Unique digital nomad travel adventures from around the U.S.
Last year, R, C and I did a little traveling through Poland. Below are a few do’s and don’ts from our experience there. The first “do” is, of course, go to Poland! After that, you can worry about the specifics below. Do’s and don’ts of …
It is nearing the second weekend in August, which means one thing in the R and B household: Braun Brothers Reunion. BBR is a music festival/camping extravaganza with great music and not so great food. I mean, there’s only so many hamburgers you can eat …
Do you know how to plan and save for a trip? Travel funds and budgets are not something I am terribly good at. However, I have recently been working on them in an effort to prepare myself for a trip to Australia.
As a child, I was obsessed with The Man from Snowy River. My love of Jim Craig runs deep and I still find myself watching the film at least once a year. It is because of this movie that my desire to see Australia was established long before I discovered my love of traveling. And even after I started traveling regularly, Australia remained number one on my bucket list. The only reason it has not been checked off yet is because I want to do it justice. Two weeks and the usual budget are just not good enough for my childhood dream. So I have been biding my time, waiting for the right moment.
That moment is almost finally upon me; I will be flying to Australia this February. While this is all very exciting, there is a lot of planning that goes into a trip like this. I figured I would share a bit of that planning process as well as what I am doing to save up for my time Down Under.
Now honestly, although each trip is unique, the planning process for me is relatively the same for either a long weekend out of town or an epic month in Australia. No matter what, I need to do the following:
R and I almost always know where we are headed next. We start wishing and dreaming years in advance. Now sometimes a really good deal or adventure presents itself and we jump on it. Other times a plan might fall through and we have to make an abrupt change in direction. But for the most part, things seem to fall into place and we are continually filling up our schedule with various activities both long and short. However, if you are struggling with deciding where to go, I suggest you read this post about choosing your next travel destination.
Aside from it being number one on my bucket list, I started really considering Australia about two years ago. I knew I wanted to go for at least a month and I finally felt as if I was in a position at work to ask for that much time off. I also thought it would be fun to make the trip over my 35th birthday. So with those thoughts in mind, I started to put the wheels in motion. Luckily, it did not take too much convincing to get R on board.
Make sure to do some research into what it takes to get into a country. Some visas are free and can be “applied” for when you arrive in the country. Some are expensive, a challenge to apply for and must be done ahead of time (looking at you Brazil).
When it comes to vacation hours, I am lucky enough to earn more than two weeks a year (but not as lucky as my brother-in-law who gets five…oh well). Normally, I spread my vacation hours out. Never have I taken a whole month off at one time.
For this trip, I did some math and realized that if I was careful, I could accrue enough vacation hours by the time I leave to cover me for the whole month. Unfortunately, being careful is not easy for me. I very much enjoy taking a little time off here and a little time off there and I don’t usually pay too close attention to the total amount of vacation hours I have available. But that is not an option if I want to get paid the entire time I am in Australia. So careful I will be.
R is in a very different situation. As an independent contractor, she never gets paid for the vacation hours she uses. So the longer she is away from the office, the smaller her paycheck. This definitely needs to be taken into account when she is planning a longer trip. In this case, she will not be joining me for the entire month—just the first 18 days.
Every employer is different and although mine has always been good about me taking vacation time, being away from the office for more than two weeks is pretty rare. In fact, like many Americans, most of my coworkers hardly ever take a full two weeks off at one time. But I finally reached a point where I felt comfortable requesting more time off.
When I asked my boss if it would be okay if I took a month off to go to Australia, she did not hesitate to tell me yes. Yes! I feel it is important to give your employer as much notice as possible, especially for a longer trip. However, two years may have been a little extreme. My boss even commented that two years was more than enough notification.
Again, R is not quite in the same boat. Although her employer is also good about time off, she is not in a position to take the entire month off. However, given that Australia is my big dream and not hers, I think she is content with a slighter shorter vacation.
I am a little embarrassed to admit that I am not very good at budgeting for a trip. I know about how much I can spend every year on travel given my income and living situation and as long as I stay within that ballpark, I am fine. If flights to a particular destination are more than I am comfortable spending, then I change plans and go somewhere else. If a particular attraction is too much, then I do something else. I am thrifty, but not super conscious of where every penny goes.
But here’s the deal: Australia is expensive. It is expensive to get there and it is expensive to be there. On top of that, I am going to be there for a full month. That’s double my usual travel time. And since I want to make sure I do this country right, I do not want to stay in cheap hostels and forgo certain attractions due to a lack of funds. Taking all of this into account, I knew I would need to approach financing my Australia vacay a little differently than my other trips.
