Our drive from Boston to Dallas covered 1,934 miles and took about 38 hours. That’s just over four days on the road. And while I managed to find a few creative ways to entertain us, this particular road trip was made possible by these essentials.
Read MoreTesting the waters on Martha’s Vineyard
We originally envisioned our visit to Martha’s Vineyard last week as our final farewell to New England. But as soon as we disembarked the ferry, we started using it as a practice run for our year of budgeting on the road. (Though technically it was more like a practice power walk: We paid for the Airbnb months ago and set aside a separate slush fund specifically for the trip. Because $100/day on the Vineyard? Impossible.)
Chocolate lollipop, Inkwell Beach, Martha’s Vineyard
Sean and I are generally very frugal people. In our regular life, we make our own iced coffees and avocado toast, wait for new releases to come to Redbox, and wear clothes we’ve owned since college. But when we’re traveling? The purse strings get a bit looser. We’ll have a cocktail with brunch before heading to a museum, then perhaps do a bit of browsing prior to dinner. Now that traveling is becoming our regular life, we have to adjust our habits.
So while we were on the Vineyard, we strolled around the Gingerbread Cottages on our own instead of paying for a tour. We took the city bus and walked instead of Ubering. We shared two huge appetizers for lunch and a huge ice cream for dinner instead of buying four separate meals.
Gingerbread Cottage, Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard
We ate donuts from our Airbnb in the morning and snacks from the grocery store on the beach in the afternoon so we could enjoy dinner and drinks on the waterfront in the evening.
Fish tacos & cider, Coop DeVille, Martha’s Vineyard
We still allowed ourselves to splurge, but only for the things we truly wanted: our last New English lobster rolls ($40), beers at a brewery ($20), a ride on the country’s oldest carousel ($7). And we actually put thought into things we might’ve otherwise spent money on impulsively: a $36 museum visit just to get out of the rain? No. $10 to climb to the top of a lighthouse? We did that already in Maine for free. $80 for a bus tour to the Aquinnah cliffs? We could get there on a city bus for $16. And aren’t we going to see better cliffs in Portugal next month anyway? (Yes.)
Flying Horses Carousel, Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard
When all was said and done, we ended up saving a few hundred dollars just by being a little more mindful. And we still had a great time. That’s what our year of budget travel is about: cutting back on frivolous expenses so we can indulge in the experiences we don’t want to miss out on.
Sunset, Oak Bluffs harbor, Martha’s Vineyard
Our travel blueprint
Sean and I have done a lot of research into our year on the road—reading books and blogs, watching Youtube videos, talking to friends and family members who’ve gone before us. But plenty of details are still up in the air. And that’s by design: We’re both natural-born planners, and leaving things to chance is part of the challenge (and the thrill) of this next chapter. Here’s everything we know (and all the things we don’t):
The timeline
The trip is bookended by two big events: Oktoberfest in Munich this September, and the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo next August. What we do in between those two tentpoles is (roughly) up to chance. We’ve got a one-way ticket to Portugal booked for early September, with the goal of returning to the States around the holidays. After Christmas, we’ll head to Central and South America for a few months, and then trek over to Asia (and Australia?) in the spring.
The budget
Our goal is to spend an average of $100 per day (though we’ve saved quite a bit more than that if and when we need a buffer). “How,” you ask? By sticking to off-the-beaten-path destinations; staying in hostels and private rooms in Airbnbs; traveling at off times like Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and late nights and early mornings; taking public transit whenever possible; and minimizing meals out. We’ll also plan plenty of down time to counterbalance pricier days (we can swing a $100 riverboat tour in Portugal’s Douro Valley if we spend a couple of days lounging on the beach in the Algarve). It’s going to be tougher in Western Europe, but we’re hoping it’ll even out in less expensive locales like Southeast Asia.
