Unique digital nomad travel adventures from around the U.S.
I have been lucky enough to find some great travel companions over the years. But I understand that it can sometimes be difficult to find like-minded people to travel and explore this world with. Unfortunately, I do not think there is a magical formula to …
A few weeks ago, B and I went and visited the North Cascades National Park, via the Spokane, Washington, airport. Upon landing, we made our way to the rental car desks. As you can imagine, the rental car section of the Spokane, Washington, airport is …
Traveling can be a scary concept, but that doesn’t mean you should do it. This post highlights tips to help you stay safe while traveling. But first:
The world can be a scary place. And with the bombings in London, Paris, Rome (the list goes on and on), it feels like travel might be too dangerous of an enterprise to take part in. When I start to think like this, I remind myself of a few facts: 1) Even if my hometown feels safe, I can’t just assume it is. People in Columbine, Newtown and Miami probably thought nothing would happen in their hometown either; 2) And this is really important, the odds of something happening to you are really, really small.
We as humans are really bad at managing risks and we don’t logically think through things when the media is screaming stories at us all the time. B recently had a conversation with a coworker who said they don’t fly because it is too dangerous, yet had no problem driving. This illustrates the bad-at-managing-risk point–how many plane crashes do you know of compared to automobile crashes? This lesson can work for trips overall. Even if you hear about a few things going wrong, think how many millions of people go on trips each year. The odds are definitely in your favor.
Okay, now that we have that over with and I have hopefully convinced you to keep traveling, we should talk about some ways to help you not become one of those scary news stories. Separately or together, B and I have been to dozens of countries on dozens of trips. Neither one of us have ever had a serious problem where we were in danger. While there’s a chance that this could just be the luck of the draw, I do believe we take precautions to make sure we aren’t easy pickin’s for the bad guys. Here are some rules you might want to think about when you are on a trip, either international or in your home country.
Leave it at home. I know you love your one-carat diamond solitaire earrings. But that doesn’t mean you should wear them when you are visiting a country with the gross domestic product of $12,000 a year. Why tempt fate? I’m all for accessorizing, but if something is really flashy, it might be best to not draw attention to it or your perceived wealth. I probably wouldn’t wear fake diamond earrings either, just because people might see them and assume they are real. Stay safe while traveling and leave your expensive accessories at home.
I have heard several stories about people on vacation enjoying themselves and not paying attention to their surroundings and getting their stuff stolen. While you are supposed to relax and have a great time on your vacation, you should still be alert of your surroundings. While we were in Morocco, our tour group was checking out a souk. We couldn’t have been more conspicuous in the fact that we were foreigners on a tour; as such we were pretty much sitting ducks. One lady in our group was looking at some of the goods for sale when she felt the slightest touch on her arm. When she looked down, she saw a hand unzipping her purse. Luckily she felt something and could push it away before anything was taken.
This is a good time to mention something that should be standard practice for you–when walking through a crowded area, make sure your purse or bag is on your front. If you are using a bag a cross strap, just swing that thing around so it is on your chest instead of your back. It’s an easy way to stay safe while traveling.
Again, vacations are for relaxing and having a great time….but that doesn’t mean you should lose control of yourself. While B and I have left the particular phase of travel where we stay up late and party (albeit tamely), if we did have plans to get wild we would make sure one of us was sober enough to think for the both of us. What could be an easier target than a out-of-her-mind high or drunk girl, stumbling away from a discotech by herself? That’s just asking for trouble. The buddy system can be challenging for solo travelers, but if you don’t have someone looking out for you, it might be prudent not to lose control of your faculties. Who’s going to tell the Uber driver what hotel to go to, after all?
Mitigate bad things happening. It would be a real bummer if something bad were to happen while on a trip. But the real bummer would be if you lost everything, not just something. Remember the adage about not putting all your eggs in one basket? Apply this to travel as well. When I am on a trip somewhere that I think might be a little sketchy, I will divide my money and credit cards up and carry them in different locations. Sometimes I’ll leave it in a hidden compartment in my pack, sometimes under the sole of my shoe, or in a pocket of a coat. The idea is to spread things around so if you do get robbed, you only have to give them what is in your wallet.
Another trick is to make photocopies of the front and back of your cards you are taking with you. Remember to keep these copies as safe as you would the real thing, because if someone gets a hold of these copies you would be just as screwed. You can do an electronic version of this if you like–either with pictures on your phone or in your email. That way, you wouldn’t actually have a piece of paper laying around.
Here’s where this advice comes in handy: a while ago I flew to Frankfurt, Germany. I distinctly remember using my debit card in the Atlanta airport, but when I got to my hotel in Frankfurt I realized I didn’t have it anymore. This was a blow because, as we’ve talked about in other posts, an ATM card is the best way to get local currency and my trip was just beginning. Fortunately, I was able to pull out a picture of my card and read the numbers to call on the back to cancel it and put it on fraud alert.
Don’t worry. My friends were nice enough to let me pay for the shared expenses like hotel rooms on my credit card. They then paid me in local cash so I could have some spending money.
