so we had built-in time to sleep in, do laundry, shop for supplies, and catch up with friends back home3.

    We knew that this type of trip would entail a lot of flights. And, unfortunately, we’d need to check luggage for each of them. But we tried to keep the flights as reasonable as possible, limiting duration, layovers, and cost.

    In addition, if we had to layover somewhere en route to the next destination, we should take a day or three to explore a bit before moving on.

    We prioritized visiting Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao first, just in case future political trouble made them hard to visit later.

    We originally decided to keep the last 20 days completely open. But after some reflection, we decided that it’d be better to plan something out; we didn’t want the added stress of trying to decide, research, and book things during the other sightseeing days of our trip. We also wanted to be sure to “end on a high note,” so we chose to finish in Australia and French Polynesia (read: Tahiti and Bora Bora). We wanted something near the end that we’d be looking forward to (Australia) and that would also be more relaxing and stress-free than other destinations, figuring that we could easily be getting tired of travel by this point. While Australia is the only exception to the “only new places” rule (Jen visited previously), we could still “leave it open” by renting a campervan, which would provide a lot of flexibility in how we traveled.

    General thoughts

    This will definitely be our most challenging trip ever.

    We’ll be stretching both of our comfort zones in a number of ways. There are a lot of logistics, and a lot can go wrong when you’re traveling for 100 days—canceled flights, lost baggage, theft, illness, and countless other things. And we’ll likely have to pivot and skip something(s) on our itinerary to get back “on track.” I’m sure we’ll make plenty of mistakes along the way.

    But it’ll be an adventure, that’s for sure!

    1. It’d also give us a taste of what to expect on a safari, as we plan on returning for more focused safari tours in the future. ↩︎

    2. This might be most important when it comes to food. Scott is very much not an adventurous eater, and that may be the toughest part of the trip for him. ↩︎

    3. We’re planning on having an open Zoom room available for anyone who wants to pop in and catch up. ↩︎

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    An unexpected concern: make sure any cash you’re bringing to Africa was printed after 2013, as bills printed before then were subject to widespread counterfeiting and often aren’t accepted as payment.

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    Choosing where to go when you can go anywhere

    When we first started embarking on a plan for taking a mini-retirement, we naturally started considering where we might go.

    The first plan that emerged was a tour around South America. It’s a continent I’ve never been to, contained a number of “top tier” destinations we want to visit, and would pair well with a Dec-Feb trip timeframe—which is one we often struggle to fill. That’d also allow us to divide vacation time into two calendar years, making things much easier. We could also do it rather cheaply.

    A little while later, Jen put together another option of bouncing around the Balkans instead. It’d be more expensive, but would be better timed for the late spring. It also seemed a bit more strategic because it’s easier to travel from Arizona to South America than across many timezones to Europe. So perhaps we should save various South America destinations for “normal” trips instead.

    Of course, this was all just theoretical conversation; several factors would have to align to make a trip possible. We wouldn’t be able to entertain any substantial time away until my dad passed away. And then Jen would still need to convince her bosses to let her take an extended leave of absence, a very rare event. To our surprise, both of those factors recently aligned. So the destination discussions got real, quite quickly.

    Where do you go if you can go anywhere in the world? It’s not a common question to think about. Dream about? Sure. Seriously consider? Not really.

    But suddenly, it was a question we’d have to actually answer. (And believe me, I am NOT complaining!)

    When we calculated out the specific days and discovered that the time off would be exactly 100 days, the answer seemed obvious. Wouldn’t it be epic to visit all seven continents in 100 days? Wow! 7 in 100. That would be a story I’d never get tired of telling. So we put together a trip that would do that. Jen has already visited each continent, but I have only been to Europe and North America. It’d be quite a bit more expensive than the other two options we had plotted out, but it’d be worth it. 7 Continents in 100 Days! How cool is that? We nearly pulled the trigger.

    But we decided it was smart to chew on it for another night first before booking. We went to happy hour at a local brewery the next day and stepped back a bit to ask a bigger question: “what did we really want from this trip?”

    Jen’s answers were different than mine. She’s more than half way through her career, with a dozen years remaining before retirement. She’s incredibly burned out and needs a big break from work. And she’s excited to see as many new things as possible. She wants to make a lot of progress on her quest to see all the countries of the world. She wants lots of new experiences. That’s what would really re-energize her.

    And it was suddenly immediately clear. We needed to ditch the seven continents plan and focus primarily on the countries it would be logistically difficult to visit during our usual 2-ish week vacation window, given their distance from home. We should shoot for the antipode—the places on the far side of the globe.

    We might not hit as many of those top “bucket list” destinations, but we’d set ourselves up for easier international trips in the coming years.

    We’ll have an amazing time no matter where we end up. I mean, we once let the internet choose our road trip destination and we still managed to have a fun time at the winning entry, the (not so illustrious) International Banana Museum. So it doesn’t really matter where we go.