This is Carlos. He likes soccer, discovering new music, and tracking his day to day expenses in Excel spreadsheets.
And this is Ashly. She likes animals, doing home improvement projects, and endlessly browsing through social media sites “for the articles.”
And together, these two make up the Happy Nomad Couple. While the name might seem a little misleading now since we are not currently nomads, we are a happy couple! And 2 out of 3 ain’t bad, right?
Anyway, we don’t have plans to be misleading for very long. We plan to take off on our Round the World (RTW) trip in March, roughly 70 days from now! But until then, we have A LOT of planning to do. We have to research our destinations, get vaccines, apply for visas, get travel insurance, buy our gear, and the list goes on and on. Planning for a RTW trip is quite the daunting task as you would have guessed by that ‘not even close to everything’ list I just mentioned. But even with the intimidating list of things to prepare and plan for and the uncertainties associated with quitting our jobs and not having a stable income for more or less an entire year, we are incredibly excited and eager to start on this unstable journey. And we figured we would use this first blog post to answer a few basic questions that have been posed to us about the trip itself and our motives behind making the decision to take it.
“Who?”
Just us two. Hope we don’t get tired of each other. Ya know – being together 24/7 for months on end – could get a little exhausting. We’ll keep you posted.
“What?”
I thought we already covered this. Round the World Trip…? Travelling, well quite frankly, around the world.
“Where?”
We have a loose plan of between 30-40 countries on the itinerary right now. This could change at any moment as we plan to just go with the flow and see where life takes us over these months.
“When?”
We have a tentative date to depart on Tuesday, March 21st (just waiting for my airline tracking app to tell us when it’s the right time to buy tickets)! And an even more tentative return scheduled for sometime early January 2018. Mostly because I want to spend Christmas and New Year’s in Australia.
“Why?”
Ah the elusive why. The question of what is driving us to make this crazy decision to up and leave and travel the world in the first place. The reason that sticks out as most prevalent to us is our feeling of being “stuck.” We both currently have great paying jobs that have allowed us the luxury to even ponder the idea of this trip, however, those great paying jobs are not the “great paying jobs of our dreams” – and we both seemingly have a problem with that. We’re millennials. Maybe we have an unrealistic expectation to just fall into the perfect job that caters all your meals and lets you bring your puppy to the office – but oh well. We know the jobs we have right now, are not the jobs we want. So we’re ditching them for a completely different lifestyle – at least from March 2017 – January 2018. During this time, hopefully seeing corners of the world we never even dreamt of seeing will spark some inspiration of what we really want to do in our lives and what impact we want to have on the world. Hopefully it’s a big one.
“How?”
Here’s the part that’s important to you. There are a lot of ‘How?s” that come up when beginning to plan a trip of this magnitude (believe me, we’ve already been through many of them and expect more to come up as we go). And because we have already done a lot of the research and planning that is associated with the question of How?…we thought we would put all of our newly gained knowledge to good use for more than just ourselves. We are going to be posting it here on our blog, on our YouTube channel, and on our social media outlets for you to see as well. But you have a job too – even if it’s basically a passive one. Your job is to keep us on track and accountable for all the things we need to get done before embarking on our journey. And that’s pretty easy. All you have to do is keep checking in on our posts, watching our YouTube videos, and engaging with us on social media and letting us know destination recommendations, how we can improve our internet presence, and any questions you would like to see us address on one of our platforms. So we will be spreading this “How?” out over the many months while we are gone – and we will be learning new answers to question along the way and plan to share it all with you.
The best way to keep up with us and get the most comprehensive information is to subscribe to our blog. You will be able to stay up to date and find out details of what we have planned for our trip and resources you can use to plan your very own trip.
If you haven’t already, make sure you check out our YouTube channel and subscribe so you can be alerted when we release new videos.
Last but not least, connect with us on social media. Happy Nomad Couple is on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and you can find us by clicking on the icons in the side bar to the right. We would love to hear from you!
Thank you for reading our first post and we hope to see you back again next week!