The first thing I did was estimate how much money I would need per day. This is always a challenge but a simple Google search can help. I like to estimate a little high for me just to be on the safe side. After I settle on a cost per day and times that by the number of days I’ll be gone, I add on the cost of a plane ticket. Then, depending on the location and itinerary, I factor in inter-country transportation, visa fees, etc.
COST PER DAY x NUMBER OF DAYS + COST OF A PLAN TICKET
= ROUGH BUDGET ESTIMATE
Like I mentioned earlier, flights to Australia are not cheap (especially from Boise). Since I regularly check flight prices to all sorts of destinations, I knew what the high and low side of a flight to Sydney costs. When it came to my budget, I picked a number on the high side with the hope that I would find a better deal. I knew that the less I paid for my plane ticket, the more I would have to spend in Australia.
Once official planning begins on a trip, I religiously check flight prices—almost daily. I take note of when prices seem to drop and when they are the most expensive. This can be tedious. But it is worth it when you find a decent price within your budget.
Sign up for alerts…but do not depend solely on them. Alerts are helpful, but I have yet to find a system that covers it all. So for now, I continue to do a lot of legwork myself.
Once I settled on a final number for my budget, I divided it by the number of months I had left before my trip. It turned out to be a number I was comfortable saving each month. However, if that number had been too high, I would have had to rethink my trip. I figured I had a few options:
Luckily, I did not have to employ any of the options above. However, I did decide (just to be on the safe side) that any additional cash I might earn leading up to my trip would go straight into my Australia fund. Below is the budget I set for my trip. Read an updated post what I actually spent on my month-long trip to Australia.
The best piece of advice I have is to make your saving automatic. This has made all of the difference for me. Once I knew what I needed to save each month, the first thing I did was set up a separate savings account. I wanted a specific travel fund. After a little research, I settled on My Savings Direct, an online bank that offers one of the highest interest rates for savings accounts.
I set up an automatic transfer from my regular checking account for the amount I needed to save each month. I knew that if I tried to remember on my own, I would fail more times than I would succeed. Plus, I was also worried that when it came time to make a transfer, I might find a better use for the money in that moment. Having the transfer occur automatically made my life a lot easier and I can honestly say that it was the smartest thing I did to save. I highly encourage you to set up something automatic.
There is a plethora of ways to make some extra cash should you need/want to. Don’t believe me? Try Google. Below are a few options I have tried with varying success:
Regardless of what you decide to do, if you stick to it, then little by little you will see your travel fund start to grow. After that, the next big step is trying to find a good deal on plane ticket.
What you pay for your plane ticket can have a major effect on your budget—for better or for worse. When it comes to finding a good deal, it is crucial to do your research, sign up for alerts and check often. I read a lot of travel articles and blogs and although there is a lot of advice out there about the best time to buy, I have yet to find the magic answer.
A few months ago, I noticed several travel articles talking about the low price of plane tickets to Australia. That was all well and good, but I needed something affordable out of Boise and so far, prices had remained steadily high. I wasn’t particularly worried because my trip was still close to 10 months away and I have never bought a ticket that far in advance. Then one day I did my usual checking and discovered that the cost of flights to anywhere in Australia from Boise were the lowest I had seen them in years. Years! The price was almost half of what I had originally budgeted for. For obvious reasons, I was anxious to jump on it.
One lesson R and I have learned the hard way is that if you see a good deal on a plane ticket, jump on it immediately. Even waiting a couple of hours can be the difference between spending Thanksgiving in Brussels or…not. So my best advice: go for it! If you know your dates and you are comfortable with the price, do not hesitate. Did you know that you have 24 hours to change your mind (assuming you booked with the actual airline)? With that sort of safety net, there is no reason to hesitate.
But hesitate I did. The reason: R cannot go for the whole month and we had yet to work out her schedule. But you can bet we started planning frantically to get everything in order. I did not hesitate long because the very next day I noticed that prices had already started to go up on certain days. This time I jumped. And later that evening, R jumped as well. It was so exhilarating to finally buy that ticket and know that I was well on my way to another adventure. (A little fact about B: I have never gotten buyer’s remorse from purchasing a plane ticket. A new purse? Sure. But never something travel related.)
In case you were wondering, the flight I booked was close to $900 cheaper than what I had originally budgeted for. Now I have an additional $900 that can go towards anything I want (e.g. nicer lodging, more shopping, a fancy dinner, etc.).
Now that I am well on my way to saving and the plane ticket has been booked, it is time to plan the nitty-gritty details. Honestly, this is one of the most enjoyable parts of planning a trip and one I feel deserves its own post. So head over to the post I wrote about how to plan a trip.
I like plans and I like lists so the steps discussed above work really well for me. If you are more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of Jane, you probably stopped reading a couple of steps in. Regardless of how you like to plan your trips, make sure to enjoy the ride. Planning a trip is not nearly as fun as taking one, but it is a pretty close second.
