Finding your inner resource
Resource: noun
1. a source of supply, support, or aid, especially one that can be readily drawn upon when needed
Many times we have been asked how we went about organising this world trip. So, here’s what worked for us...
Most of the planning took place in front of computer screens late evening and at weekends for six months before we left. There are endless online resources to choose from and we watched lots of traveller videos to learn from others. Just search ‘travel tips’ and take your pick.
Some of those videos led us to volunteer websites and we eventually opted for WWOOF and WorkAway. There is a small fee to join them and then you refine your search to locations and type of work you are interested in to get pages and pages of potential host profiles to choose from. You write to the hosts and eventually after some exchanges you find good matches.
Doing volunteer work and home swapping was our way to be able to afford to travel. Working out the budget and balancing it with reduced income was obviously very important to do early on in the planning. Organising the time off from work and school also took some time to arrange and agree on.
During our journey, we took 25 flights and I was very thankful to have found a website called BootsnAll which makes booking a Round The World ticket very straightforward and exceedingly good value. You can sign up for their free daily email which lasts for a month and covers a different aspect each day to help you plan a word trip. It was very useful.
To help us decide a route, we wrote a bucket list of all the things we’d love to do or see and then we tried to add as many of them together to form a route. We didn’t get them all fitted in and there are enough left over for another trip. ;-). Also, we spoke to lots of friends who had travelled to the places we were interested in and their recommendations helped mould our choices.
Fairly early on in our planning, we decided to share our journey by creating a website. We read lots of reviews of different platforms possibilities and eventually settled on Squarespace. Emily taught herself how to set up a site using their templates and we used a virtual graphic designer (who happened to be based in Argentina) to create our logo and so, www.grá-the-world.com was born! Emily also watched lots of videos on how to film and edit footage to create videos and she made a few practice ones before we left.
Finding a way to gather, organise and share all our information between Adam in Ireland and Emily and me in Italy was important from the beginning and we chose Microsoft OneNote. It allows you to create lots of folders with sections where you can have lists and upload links and attachments. As the list is ‘in the cloud’, you can access the information from any device, anywhere and as one person adds something, the others can see it immediately. It meant that we had all our travel documents, packing lists, random ideas, budget, To Do lists etc gathered in one easily accessible place for the planning and while we travelled.
We spent a long time making a list of equipment to bring and refining it for weeks and weeks before we started buying. In fact, we bought most of our things in the last six weeks before leaving when we were more sure of our needs. As we were filming and video making, we brought some specific electronic equipment such as a gimbal, go-pro, portable hard drive and tripod. We spent a couple of hours in a sport shop choosing our backpacks and the packing bags we used to group and contain our gear made packing and living from a backpack really much easier.
We took a portable wifi router with us and as soon as we arrived in a country, we bought a data SIM card for it which gave us internet access as we travelled. Very, very useful indeed. You need to do your research well before buying to ensure you get one that works in all countries. Ours didn’t work in Canada or the USA but luckily those countries had a reasonable amount free wifi around so we managed.
For some countries, we needed vaccinations and we identified which ones quite early on in the planning because we had to take a series of vaccines following a schedule. We also looked into visas early too so that it wasn’t a last minute rush before leaving. For some reason however, Australia slipped through the net and we didn’t organise that visa in advance so we had a truly awful hour in Nairobi airport desperately applying online (with very weak internet) for entry visas before we were allowed to board our flight to Sydney. Luckily I wasn’t connected to a heart rate monitor during that little episode.
Looking back on the planning makes me wonder how on earth we managed it all but starting early with a list and slowly working your way through it ends up with getting the main elements in place before you go. Of course, you can wing a certain amount of things along the way and we did that too. We scheduled in admin sessions a few times a week to keep things rolling along back at home and planning on next steps in our journey.
So that’s a taste of some of the elements of how we went about organising our trip. If you are curious to know more about anything in particular, you know that I love nothing more than a cuppa tea and a chat!
Le grá,
Gill