How We Saved For Our RTW Trip Part I: Trimming the Fat

20 Sep

How did you save for this trip?

How much do you need?

What will you do when you get back?

As we get closer and closer to our actual departure date our family and friends have asked these kinds of questions fairly frequently, and rightly so!  I mean really, it’s a big deal to quit your jobs and be able to survive easily, while travelling, without any source of income.

The first thing to set your mind to is that while yes, we are travelling and intend to have loads of fun, this isn’t a vacation in the traditional sense.  We will not be staying at hotels and eating out 3 meals a day like you might on a traditional vacation.  You can’t just take what you might spend on a week-long vacation, and multiply that by 52, to get what our budget is…that would be an insane amount of money, and while it’s probably feasible for some, it’s not for us.

Interestingly enough, when we decided to take this trip we had already saved most of what we needed, just by sheer coincidence.  If you read our post about how we made the RTW decision in the first place, you might remember that initially we had just intended to save for a move back to Colorado.  We thought we might be out of work for a while, so we our intention was to amass enough for us to live on for at least 6 months of potential unemployment.  As it turns out, the amount you’d need to live in America without working for about 6 months is close to the amount we need to travel around the world for a year.  Go figure.

Let’s be clear about something else right away.  We did not make a ton of money in New York City.  I was a teacher for crying out loud!  Justin had a solid job, but it wasn’t something we were going to get rich on.  Saving money is HARD WORK.  You have to make a plan and actually stick to it.  Sometimes it sucks, but you do have to sacrifice things unless your salary is large enough to support your savings PLUS allow you to do whatever you want.

We have broken this down into a few posts because it’s going to get long.  I appreciate details about how to do things, so I’m going to give as many details as I can.  If you don’t want to read all of that, here’s the bottom line:

Don’t spend as much money as you do right now on unnecessary junk.

Most people have way more fat in their budget than they realize.  The easiest way to start your savings it to trim some of that away, sort of like you’re on a money diet.  I mean, if you want to lose weight, you cannot eat ice cream twice a day.

First, you have to figure out where the fat is, and to do that you need to track your expenses for a while.  How much are you spending over the course of an average month?  Start by just carrying around one of those tiny little notebooks and write down everything you spend.  Yes, everything.  Do you grab a coffee and a bagel on the way to work?  Write it down.  Did you make a donation to something?  Write it down.  Did you buy a fake moustache from a vending machine for .50 cents (it’s not like I have ever done anything like that…)?  Write it down.  You really do need to get a clear and honest picture of every cent you spend.  You should be including all your regular bills as well.

At the end of a month, take a look at the numbers.  How much is going out vs coming in?  I know I’m being Captain Obvious here, but in order to save, the amount of money coming in must be larger than the amount of money you are spending.  The bigger the difference, the bigger the savings.

You can do a variety of things to start cutting down on your regular spending.  Many of these seem like such small expenses that most people never realize how much they are spending over the course of a year.  Some of the things we cut included:

Coffee.  I picked up a coffee every day on the way to work, and sometimes I’d get one in the afternoon as well.  Each time, it cost me $2.  I was spending an average of $15 per week on coffee.  That’s $780 a year! That’s fat.  I stopped buying coffee and started just making it on my own and bringing it to work.  Not only was I saving the environment from all of my trashed paper coffee cups, but I was saving myself around $600 a year – you have to factor in that I did have to buy more coffee beans, and it doesn’t mean I NEVER bought a cup of coffee ever again.  When Justin also stopped buying coffee every day, we were able to save about $1200 per year.  If you buy fancy latte-frapa-whapa-chinos every day you can go ahead and double, or even triple that number.

We saved over $2000 in two years  just by making coffee at home.

Lunch delivery.  In NYC most people just order lunch to their office.  In fact, I know a significant number of people who almost never eat at home.  I fell into the lunch trap for a while and spent between $8 and $15 every time I ate out during the work week, which was usually 2-3 times.  When I stopped eating lunch out I saved another $400-500 per year.  When Justin started making his own lunch that number more than doubled.

Alcohol.  We’re young(ish) and we like to imbibe from time to time. This wasn’t something that we got rid of completely, but we did cut it dramatically. We made a conscious effort to find great drink specials, to not overindulge, to gather with friends at someone’s house instead of a bar, or to just not drink during the week.  I don’t have an exact number here because our spending in this area varied greatly, but I assure you we saved more than when we cut out coffee.