The destinations
Someone asked me recently where I’m most excited about going. But other than Portugal, Germany, and Japan, we truly have no idea where we’ll end up. We have a list of places in mind—Italy, Spain, Croatia, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Belize, Colombia, Argentina, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, China—but it all depends on the availability of cheap transportation. And that might be what I’m most looking forward to: looking back on our adventure one year from now and being surprised by all the places we visited.
The luggage
We’re going carry-on only throughout our journey. It’s one part money-saving strategy (we’d rather not pay to check bags on budget airlines) and one part logistical (I don’t want to drag a heavy suitcase through a jungle or share a cot on a sleeper bus with a giant backpack). That means we’ll be doing a lot of outfit remixing and washing clothes in the sink. The good news is, we plan on returning to the States in between continents, so we can swap out our wardrobe to suit the next climate. (The cozy sweater I’m packing for Europe in November will be entirely useless in Asia in June.)
The things we’re leaving behind
We’re getting rid of A LOT. Way more than we ditched when we moved to Boston five years ago. We’re loading what’s left into a U-Haul and driving home to Texas to store it near my parents’ house. The only things we’ll see between now and next fall are our clothes and the handful of knick-knacks we’ll set up in my old room to make it feel a little more “ours.” And what of my sweet angel, Layla? Thank you so much for thinking of her! She’ll live with my parents temporarily before moving in with my brother when he gets settled in a new place.
Chapters
“The interesting thing about adulthood,” Sean said over dinner a couple of weeks ago, “is that it’s been made up really distinct chapters so far.”
Chapter 1, pages 18-22: College
Chapter 2, pages 23-26: Dallas
Chapter 3, pages 27-32: Boston
“Each one has had the perfect ending,” he continued. “We didn’t hang around College Station after graduation, clinging to the glory days; we didn’t settle down back home in the ‘burbs when we were still young and adventurous; and we aren’t going to wear out our welcome in New England.”
It’s been a minute since I’ve really sunk my teeth into a writing project, but if memory (and a 10-year-old English degree) serves, we’re pretty much nailing one of the core principles of storytelling: knowing how to advance the plot. If you keep a chapter going interminably, without introducing any new action or characters, it stops being interesting. Wrap it up when there’s still a spark left, and you compel the reader to turn the page.
The past five years in Boston have been packed with action. Sean got his Master’s and worked in Germany. I got paid to write about Antarctica, Egypt, and Rwanda; found my voice professionally; and learned how to lead. We both won awards at work and took a few steps up the corporate ladder. We survived the snowiest winter on record and cheered the Red Sox to a World Series win. We’ve traveled extensively throughout New England, and we’ve explored 19 countries together and independently.
And the characters—oh, the characters! The people we’ve met here have broadened our horizons and supported us in ways we never could’ve anticipated. We’ve had meaningful conversations; celebrated marriages and babies, book publications and new jobs; and laughed until we cried. In an era when it’s tough to make adult friends, we’ve amassed a gaggle of them.
But we’re starting to reach the denouement. We’re no longer comfortable with the exorbitant cost of living, and we’re both ready for new professional experiences. We loved Boston for a very long time, and we want to bring this chapter to a close before we get tired of it.
Chapter 4, pages 33-34: The World
If five years in the travel industry have taught me anything, it’s this: The world is an absolutely incredible place, and the most unforgettable experiences typically don’t cost that much. Getting a spontaneous hug from a gregarious German grandmother in Dresden; sharing pints of Smithwicks with an Irishman in Cobh; discussing capitalism and dancing with Cubans in Havana; smoking shisha with Egyptians in a shack outside the Valley of the Kings—these things have stuck with me more than any castle visit or city tour. With that in mind, we’ve decided to throw off the bowlines and spend the next year adrift abroad.
We have a small-but-comfortable amount of money saved, a couple of new suitcases that should fit into even the tiniest overhead bins, and a general idea of countries we’d like to explore. But beyond that? We’ll just have to see how the story unfolds.
What’s the first thing you think of when I say Colombia? Cocaine? Pablo Escobar? Narcos? FARC? Terrorism? That’s fair. But what if I told you everything you thought you knew about the country is wrong?