This morning was rough. After a series of most unfortunate events, my shiny new iPhone ended up taking a swim. The friendly IT guy at work gave me a baggy full of silica gel packets and told me to put my phone in there and …
Estonia is a lovely little country located on the Baltic Sea. I cannot think of a single negative thing to say about this country. It is beautiful and easy to travel. Things are really, really, really old. There is a history here that is hard …
We’ve written posts about big trips, weekend trips and day trips. This post discusses how to take a trip for about two hours–all within the convenience of your own home…aka movie travel. I don’t know about you, but certain movies have the ability to suck me in and for the length of that movie, I feel like I have been transported to a different time and place. I re-watch certain movies when I want to be happy, laugh or feel better about the world. There is also a select set of movies that I watch when I want to feel like I am in a different country. Below are my nine favorites, in no particular order.
Note: these are not all particularly great movies. But they all have great scenery and take place in a foreign location.
This movie is all about a woman who visits Tuscany and spontaneously decides to move there. Lucky for her, but also lucky for us because we, as viewers, get to take part in all four seasons of this beautiful part of Italy. Besides the lushness of the Tuscan countryside, the movie also treats us to Florence, Siena and Positano on the Amalfi coast. Diane Lane must have had a real hard time filming this one. This movie, maybe more than any other, can soothe my soul when I am feeling anxious, simply because of the beautiful scenery.
This movie might just have it all: history, travel, Harrison Ford and Sean Connery. Seriously, what more can you ask for? As he fights the Nazis and searches for the Holy Grail, Indy takes us along to Venice, the Rhine region of Germany and Petra, Jordan. That last one is the reason this movie makes the list. I still remember the first time I saw this movie as a kid; they round the corner and Petra is there, incredibly carved right into the side of the cliff. I thought there was no way a place like that could really exist. But exist it does and someday, I’m going to see it.
In The Way, Martin Sheen walks the pilgrimage of the Camino de Santiago across northern Spain. Along his journey, we are treated to the green hills and mountains without any of the hard work of hiking.
You might be wondering why these two movies share the same line. They are, after all, very different. If you watch either of them, though, you can get the same fix if you are craving some Czech Republic. James Bond and Queen Latifah both enjoy the scenery of a magical little town called Karlovy Vary. In Karlovy Vary, the buildings’ facades are colorful and stately. There aren’t many of them, though, so the town remains quaint and charming, and has remained that way since the 1300s.
This movie is very evocative. A beautiful woman arrives in a beautiful French town and meets the beautiful Johnny Depp and, oh yeah, there is a lot of chocolate made and eaten. The town of Flavigny-sur-Ozerain is one of 155 villages the French (they’ve got to be very tough critics, right?) named Les Plus Beaux Villages de France. This translates to real pretty. Watch this movie if you want to be transported to the French countryside.
This is not a happy movie. Let’s just get that right out in the open. It is set in China during a horrific cholera outbreak. People are hungry, angry and dying. Not pretty. How on earth did it make this list? Well, it happens to be filmed in Yizhou, a town in Southeastern China. In this part of China, the dominant feature of the landscape is the dramatic hills that arise out of nowhere. Karst topography is created when water eats away some of the limestone, leaving behind incredible hills. There’s a scene in the movie where the characters are floating down a river on a bamboo raft with the karst hills in the background. It is so incredible, it makes you forget how sad the movie is.
This movie makes this list because it is B’s favorite and because it is filmed in Victoria, Australia. Victoria is a region in Southeastern Australia that has quite a diverse type of geography. But the part that puts this movie on the list is the high mountain area where the Snowy River flows, perfect for riding around on a horse.
In this movie, we are all invited to join a tour bus as it makes it way through the ruins of ancient Greece. We get to see many of the ruins, most famously the Acropolis in Athens. Another perk of this movie is the very accurate portrayal of the members of the tour group. (See our posts on groups. We had several versions of the characters on our travels.) At one point in the film, the tour director talks about why she loves the ruins. She says you can actually feel the energy coming from the ground at one temple and frankly, she sells me on it. I want to feel the energy of these ancient structures.
Before I start describing this one, I feel it is important to remind you of the purpose of this list. It is not a list of my fave films–just films that let you travel without leaving home. Warning: this movie kinda blows. However, it might be worth the pain to see some of the amazing locations little Lara gets to visit. What is supposed to be somewhere else is actually Iceland. As we might have mentioned in other posts, most things about Iceland are wonderful and lovely and magical. The glaciers in Lara Croft Tomb Raider alone should inspire you to visit the Land of Ice and Fire.