Plan your meals and don’t go to the store hungry.  Buy in bulk when you can. Make more food than you need, and freeze the leftovers for easy lunches that are ready to heat and serve.  Our membership to Costco saved us around $1000 per year in bulk food items like cereal, oatmeal, noodles and meat.  I started making huge vats of pasta sauce and freezing it in small portions.  Justin eats mass quantities of pasta and my sauce cost us about $1 per jar vs. $3-5 of store-bought sauce.  Again, the little things add up.

Clothing.  If we didn’t need it, we didn’t buy it.  You can easily save hundreds of dollars a year by not buying new clothing “just because”, especially if it’s not on sale.

Haircuts.  How often do you cut yours?  Can you get away with going longer between cuts?  What if you went every 5 months instead of every 4?  Over time, this will save you a few hundred dollars.

Small change can mean big savings!  At the end of every day we put all our coin change into a bucket.  When the bucket was full we lugged it down to the bank nearby that had a free coin counter and we cashed it in.  It took us a few years to fill it, but it ended up being worth $700.  $700 for tossing change into a bucket.

There are so many little areas where you can really cut back, and every article ever written by a professional about saving money will tell you the same thing.  What you cut will depend on what you already spend.

Do you need the gym membership?  You can save between $250 – $1200 a year by working out at home or in the great outdoors.

If you haven’t already, QUIT SMOKING.  In NYC a smoker who goes through a pack a day wastes more than $3800 a year.  For real.

If you can, take public transportation, walk or ride your bike instead of driving everywhere.

Buy a reusable water bottle and carry it with you instead of buying bottled water.

The first step is always the hardest and there is an adjustment period to a lifestyle change. If you find it difficult to stay on track,  put a picture, or ten, of your goal (be it a travel destination, a house, whatever…) to your mirror, or door, or fridge to remind yourself of what you’ll earn in the end.

Next time: Making a practical detailed budget, and how to keep yourself on track.


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Yangshuo’s Silver Caves

16 Sep

Original Post: August 9, 2007

Yangshuo is a backpackers paradise stop.  There are a ton of Western restaurants that serve cheap and decent food – you can get real eggs and toast in the morning instead of boiled duck egg, which quite frankly I never managed to develop a taste for.  Many people speak English, and there are a million things to do. The town is nestled in the middle of the mountains, so there’s a big hiking, biking, rock climbing, rafting scene. There is also an abundance of caves that you can visit.  We decided to go check out the Silver Cave, it got great reviews and seemed like it might let us escape the heat for at least part of a day.

To protect the delicate structure of the cave, you have to go with a guide in a group.  This is not our favorite way to see the sights, but in this case it was unavoidable.  It took about an hour to get to the caves and once there we realized this was going to be a huge tourist debacle. There were tons of people and you had to filter into winding, roped off lines like at an amusement park.

We joined the herd and were shuffled around in the throngs of people

Somehow, despite all the Westerners we saw in town, we were once again the only foreigners. There was a sign in English that said we had to enter in groups of 40 and stay with the guide because they controlled the lights and without them we’d be lost in the dark.  Right.  We let ourselves get shuffeled in with a big group of people, keep in mind, people are staring and pointing and giggling at us the whole time, so it was a bit of a scene, and the tour began.

Have I mentioned that the Chinese people seem to LOVE LOVE LOVE fluorescent lighting? I am not kidding, it’s a little like being in Vegas, even in the small mountain areas if they have a downtown. The highways in Shanghai are totally lit up as are many of the big buildings, which usually have patterned lights dancing along the outline of the building. Restaurants show their success with large displays of flashing neon. It’s a bit over the top. This little trend crept into the Silver Caves…the thing was lit up like a disco, complete with running X-mas lights in some areas.

Random strings of lights were draped haphazardly upon the formations

There are all these beautiful rock formations and they are lit up in bright purple, green, yellow and red. The cave is truly gigantic, and is filled with stalagmites and stalagtites and some other formation that looks like the underside of a mushroom.

This formation was huge, more than 15 feet high.

There were also quite a few underground water pools that reflected all the colors.  The tour took nearly 2 hours, though we have no clue what our guide was speaking about so we spent the time just marveling at the structures and attempting to take a decent picture.

