As a couple that travels and adventures a ton (even if we aren’t leaving the state, we are usually gone most weekends) we get asked a lot of questions as people try to make sense of what we do and how we do it. This will be a living blog post in the hopes to keep adding information as we continue to get questions, but I hope this provides some insight into HOW we do what we do on a regular basis.
- Why do you travel so much?
Short answer – We love it! Getting to explore new places, cultures, ways of living, environments – the world is so big, get out and see it! Travel and adventures have a way of expanding your worldview, testing your limits (and your relationships at times), and teaches you things that I don’t believe you get from any other experience. - What do you do for work?
Chris is an entrepreneuer who has spent the last decade building his fencing and contractor business. He works 12+ hours a day when we aren’t traveling. I am in Marketing for a local city government in Colorado. I am lucky to enough to work a hybrid schedule and alot of my work is behind a computer. We both spend a lot of time at work to be able to balance the travels we do. - How much PTO do you have?
Chris being self-employed gets a big fat 0 hours of PTO! The key for him is offsetting the time off. He usually trades the freedeom to travel some weekends for 12+ hours of work the days we are home. I get about 3 weeks and some floating holidays. This time-off for me gets banked for our really big trips about twice a year and the rest of time we utilize our weekends to the fullest extent. Since most of my job is behind a computer, I work at the airport/airplane/hotels/in the car to make up any hours missed and end up working a lot of Sundays on our travel day home. - What do you do with your dog?
We get asked this a lot and the truth is we pay to board her. Camp Bow Wow is the place we take Penny. They love her and she loves it! We do understand this is an added expense to travel and a luxury but we budget around the cost and cut costs in other places to accomodate the expense. - How do you afford to go so many places?
This is probably the NUMBER 1 question on everyone’s mind. While we do quite well being a dual-income household, the answer is we budget just like everyone else.
It is a multiple step approach:
* We plan the vast majority of our trips 6-12 months in advance (this saves alot).
* We utilize travel credit cards and ACTUALLY USE the benefits of them (this is key!) to help offset travel costs, get additional perks on trips, use points to pay for mainly flights.
* We monitor our bookings even after they are made since most of the time we have free cancellation (if it gets cheaper or less points, we re-book!) I recently saved about 25K Southwest points by re-booking our trips during a sale!
*We watch travel flash sales, point conversion sales, etc. and pick our destinations and timing around those.
* We utilize travel lounges and breakfast vouchers for our trips so we save $$ on food (the two meal a day trick works well too with packing your own snacks!).
* We eat locally when we can to save $$.
* We do a lot of free/low cost adventures – outdoor activities, sightseeing, hotel amenities, etc. that aren’t spendy.
* We make budget sacrifices at home! (we cook most of our meals in, don’t drink alcohol a lot ever but especially not at restaurants or bars, we don’t buy coffee or convenience store snacks, we like to do a lot of low-cost activities when we are home too and don’t do a lot of movies, concerts, etc.).
* It ultimately comes down to priorities. For us, house improvement projects, social events, drinking out at breweries, etc. aren’t our priority – travel and adventure is, and that is where we spend our $$ and save in the other areas. - What about things around the house and errands?
We know a lot of people save their household chores and errands for the weekends. We don’t! We sacrifice the time that most people spend (usually around the TV) in the evenings and divide the tasks for the week: laundry, grocery shopping, cleaning, dishes, cooking, etc. We actually PREFER going to the store during the week (way less crowded than on a Sunday morning). It allows us to fully take advantage of the weekends. - How do you decide where to go?
* Travel sales and point deals dictate a lot of destinations.
* We tend to visit places in the off-season to save $ (Olympic National Park in JANUARY for example) – plus there is usually less crowds which is a bonus!
* We pick locations that we can genuinely do a in a weekend and save our longer trips for bigger worldwide destinations.
* Flight patterns dictate a lot of our weekend trips with what we can make work Fri-Sun (usually last flight out of the day Friday and later flight on Sunday to return).
* New places or places with outdoor adventure seem to top our list (national parks and hiking).
* We pick destinations based on where we can maximize our time (we might save east coast for holiday weekends so we can get an extra day, same with somewhere that is far from the airport).
MC Exploring 