Tag Archives: Family World Travel

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Haircuts on the Road

Today’s post is guest-written by my very witty husband, Murph (aka WanderDad) on a traumatic if efficient barbershop experience here in Kizkalesi, Turkey.

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One of the simple necessities of life that becomes fraught with peril on the road is haircuts.

When you don’t share a language, you rely on grunts, gestures and animated hand signals, but it’s not until after the fact that you know whether your intent was correctly conveyed as “short back and sides” or as “take everything off the left side and don’t spare the bloodletting – in fact, why should anyone have two ears? surely one is more than necessary”.

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A Road-Schooling Day

It struck me recently that I’ve said a number of times that road-schooling is hard work but that I’ve never really explained why this is so. It seemed like a description of a typical “school day” would be a good idea to remedy this.

The diary below describes a day in Emei Shan, a mountain two hours drive from Chengdu. It was Saturday. We’d hiked the mountain on Wednesday and Thursday (60km, 3,000m) and been in Leshan (to get our Chinese visas extended) on Friday. We were overdue for a school day.

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And One More Thing

CAM and I were leaving the sprawling MBK mall in central Bangkok.

“That’s another reason why I hate this trip” he said.
He was behind me, so I couldn’t see the look on his face, but I could tell from the tone of his voice that he wasn’t being serious. He is a master curmudgeon.
“Why’s that, bud?” I asked, curious to know what had brought on this latest complaint – especially since I’d just bought him a new pair of headphones.
“$23 isn’t a lot of money”, he replied.
“Well”, I said, “it is for some people”.
“That’s the point. It is for some people”
“Like the villagers we met in Cambodia”, I suggested, referring to our visit to the opening ceremony for the Passports School.
“But it shouldn’t be for me and that’s why I hate this trip, it’s made me realize that $23 is a lot of money for a lot of people” he continued, giving no sign as to whether or not he’d heard what I’d said.

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RTW Travel – How Much Does It Cost?

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How much to travel the world? This post on our costs is way overdue…

To travel around the world was my childhood dream. The restlessness behind such a dream is one of the few personality traits that I share with my husband. We left Ireland in 1995 planning to spend “just a couple of years” living and working in the US before continuing onwards ever onwards. Fifteen years later, as I approached my 40th birthday and we considered high schools for our older son, our settled, normal life rankled.

How Much To Travel The World: Our Research

Our dream to travel for a year took shape slowly. We agreed to research costs. We postponed any decision-making until we had facts, in dollars and cents, to evaluate. The data posted by sixintheworld and 360degreeslongitude was invaluable. (The recent collation of real-life examples of RTW trip costs by jackandjilltravel.com is excellent). There is general consensus in these sources that $25,000 per person is a good baseline approximate cost for a year’s travel.

How Much To Travel The World: Itinerary Choices

To refine our budget further, we needed an itinerary. I read Tim Leffel’s excellent World’s Cheapest Destinations for ideas on where to go to make our money last longer. I pulled per-country budgeting guidelines from the Lonely Planet website and plugged the numbers into a spreadsheet. (Look under Practical Information/Costs for the country you’re interested in visiting. Here’s the entry for Thailand, for example). I used a per-country simple formula of:

(LP’s higher daily budget amount) * (number of days we planned to be in the country) * 4

and then summed that up across all the countries we planned to visit.

How Much To Travel The World: Our Budget

A copy of our initial budget lay on the table. We both stared at the rolled-up total, which came in at just under $80,000. We went back and forth on whether we should or should not go. The conversation ebbed and flowed over a number of days until we faced the decision which we’d probably really made the minute we had agreed to do the research. We had to go. Not to do so would leave a dream unfulfilled.

The decision to make this trip required that we plunder our savings and home equity. Or what was left of them since we’d already seen our savings decimated twice: once with the dot-com crash and again with the market implosion of 2008-2009. Deciding to spend what we had left before it too disappeared was perversely, an easy decision.

Taking this trip is a huge gamble. We’re betting that once we return to Seattle we will be able to get work and continue working for another 30 years to rebuild retirement savings. That we’ll likely need to work past normal retirement age is a price we’re OK with paying for an unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime experience.

How Much To Travel The World: Our Actual Costs

* Flights have been our single biggest cost. We chose not to buy a RTW ticket, preferring instead to travel overland as much as possible and buy point-to-point tickets as necessary (i.e. to jump oceans). Total cost per person: $3,200.
* We’ve scheduled (and may add) a limited number of Big Ticket Experiences, roughly one per continent: the Inca Trail Hike and the Gibbon Experience so far. Next week the boys will be doing a one-week scuba certification course. I’ll add the total spent when the trip is over.
* Our Daily Budget is $150 to cover food, transportation and accommodation for all four of us. This is easier to keep to in some countries (Thailand, Ecuador) than others (Chile). As I add per-country pages to this website, I’ll include the actual average daily cost – see the Ecuador page for example.

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Photo Credit: LiteForex

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Bokeo Village Faces

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We’ve all been downed by a cold/flu for a few days so instead of a post, today I’m sharing some photos of the villagers which we took on our way out of the Gibbon Experience . Enjoy!

We met these local boys on our way back into the village. They were having a grand old time constructing monster balls of mud.

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Brothers Together In Penang

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There are times when my boys fight with each other just for the sake of it. There are times when they go out of their way to bug each other. And then there are moments like this. Unprompted, unscripted and priceless.

Head on over to DeliciousBaby for more travel-themed Friday photo fun.

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