The lights reflected nicely off the underground springs.

It was pretty sweet, but would have been sweeter without the million people and disco-theme.  I would definitely recommend checking it out, but prepare yourself for the masses, and try to find an English speaking guide.

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The Faster You Run, The Faster You’re Done

13 Sep

A lack of nearby gym facilities requires to me to run and hike  frequently lest I suffer the consequences of the abundance of good food and drink here in Vermont.

I actually ran semi-regularly while we were living in NYC as well, alternating between the gym’s treadmills in the winter, and the West Side Highway as the weather improved.  Mostly I stuck to distances of 3-4 miles, which was perfect in New York because that was about how far it was from my apartment to Battery Park where I typically just got lazy and rode the subway back home.  Once in a while I’d change it up a bit and get out to Central Park for a “hilly” run and some different scenery.

I never thought much about the logistics of my runs until we got to Vermont where I immediately noticed some major differences.

  • Clean air! No litter!  Amazing.
  • No stoplights, no pedestrian dodging.  It was really irritating to try and keep a steady pace when it took me close to a mile just to get to the river, while at the same time trying to time the lights and maneuver around all the other people on the sidewalk.  My other option was to run in the road and risk getting nailed by a car or a bike messenger.  Here, it’s just me and the dirt road.
  • Hills.  I laugh at myself for thinking the Central Park loop was really hilly.
  • Dogs.  I am an animal lover but the damn dogs are going to be the death of me!  Every single house I pass has dogs and as I go by they all come out to greet me…some more nicely than others.  Generally they come storming out, snarling and growling until I coo at them “Nice puppy!  Who’s a good boy?!?!” at which point 99% of them stop and start wagging their tails and I can go on my merry way.   There’s one house, about 3/4 of a mile in, where I have to actually stop and pet the pit bulls or they continue to snarl and chase me.  Another house I pass sometimes has a very friendly chocolate lab that likes to run with me.  He’s followed me as far as a mile in some cases, his owners screaming after him to “Get back here!!”   More often than not, the dogs are fenced in, or they won’t follow me much past their house.  Once though, I was chased by a dog that I really thought might bite me despite my cooing at it.  It was the first time a dog remained aggressive towards me even when I slowed and talked to it, and I wondered what the heck I’d do way out in the middle of nowhere if I really did get bit.
I’ve always had a hard time sticking with a running routine, but I’m much more inclined to keep up with it here where I get beautiful scenery, fresh air, and the stillness of being the only person on the road.

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Guilin to Yangshuo on the Li River

9 Sep

Original Post: August 9, 2007

After departing from Xian we arrived in Guilin to spend a mere 12 hours so we could catch an early morning boat to Yangshuo. We were met at the airport by the service staff from the hotel. It was nice of them to pick us up from the airport, but their real motive was to attempt to up-sell us some much more expensive boat tickets. The Li River cruise is an absurdly popular way to see the mountains in this area, and we had pre-booked the basic boat cruise through Jenny’s travel agent. The guy from the hotel tried to tell us that cruise we had already booked was the super-bottom-of-the-line boat filled with drunkards and thieves who would be puking all over the place. He even went so far as to tell us that they hadn’t even sold any tickets for this particular cruise for more than 6th months. He was so full of crap that you could smell it a mile away. We stuck to our guns and he finally, after nearly an hour of refusing to upgrade, booked us the trip we wanted.

The boat people came and picked us up at the crack of dawn the next morning and sure enough, all very nice looking people, no scummy drunkards to be seen. The tour was not in English, we were the only Westerners on the bus and so we had no idea what was going on. We might not have even figured out which boat was ours (there were at least 20 boats at the docks and we were left in the parking lot with all our luggage and some sort of instruction in Mandarin and general pointing towards the docks) but luckily there was a young couple from Hong Kong who took pity on us and helped us find our way since they were on the same boat as us.

I tend to get violently ill on boats, so I was a little nervous about the prospect of being on one in the middle of China for 5 hours.  Fortunately the river was very calm so I survived without any major trauma.

We were in a parade of boats.

