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Both: Hey everyone!
Jen: This is Jen and Greg with an update on our travels.
Greg: So this time, we're sharing some background of our early thought process and our preparations for traveling around the world. Well, we've been talking about this for years and we've been actively planning it for just about as long. And we wanted to share a little bit more about our thought processes from the beginning and our choices so far.
Jen: Yeah. We knew pretty quickly that we wanted to make it one big trip, instead of many smaller ones. One of the things we know we wanted with this trip was to have a life-changing impact on ourselves and to be able to reevaluate the things we take for granted in like normal day-to-day life. Plus, we wanted to be able to disconnect from just the habitual side of living each day, like you know…getting up and going to work, running errands, those kind of things.
Greg: Yeah. Also many smaller trips over, you know, a number of years is actually less feasible than it may sound. We actually have created a spreadsheet for tracking costs and stuff and our per day cost of one longer trip is actually looking to be of a pretty good value so I think it's it's been the right choice.
Jen: Yeah. Um, I think Google Docs has been our friend with this with the spreadsheet we created! And we also took some time at the beginning of this to kind of sit down together and create a list of the "whys" of why we wanted to travel. So we sat down one day - independently of each other - and each made our own list and of why we wanted to travel around the world. And then we kind of met back together and then we shared what we had each done.
Greg: Yeah, I really enjoyed that and I was a little bit surprised because of how similar our lists were even though we made them separately without knowing. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised since we do so much together and we are of a like mind but just to share what we both wanted was: collecting memories and keepsakes. And we mean that literally and metaphorically. We also wanted to learn more and experience different cultures and eat great food.
Jen: (laughs)
Greg: Yeah that was pretty high for both of us and we were in agreement that we wanted a certain amount of self-discovery and self-improvement as a part of this. We also wanted to take some cool photos, really, and document our travel and kind of revisit it later or share it with other people.
Jen: Yeah. So we took some time and we put effort into another list - a tiered list - of places we wanted to visit, things we wanted to do and things we wanted to see. And if you know Greg…this was 100% his idea.
Greg: Yeah, this was a very "me" thing. I just liked the idea of ranking everything so that we could have some clarity around what we each wanted so that prioritizing destinations would be done much more easily.
Jen: Yeah. To give you guys an idea, that list was a three tiered list. That first tier was the places we felt we couldn't (or shouldn't) miss. That second tier was places we felt would be great if we could work them in while we were visiting those main attractions - those first tier places. And then that third group were places that we would have been nice to see but if it didn't work out, or if it was too complex to make that happen, we could skip them and not feel too guilty about it.
Greg: Exactly. So for example, Amsterdam - which was tier two - we realized when we were going to be getting to Europe right at the peak of tulip season.
Jen: (interrupts) Tulips are my favorite flower so we chose to add a stop in the Netherlands to visit Keukenhof Gardens.
Greg: Right. Unfortunately, though, after we made our list… you know, the world kind of changes. And, as an example, we wanted to visit St. Petersburg. But then Russia invaded Ukraine so that no longer became an option. Or Montenegro and Albania is another example that we moved higher on our list after we learned more about the Schengen Area.
Jen: (interrupts again) Hold on...let me just spare everybody a Greg-level explanation of what the Schengen Area is. We're only allowed to stay in most European countries for a combined total of 90 days out of 180 days. So if you want to know more, let me spell it for you, S-C-H-E-N-G-E-N. Just go look it up yourself...(sighs)
Greg: Okay then! Moving on. We also spent some time thinking about our methods of travel and we agreed that we would like to avoid flying as much as possible because you lose some of the “romanticism” of the trip. But when you get on a plane, you sit for a while and then you're just kind of there. And then you get off the plane, but you missed all of the stuff that was along the way. You just passed it right by.
Jen: Yeah. Plus, I mean, we don't like the whole airport and flying experience. I mean, who really does? So choosing a cruise for us or as I like to say, "booking passage on a transatlantic voyage," makes me feel like I'm in a 19th century novel. But seriously, it kind of gives us the opportunity to feel just how big the world is and to enjoy the "getting there" a lot more than if we were packed into an airplane.
Greg: Yeah, and besides the discomfort of air travel, luggage is kind of a problematic piece of it. So if we do have to fly, we wanted to have just carry-on luggage. We really don't want to have to keep up with big bags or multiple bags or any of that stuff.
Jen: Yeah, so we realized then that we really needed to change our thinking about packing for travel. And this kind of led Greg to finding the OneBag community online. So eventually, we embraced the idea of each having one bag and we felt that backpacks were the solution. But we'll talk more about that on a different post.
Greg: Yeah, I think it probably needs to be its own thing.
Jen: Yeah. So as we started looking more at our lists, it dawned on us that a rewards card...well, maybe a travel-based rewards card would be extremely beneficial. We already put as many of our daily expenses as possible on those cards. Paying them off each month, of course, to build up those reward points. And we're already putting those reward points to use. A bonus to those cards as well is that we also or they also provide travel insurance for the purchases we make on them.
Greg: True. We figured out pretty quickly, as well, that this type of travel is like so different than our normal vacations. I don't want to sound like a Valley Girl, but sooooo different.
Jen: (laughs)
Greg: But that means we spent a good amount of time researching all the little things that were good to have or buy. Like packing cubes, certain types of clothes, a filtered water bottle, stuff like that. And we created a shopping list very early on and then we were able to wait for when many of these items were either on sale or discounts. So we also put a massive amount of effort into researching tours - and tour companies - for every place that we're visiting, whether or not it was going to make sense to do things on our own or to be part of a group. And if we wanted to be part of a group, we had to find the right company for that.
Jen: Yeah. And that ended up feeling like a full-time job. I won't even tell you how long it took us to plan the week in Paris. But shout out to worldinparis.com and all the other sites by locals that kind of helped us with those ideas!
Greg: For sure. And last but not least, we spent time considering the communication aspect. We ended up settling on Signal, which I really appreciate. I know many of you have had to hear me lecture on the topic, but Signal's really going to allow us to stay in touch in a variety of ways, like text messaging, phone calls, video calls. I think it even does desktop sharing. I'm not going to go on and on, but...
Jen: (laughs) Yeah, we also wanted a central place where our friends and family could follow along with us on our travels. And we wound up choosing Substack for that, which is where when you go to jenandgreg.travel, that's where it points to. It's pretty great about allowing us to have written posts, audio posts like this, pictures and other stuff. And everybody can just check the site or they can sign up to have it email them when we post something different.
Greg: So, you know, that's just a little glimpse into the hows and whys of our decision making for this trip.
Jen: Yeah, and hopefully we've been able to give you guys an idea of how much time and thought we've been putting into this from the beginning, especially Greg with all his reading and learning on various things.
Greg: AHA...CREDIT!!!
Jen: (laughs)
Greg: So thank you for checking in.
Jen: And we'll see you at the next stop!