What really puts this movie on the list, though, are the scenes in Cambodia. The movie takes us to the incredible ruins of Angkor Wat in Siem Riep. The Angkor Wat temple complex is the largest religious monument in the world and is full of intricate stone carvings, jungle and monkeys. Every time I see this movie I vow to visit this incredible place in real life one day.
Well there you have it. You can visit all sorts of amazing places without having to have a valid passport. (Although you should always have a valid passport. Always.) Let us know if you have any other favorite travel movies that should be on this list!
How often do you go out exploring your own backyard? This past weekend, we headed to the mountains. Our goal: huckleberries. I am happy to report that we were successful and came home with a nice little haul. R had family visiting from another state. …
When S, B, and I visited Bali, we knew we wanted to see as much of the island as possible. One way to do this was through a sunrise hike, where we would experience a sunrise after making our way up the side of a …
Let us talk about tour group challenges. Since last week’s post discussed Morocco and some of the benefits of group travel, I thought it only fair to discuss some of the less pleasurable aspects of traveling with a tour group. Knowing both sides can only help to make an informed decision about the kind of trip you want to take.
A couple of years ago, R and I jumped on a good deal to Ecuador (courtesy of Travelzoo). The catch: it was a group trip. Although a tour group is not our preferred way of travel, we had a really good time. However, there were a few individuals in our group who made the trip a little more challenging than it needed to be. The individuals listed below (names have been changed) represent the type of people or situations you may encounter while traveling with a group. These are tour group challenges at their finest.
I am not sure I have ever met a more pessimistic person. I have certainly never met one who travels—they usually stay at home to complain about the world. But Fred was unique in his ability to travel the world and make everyone around him miserable. He was old and in poor health, which normally would not be that big of a deal. However, the trip description specifically said you needed to be in reasonably good shape and able to walk for several hours at a time. Evidently, Fred did not care. So our group progressed slower than planned. And honestly, I do not think anyone would have minded if he had at least been nice. But he was rude. And since we were on a group trip, there was no getting away from him or his piss-poor attitude.
Jim was a nice enough fellow, but a bit scatterbrained. For whatever reason, Jim decided to take his fanny pack off when he used the public restroom and hang it on the back of the door. (I thought the whole point of a fanny pack was to keep your valuables on you while remaining hands free. Maybe he just liked the fashion statement he was making.) By the time he realized he forgot to put it back on, it was gone…along with his passport.
The group then got to spend a good portion of the day driving around looking for an open police station to report the situation (there was some sort of festival going on and most were closed or empty). By the time we found one, we had very little time for lunch and shopping at our next stop. My travel journal had this to say about that: “I would have liked more time to explore. Oh well, one of the downsides to tour groups.” By the way, everything worked out okay for Jim. He headed back to the capital with his police report and returned a couple of days later with a brand new passport.
Peter was our fearless leader and for the most part, he did a good job. However, he did a couple of things that seemed a little fishy. Several meals were supposed to be “on our own,” according to the itinerary. But instead of going somewhere with dining options, our leader took us to one restaurant and then told us about the special. We were not given a menu to pick from and no price was mentioned on the special. This happened on more than one occasion. Also, we stopped once to let a nice young lady on board. She sang to us and then walked down the aisle selling scarves. Luckily, I really like scarves and had no problem buying one. But it was still an uncomfortable experience that was forced on us by the very person who could (and should) have prevented it.
Bethany was an adventurous soul and fun to talk to. She was also easily distracted and a little self-centered. Bethany did not wear a watch and she was always late, which made the group late. It was quite frustrating. This type of person is actually pretty common on group trips. There always seems to be at least one person who, whether intentional or not, is not very considerate of the group’s time and the schedule they are trying to keep. Sitting on a bus, waiting for others who are late ranks up there with the most annoying tour group challenges.
Edward was our bus driver and a very funny guy. But before our trip even began on day one, Edward got into a little car accident with the bus. So we had to wait. And wait. If the bus wasn’t moving, no one was moving. When it comes to tour group challenges, you are on their timetable and there is little-to-no flexibility. Having your own personal transportation is convenient…until it is not. It is a perk…until it is an inconvenience.
Now please do not think that we did not have a good time in Ecuador. Some of our funniest moments traveling happened on that trip and we laugh quite often about them. We also met some really great people on that trip. However, there were just a few moments, and individuals, that I could have done without. They make me really consider tour group challenges and whether group travel is the way I want to see a particular place.
Group travel is a worthy option. You can often find good deals and planning is a breeze. But there will be downsides and potentially difficult people. However, if you go into a group trip knowing that, you can still have a great time.
B and I are travel junkies; there are few places we really don’t want to visit (hello, Moldova), but overall we’re pretty much open to whatever. This is helpful when we come across a good travel deal, like we found a few years ago for …