The scenery is really the only reason to take this cruise since you can get to Yangshuo by car in about an hour. There are these crazy mountains all over the place,  like huge skinny hills that jut out of the ground.  I believe they are made of limestone and interestingly enough look just like the formations in Halong Bay where we went on a cruise with my dad in April of 2010.   This area is what is depicted on the back of their 20RMB bills.  It’s hard to describe how bizarre these things are, and the photos really don’t do them justice.

Spectacular. I have dozens of photos, it's so hard to choose what to post!

A massive meal was included.

 

It was like being in a movie, or a painting, very surreal and beautiful. We spent most of the time on the deck just taking a million pictures, and then inside for a few minutes taking pictures of the food that was served – river crabs, prawns, veggies, something that looked like a hot dog…

We made it to Yangshuo all in one piece, fought our way through the crowds at the docks, and headed off to our hotel to relax and figure out a plan for the next few days.

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Maine. The Way Life Should Be.

7 Sep

Footbridge Beach, Ogunquit, Maine

The state slogan doesn’t lie, summer in Maine really is the way life should be.

Every summer for nearly as long as I can remember my mother would load up the van with our luggage, beach chairs, boogie boards, coolers and sand toys.  My brothers and I and would pile in and we’d wind out of Vermont, through New Hampshire and into lower Maine to whatever house trade had been arranged that summer.  We stayed in a variety of little towns over the years, but the times we spent in Ogunquit hold the strongest memories for me.

We spent most of our time at the Footbridge Beach, aptly named for the footbridge you have to take to cross the saltwater inlet that separates the beach from the town.  My brothers spent hours fishing for crabs off that bridge, tying hot dogs to empty plastic strawberry containers and lowering them into the water.  Pulling the homemade traps up at just the right speed to keep the crabs attached.  Bragging to the other kids that they were able to catch more, and if not more, theirs certainly were bigger.

I spent hours walking up and down the 3-mile stretch of sand with my cutoff jeans and sunburned nose, listening to the latest Guns N’ Roses single on my walkman over and over and over and over.  One summer, a friend of mine came out to Ogunquit with us and we met a boy from Quebec who told us all about escargot.  We pretended to be fascinated and impressed, and then secretly made gagging faces behind his back.

The water in the Atlantic seemed like ice water to me, but we went swimming anyway because there are no beaches in Colorado.  There was always an abundance of seaweed in the ocean and we would drag it out by the fist-full and make it into wigs to decorate my youngest brother’s head when we turned him into a sand-sculpture mermaid.

Lunch was lobster rolls, and fried clams, and grilled cheese at the seafood shack up the street.  Dinner was twin lobsters with baked potatoes and corn, followed by blueberry ice cream from the place right in the center of town.

When I smell sunscreen, I see that beach.  For me, it represents an idyllic point of childhood, some of the best summer memories I have.

When Justin and I arrived in Ogunquit last Friday night, the first time I’ve been in more than 15 years, the first thing we did was walk down to the Footbridge Beach to watch the sunset.  We passed a group of boys catching crabs off the bridge.

“Wow, you have quite a lot there!” I exclaimed.  “What are you using as bait?”

They were using hot dogs.

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Xian – Home of the Warriors

2 Sep

Original Post: August 9, 2007

Xian is a small city near the middle of China, and its big draw is the Terracotta Warriors – literally an army made from clay that was buried more than two thousand years ago! We wanted to take an overnight train from Beijing, but it was completely full – a lesson in booking in advance – so we had to scramble for some last minute plane tickets. We arrived late at night and basically just crashed at our hotel – The Bell Tower Hotel – right in the center of the old town.  You could see the actual bell tower from our hotel room.  Since we only had one full day to spend in Xian, we decided to hire a driver to take us around because the busses are slow and the tours cost more total for three people than splitting the cost of the driver.

Justin looks great in armor!

Our first stop was some sort of museum about an ancient group of people called the Banpo.  It was interesting, if small, but in retrospect we should have skipped that and gone straight for the main site. We rushed through the next stop – one of the places where they make all the terra-cotta figures that you can buy in the stores/on the streets. This was a bit more interesting because you can buy ones that are life-size so they show you how they make it in 8 separate pieces and fit it all together just before they fire it. Surprisingly there wasn’t a lot of pressure to buy their wildly overpriced merchandise.  You can however do the very very touristy thing of pretending to be a warrior.  Which of course we did.

