I love to travel. Second to actually traveling is reading about other’s travels. Before we started planning our RTW trip, I had been reading numerous blogs on other’s trips. After mentioning it to Jon over and over and over again, we finally sat down and had a serious discussion about it. In the course of a couple hours one Sunday afternoon, we had made a major life decision – to quit our jobs, get rid of all our stuff, and leave for a round-the-world trip indefinitely. Our fist discussion involved a lot of “what ifs” and hypothetical ideas. That soon morphed into a list of places we’d like to see and visit (which will be refined over and over again in the course of our planning) and a budget spreadsheet. One of the first things that we both realized we had to do is to pay off our debt and start saving. We put together a budget spreadsheet of our incomes, our expenses, and then came up with a way to pay off debt and start saving. It doesn’t seem like much now, but every week when I see our credit card number go down, and our savings account number go up, we get a little more excited.

As time moves forward, we will continue with our tentative planning. I say tentative for now, because we have some major things to do first, before we start our “real” planning. We’re getting married in about a year, which is something that we want to focus on to make sure our wedding will be exactly how we want it. We also want to get some (all!) of our debt paid off and start really saving for the trip. Once we get further along in these goals, then the “real” planning will start- researching visas and vacinations, setting up an itinerary, purchasing backpacks and other gear, etc. We are still a few years out from our trip, but I know that it will get here sooner rather than later.

While there may not be frequent updates for the near future, rest assured that we are still here, still planning, and still dreaming! I will update on things that we do in our planning process, any trips that we take before leaving for our RTW trip, and other things that I find interesting. I’m looking forward to our journey and am excited to be taking some of the first steps to make it a reality!