So… Where are we going, again?

Many people ask us how we decided on our itinerary… basically we went straight to the expert: Rod Schultz. Rod lives his life by day as a software engineer, but by night he feeds his inner desire to travel the world by researching cool places to visit. If he had to, he could probably quit his job and become a travel agent.

Rod suggested that we take two pieces of paper and independently make lists of places that we would like to see. When we were done, we compared lists and tried to string together places that we had common interests in. It wasn’t failsafe and some negotiating was required to ensure truly important places were covered (Ana: Spain, Rich: Croatia), but it was a good starting point. We came up with this rough list:

• Mexico
• Spain
• Portugal
• Morocco
• Turkey
• Greece
• Australia
• Vietnam
• Peru
• Argentina
• Chile
• Prague
• Russia

The truly difficult part from here was figuring out when to go and how long to stay at each place. We had two general strategies to choose from:

1. Go native for extended stretches of time. This would entail picking fewer places to see, but would enable us to not be on the move as much and we would get a much more immersive experience. 
   Pros: Cheaper. Less Traveling. A better feel for each place.
   Cons: Not as many places visited. Potential boredom if there is not enough to do.
2. Go exploring, visit as many places as we were interested in. This strategy kind of involves us planning our trip as a giant extended vacation.
   Pros: More places seen. Possibly more exciting.
   Cons: More Expensive. Limited to hotels for many stops. More time in transit. Potential burnout.

I think (at least from reading other’s blogs) that most people who do this kind of thing go with option 1. It’s definitely cheaper. It allows one to potentially work while abroad, and forces one to get accustomed to the culture of the place visited. As a bit of a surprise to even us we opted to go with option 2, with the notion that if we ever got burned out along the way we would just stop and reevaluate our plans. It seemed (and still seems) like a good compromise. I say, better to plan too much to do and skip things than to not plan enough and get frustrated with each other (yes, this is speaking from experience).

The decision of when to go to where was determined by two things: climate and airfare. The climate was something that we wanted to research up front… We did not want to be in Russia in the middle of winter, or camp out in Southeast Asia in the middle of monsoon season. To visualize the different limitations of the places we were considering, Ana and I made a spreadsheet (geek alert!) of the places and the average temperature and rainfall for the different months of the year. This made it pretty obvious that our some of our initial legs should be in the southern hemisphere. We were leaving in June (friend’s wedding in May), and we wanted to avoid the heat and crowds in Europe during the peak season. The rest of the order was determined by the type of plane tickets we purchased. We decided to go with a Round the World ticket since it had a good balance of price and flexibility, but this forced to basically continue travelling on one direction. Our new rough itinerary looked like this: Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Raratonga, New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Turkey, Greece, Croatia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Russia… Generally we were heading west.