Thousands of these figures have been restored

At last we made it to the site of the warriors! The ‘tunnels’ where the warriors were uncovered are still being excavated and they claim that they expect to find at least 8000 total pieces in the first section alone. Essentially, the place is a mausoleum for Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China as a united whole. He had thousands of life-size figures, with real weapons, and horses created and placed into a battle formation to ‘guard’ his tomb. The thing is, after it was all done and buried a bunch of thieves broke in and stole most of the weapons and broke a lot of the pieces. It was forgotten about and not rediscovered until the 1970s when some peasants stumbled upon it! The site is decidedly impressive, they’ve managed to repair a lot of the warriors, but they left some as they found them so you can see what it looked like untouched. All of them are supposed to have unique facial expressions and there are something like 12 different kinds of warriors – archers, foot soldiers, generals, etc. We spent about 4 hours wandering around and honestly, I could have spent at least a few hours more if we’d had the time.

This is one of three areas in which the warriors have been uncovered.

The next day we had a few hours before our flight so we squeezed in the Big Goose Pagoda (another temple…starting to be templed out at this point…) and then headed back to the center to see the Drum and Bell towers. These were quite interesting, and we had missed seeing the towers in Beijing so we wanted to make sure we saw them here.

Justin played the biggest drum

The drums are HUGE, maybe 15 feet tall for the biggest ones, and there are dozens of them that circle the whole top of the square tower. They have a drum show every few hours where performers come out and perform traditional dancing and music. We were lucky to be able to catch one of the shows and it was so loud it made my stomach vibrate. The Bell Tower is basically the same, only with bells.

The vibrations from this bell nearly knocked me off my feet!

I paid the 5Y to gong the biggest bell three times – also super loud, very fun, highly recommended!

At this point our time was up and we headed off to Guilin to spend a few days in the mountains.

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A Brief Interruption In Service

31 Aug

It’s been a waterlogged week here in Cavendish, VT.  Here are some pictures of the areas around our house, where we are on day 4 of no power or water.  We’ve managed to find internet and hot coffee at a small restaurant in Ludlow where we are currently camped out for the afternoon with everyone else who needs an internet fix.

A house and part of the street on the corner of 131 and Whitesville, Sunday afternoon.

Damage to 131 near Whitesville Rd. due to the flooding and debris. This woman's house is between this damage, and the damage on a further portion of 131, she walked to the store and had to climb down into that broken road to get home.

This is Davis Road, about 1/4 mile from our house. The road has literally been swept completely away by the water.

Near the flat rocks off Davis Road where we used to swim as children. Again, the road is completely gone.

This is about a mile from our house on Brook Road, it's usually an alternate route out to Route 131, but no more.

We got past the first chunk of damage on Brook Road on foot, and then came to this, which we couldn't cross, even on foot.

The former parking lot for the Crow's Corner Bakery, and surrounding buildings, in Proctorsville. The owners live down the road from us in one of the stretches of road that's been totally destroyed.

House next to bakery. We talked to these people who told us their insurance won't cover the damage because they don't have flood insurance. We suspect that will be the case with many people who suffered damage.

We are fortunate to not have sustained any damage to our home, but that is not the case for many thousands of others.  The Red Cross has a station set up for food and water, and we’ve seen the local firemen as well as the army (or national guard perhaps? ) delivering water and food on their 4-wheelers to people who are stranded.

We hear there is similar damage in other parts of rural New England, not to mention all the flooding along the rest of the coast, though we haven’t been able to get any real news since we’ve got no power.  We though we were too far inland to sustain any real damage from Irene, but clearly we were mistaken.

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Beating The Summer Heat In Chengde, China

26 Aug

Original Post: August 8, 2007

It was HOT HOT HOT in Beijing, so at the crack of dawn on our 6th day, we set out for the Chengde – in the mountains about 4 hours north of Beijing. The main reason for heading there was to see the Imperial Summer Resort, which is where the Imperial family would go to escape the insane summer heat of the city.

The exterior wall for the Mountain Resort

The Mountain Resort itself is gigantic, you could spend days just wandering around the whole site, which comes with its own little wall.  We had limited time so instead of hiking the perimeter we took the tram which dropped you off at a bunch of key spots and let you wander about for a bit.  There’s one section that has some Mongolian style yurts that you can stay in, which we might have considered doing had we known about it ahead of time.