Know what you are getting into. Before you leave for your trip, do some research. Is your destination known for a particular scam? Your guidebooks should have a section on averting crime, but there is also a very good section on Wikitravel called ‘Stay Safe’ that has a lot of tips. For example, you should stay away from bars that might rip you off in certain districts of Tokyo or that while riding a train late at night in Melbourne you should ride in the car closest to the driver.
We forgot to check up on this section of safety tips while in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. We were walking along when a seemingly nice gentleman approached us and asked if we wanted to see batik fabric being made at a school. ‘Sure,’ we said and after a tuk tuk ride, we arrived at a shop where people were making batik…or so we thought. Thankfully, we each only bought a few small things. Later we learned this is a pretty common scam, but being as we had a really good experience and spent only $20 or so on our batiks, we felt we lucked out. Plus, we got a pretty cool souvenir out of the deal.
I’m pretty sure we are going to have some sort of safety incident in future trips. But instead of letting that stop us from adventuring, we will be as smart as we can to stay safe while traveling. Think about this: if something happened one time in every thirty vacations, would you really regret going on those other 29 trips? No, me neither.
![Tips to Packing Light [Tools and Gear]](https://i0.wp.com/janeseestheworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Shampoo.jpg?resize=760%2C400&ssl=1)
Packing Light Tools and Gear Packing light is an art. It takes years of practice and just when you think you’ve got it nailed, you’ll learn some new trick or find a new piece of gear that shows just how wrong you’ve been packing all …
We may not travel full time, but we sure spend a good chunk of our free time planning our next trip. For every week of actual travel, there are months and months of planning. I can scarcely remember a time when the internet did not …
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 …
My coworker’s husband has just left on his first international trip to London. And other than a couple of trips to Mexico, this is his first international voyage. His wife has not done a lot of traveling herself so she has been asking me a …
At my day job, we talk a lot about travel and the comparison of different locations. It comes up naturally due to the nature of our business. I work for an engineering consulting firm and we design projects all over the world (not me personally, I am not an engineer). Our engineers are on the road a lot and they get to visit some pretty cool places. To be fair, they also have to travel to some pretty crummy places as well. Regardless, travel is a common topic around the water cooler. Added to that, I have a close group of coworker-friends that all enjoy a good vacation. So we talk destinations and vacation hours and generally get ourselves worked up on a regular basis. It is both wonderful and frustrating all at the same time.
Just last week, I had a conversation with a coworker about her next vacation (we will call her L). She is in the very initial stages of planning her next trip and is trying to decide where to go. Choosing just one place can be a very difficult task. As we discussed the pros and cons of various countries, I remembered the post I recently wrote about choosing your next travel destination. I thought it might be fun to test out my questions on a real-life example (other than my own). L was more than happy to be my guinea pig.
To recap, here is the list of questions I posed when choosing your next travel destination:
Luckily, L had answers for most of the questions. She also had a handful of destinations she was considering choosing (e.g. Amsterdam, Thailand, Spain, Guatemala and Slovenia). I just had to decide how I wanted to compare and contrast the information I was given. After several false starts, I settled on an Excel document. I am not a big fan of Excel (I’m more of an InDesign girl), but since I wanted to try and quantify the results, it seemed the best option.
After setting up my document, I started researching. Since I have not been to all of the destinations L is considering, it seemed best to research all of them equally (stay tuned for a future post on what websites I like to use for researching trips). For each question, I would research a destination and then give it a number between zero and three—three points being the highest and zero being…well, zero. After I finished with the last question, Excel added up the total number of points for each destination. Of course, numbers do not tell the whole story. But it was interesting to see how her destinations added up.
Curious what the results were? Given L’s particular set of circumstances, Guatemala came out on top with Amsterdam coming in a close second. You can see all of the numbers as well as my notes in the photo of the Excel document below. The best part was seeing L’s reaction and I cannot wait to hear which destination she ends up choosing—even if it is not one of the destinations I did the research for!
For me, it was fascinating to research various destinations and not be emotionally invested. Since I will not be going on this particular vacation, it was easy for me to be objective. And having that objectivity helped tremendously in rating each country. I am not sure it would have been so easy if I was planning this trip for myself. (Although I did make notes for future trips.)
It was also fun. Like really fun. I knew I enjoyed planning my own adventures. But I had no idea I would enjoy planning someone else’s adventure just as much. I guess the next best thing to actually traveling really is planning a trip—whether it’s your own or not!
Speaking of which, do you want some help planning your next vacation? I had so much fun helping L plan hers that I would love to hear from you if you’d like a little assistance. Just send us a comment if you are having a hard time deciding between Venice and Bali and we can do a comparison for you.
Asking some basic questions and comparing the answers side-by-side can help you narrow down your choices and focus your plans. If nothing else, it can help set realistic expectations for your destination.
UPDATE: L chose Amsterdam and her and husband had a wonderful time exploring that great city.
Are you new to Airbnb? Maybe wondering what all of the fuss is about? That was me about a year ago. I was as green as they get and had never tried any home rental service before. Oh boy, was I missing out. Airbnb was …