Mongolian style yurts can be rented out for vacation stays within the boundaries of the Mountain Resort

Part of the Puning Temple complex

We stayed in an awesome little hotel that is housed inside the grounds of the Puning Temple.  The Puning Temple is a functioning (is that the right word?  It’s still in use, not just a historic site!) temple with monks still living there.  The hotel staff were incredibly nice and were all dressed up in costume.  There was a theater in the basement and each night they put on a show about the history of the temple.  It blew away the terrible Kung-Fu show from Beijing and had some beautiful dances, drumming and music.  It was completely in Chinese…so we walked away with a fairly minimal understanding of the whole thing, but it was still great fun.

A feast!

Chengde is a small town to begin with, the the hotel was pretty far off the beaten path so we stuck with the on-site restaurant for dinner.  Unlike in Beijing, there were no English menus to be had, and I kid you not, there seemed to be not a single staff member that spoke a word of English.  We were also the only Western people at the hotel.  This made for an amusing attempt at trying to order food.  The staff and other dining patrons were so accommodating that they took us around the restaurant to show us what other people had ordered, and we gestured and nodded and pointed a lot and they seemed to get the gist of what we were interested in.  We ended up with a giant meal (Justin had to put his hand in there to show the scale) for only the three of us, and I have only a vague sense of what most of it was, but it was great!

The temple itself was beautiful and had many different spaces, as temples here generally do.  In one spot as we were exploring we noticed there was a monk set up by a table with a line of people waiting to do something. You could pay him 10Y and he would tell you to pull a stick from a vase. The stick was long, narrow and smooth and had some writing on it and he would read it and tap the table next to him. The table held two crescent shaped stones and you needed to pick them up and throw them like dice onto the table. You might do this only once, or he would make you repeat the process up to three or four times. When he was satisfied with the way the sticks and stones fell he would choose a slip of paper from a box and send you on your way. Sometimes the stones would not fall favorably and he would send the person away with nothing. We decided to give this a shot and Justin and Jenny both got the paper on their first try. I got sent away with nothing 😦 We asked Mr. Shin what this meant and he said it either meant something very good or very bad but it would be difficult to say for sure.  Helpful.  As for Jenny and Justin’s fortunes, they were very cookie-like and said things like “Hard work is difficult at the beginning but will pay off in the end.”

Guanyin

This particular temple is my favorite from the whole trip. It had a very calm feeling to it and did not seem like just a huge tourist attraction. It also holds the worlds largest statue of Guanyin – the Buddhist Godess of Mercy. It is 22 meters high and has something like 42 arms.  It was one of the most impressive religious statues I’ve ever seen, akin to the gigantic reclining Buddha in Bangkok.  We were only there for 2 days to see the Mountain Resort and the Punin Temple, but you could easily spend more time there and in retrospect I wish we had.

Up next…Xian and the Terracotta Warriors!

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Biting the Bullet and Buying the Tickets

24 Aug

We finally sucked up the nerve to actually purchase our first set of multi-city, one-way tickets today! *insert cheering and clapping soundtrack here*  So, for all of those people who keep asking us if we are “really” doing this, the answer is YES.

When we started researching our options for the flights, we read a lot about RTW tickets vs. buying as you go.  We started researching flights of all varieties, and spent way too many hours crafting (or attempting to craft) itineraries and playing with the interactive RTW ticket maps.

Through our many many attempts to create a workable RTW itinerary it became very clear to us that the RTW tickets were just not going to work for us for a variety of reasons.

  1. You generally have a limit of 12 months in which to use the flights.  We have given ourselves a very open timeline and we may or may not be back in 12 months.  Heck, we might be back in 3 or 4 months, though I seriously doubt that will be the case.
  2. You need to have a relatively stable notion of where you are going.  We know we are going to start in Peru.  We know we are going to Chile and Argentina.  We know we’d like to go to Bolivia, Colombia, maybe Ecuador as well.  We’re pretty sure we are going to make India, but haven’t decided for sure.  Beyond that are a whole lot of maybe and we’ll consider it, and we’d really like to ideas, but nothing solid.
  3. There are some restrictions (they vary from ticket to ticket, so read the fine print!) on how many miles you can travel, and which directions you can go, and how many legs there can be, and how many times you can cross an ocean.  This stuff caused us more headaches than I care to mention, mostly because we couldn’t/weren’t willing to nail the itinerary down.
  4. This is the big one.  We want to be free to do what we want based on a whim, or a great flight deal, or a piece of advice picked up along the way.  Maybe we’ll be in South America for 3 months, or maybe we’ll stay for 6.  Maybe we’ll love it so much that it won’t end up being a RTW trip at all, but rather a Round-South-America trip.  Who knows!

That said, buying as you go isn’t all flowers and ice cream.  To start, it will probably be more expensive in the long run.  It also takes WAY more time and effort in terms of research.  We’ve been looking at prices for just the first few legs of our trip for months.  I generally know what a good flight price is between say, Denver and NYC.  Or NYC and anywhere in California.  Or even pretty much anywhere in the USA to almost anywhere in Europe.  Between the USA and anywhere in South America…no clue.  Within South America…no clue.  We’ve done some research, and I’ve been looking at flight costs constantly for months.  One thing we’ve done is look at different combinations of cities based on where the flights to Peru were being routed through.  We searched lots of different sites, tried to figure out what the local airlines were and looked on their sites.

We eventually found the flight we bought today, which we think has a good balance of what seems to be a decent price, and one that gets us there in a reasonable amount of time since I do not really want to spend 27 hours and 6 layovers getting to Peru.  We could have save $150 or by getting a slightly different flight, but that would have required us to spend a night partway through in an airport (or pay for a hotel near the airport in a random country we weren’t even staying in), AND it would have brought us to our destination at 3:45am, which is not so ideal.  We did, however, save a fair amount of money by getting a multi-city ticket, basically taking us from the USA to Peru, and then on to Chile.  These are the only two places that we have solid dates for so it was helpful to just buy the whole route, and it saved us $600 off the prices we were seeing for buying the tickets separately.

Once we’re in Chile we’ll mainly be travelling overland by bus since it’s far cheaper and we’ll have the time to meander around more at our leisure.  Hopefully that will allow us some time to start researching the next big flight, which might be to India.  Or Bali.  Or….?

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Hiking Mt. Ascutney – The Weathersfield Trail

21 Aug

One of our goals for our time in Vermont was to hike at least 3 times per week to prepare ourselves at least a little for the massive amount of hiking we’ll be doing in South America.  Mt. Ascutney is a great mountain for our purposes because it has 4 different trails to the summit, all within a half hour drive from our house.

Not more than a few days after our arrival in Vermont we jumped right into the fray and our first hike was on the Weathersfield Trail, which was listed as “moderate” according to the Chamber of Commerce.  I hiked a fair amount growing up in Colorado, and even some here in Vermont over the years, but I was not prepared for the Weathersfield.  The trail starts out as a lovely pine-needle covered path, and while it’s certainly uphill, you get a beautiful view and a small waterfall at about a mile in.  After this point though, the trail gets more serious.

The trail

There is a significant amount of scrambling over rocks, it is consistently steep, and there are huge chunks of the trail where you have to pay close attention to the markings since there is quite literally no real path.   Justin and I were not happy hikers, but we managed to reach the summit and were rewarded with the great view.

Finally we made it above the mist!

Why was this trail so difficult for us?  Maybe it was because it was one of the hottest days of the summer.  Perhaps it was because it was the first hike we’d done in over a year.  It could have had something to do with how much beer we’d had the night before.  In any case, we were wiped out, sore, and felt defeated by what should have been a fairly straightforward 6 mile hike.

I’ve been avoiding this particular hike for the last few weeks due to the bad memory, but this week a friend was visiting and was up for a good hike, so we decided to try to tackle it again.  We started out early and were the first car in the lot.  We kept a steady pace, and while it was just as steep and scrambley as I remember, it somehow wasn’t as hard.  By the time we reached the summit we had shaved at least 30 minutes off my first ascent time.

Much happier camper the second time around!

There are a plethora of reasons this was easier than the first – it wasn’t as hot, we had gotten plenty of sleep, and I’ve been hiking and/or running an average of 18-25 miles per week, which I suspect made all the difference.

Nothing beats some Moxie after a long morning on the mountain!

At this point I’ll still call it a heft half-day trek, which is just under 6 miles with about a 2000 ft ascent.   It’s got some great views though with at least 3 excellent overlook spots and a fantastic panoramic view from the observation tower at the summit.

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