So some people have requested a TR for my time traveling the world. I’m happy to oblige as I have seen a heap in the last 13 months and enjoy talking about it. As the attention span is short in BBV I will do it over several posts over a period of time (if people stay interested!) as otherwise it will be a tl;dr story. If there is any part of the trip people are interested in let me know.

I’m not going to make any apologizes regarding my spelling and grammar throughout the TR. Definitely isn’t my strong point and proof reading takes a lot of effort

Firstly a very brief summary of me.

I will go into more detail later as some of the reasons behind quitting my job and traveling is a bit negative and hence definitely not something to open this TR. So for now I’ll keep it light!

I’m from Australia and am in my mid 30s. Grew up in Perth until my adult years.

I basically cruised through school and university and got a job straight away. I work in the construction industry firstly as a site engineer and progressed to the role of Project / Construction Manager fairly quickly. I find the job highly challenging and enjoyable, however it comes with a lot of stress and a **** load of hours. A 70 hour week is a slow week and I remember once working 42 straight days (average of over 12-14 hour days) and another time working for 24 hours straight. Both pretty stupid when working amongst machinery that can easy squish you.

After a while, as you could imagine, it got a bit tiring. My gf of 14 years ran her own business and worked just as hard (well that’s what she tells me), so she was pretty exhausted too. So we decided to give ourselves a break and take some time off. We gave ourselves 12 months to save some money and we saved our asses off. We put together the best part of $100k for the trip (though we hope not to spend it all and have some left for whenever we stop).

So in January 2012 I put in my notice at work (4 weeks) and by early March we were on our way.
To date we have completed the following:
• 12 week road trip of USA
• 1 week in New York
• 1 week in Iceland
• 5 weeks in England and Ireland (mainly in a town called Colchester)
• 7 weeks in Europe (Spain, France, Monaco and Amsterdam), which included a 2 week house sit in the middle of nowhere Spain
• 5 weeks in Florida
• 4 weeks in San Francisco
• 2 weeks in South America (Argentina and Brazil)
• 2 week Cruise around the Caribbean Islands
• 1 week in LA
• 10 weeks in Florida
• 4 weeks in Mexico (East Coast)
• 2 weeks and counting in Costa Rica

We also have the following planned for the future (this is definite):
• Another 5 weeks in Costa Rica
• 1 week in New York
• 1 week in Toronto
• 8 weeks in Barbados

From here we are not too sure what we will do. Most likely we will head to Europe (Amsterdam again, Italy, Greece and Croatia). After that we are thinking about South East Asia, maybe Thailand for a few months. This gets us pretty close to X-Mas and we will then have to access where we are at financially.

In order to convince the mods to keep it in BBV I will include poker stories (with a BBV) as I go. It’s worth a try!

1rd

2th

So we started our adventure with a road trip of the mighty USA. We had been to the States a few times so knew the main tourist hot spots (New York, LA, Los Vegas and San Fran). However a road trip would show us a lot more.

So we hired the cheapest van we could find (picture below) and started our journey. As you can see, it is just a van, and that is all. No mod cons here. Most nights we camped in the car park of Walmart. Free accommodation, security, food right there, toilets too and all we had to do was look out the window and watch the people who walk in and out of Walmart and we had entertainment too! Interesting folk those Walmart people.



Driving on the right hand side of the road was fun. Sometimes I made it fun for the other people by trying to drive down the left hand side of the road. Anyway, we survived.

We traveled 12,000 miles in Gracie (the vans name) and treated ourselves to a motel every 5 to 7 days (tried not to spend more than $50 per night). As you could imagine after a week on no showering we stunk and it was a necessity.

The map below shows the route we took. I did all the driving, my gf did all the navigating. We only missed like a million turns. “Oh, you need to turn right” “When?” “The last exit” “Grrrr”



Highlights of the trip were:
• Colorado – beautiful area even outside snow season
• Florida – We love beaches and their beaches are awesome. Helping the matter was it was spring break and girls tend to like to wear their bikinis to the beach at this time of year…
• Arizona – Grand Canyon and heaps of big red rocks. Bit of a nerd when it comes to this stuff.
• Louisiana / Alabama area – very green and big beautiful trees. Also love the way people talk down there. Could just sit there and listen to them read the newspaper.
• Yellowstone Park – Awesome. Weird stopping your car and then having a few dozen buffalo walk past you.
• San Fran – Always loved this city, still do. Could live here if it wasn’t so cold.

Lowlights:
• **** the drive through Nebraska was boring as bat ****
• Having to use public bathrooms is always fun
• Not showering makes you feel icky
• We went out of our way to see the Augusta Golf Course and you can’t see **** unless you go in to the golf course, and you can’t just go in. We saw someone drive in and the security checks the cars trunks.


Ask any questions you like. I have nothing to hide.

Here is a bunch of random photos...

Easily my favorite photo we took. Yellowstone Park



A place to crash if you don’t mind confined spaces



Walked past the car close enough to touch



California sunset



My sport idol. One of my biggest unserious disappointments in life is not seeing him play live.



Florida Beach



Also there is no chance that you are getting pics of my gf so don’t bother trying. All other photo requests will be taken seriously. We took thousands of photos.

Poker bit:

I played some poker when we were in Vegas. We stayed for two nights.

Brags: Won $300 and plenty of free beer.
Beat: Gf lost $400 playing slots and blackjack.
Variance: Sat next to a bloke who I started chatting with and he actually said the word “lol” when I said something funny. I think he realized what he did was stupid pretty quickly and started talking about something else straight away.

damn u a fast typer

5* thread in the making...

- Did you do that entire circuit of the states in 12 weeks? Seems a lot of ground to cover in that time.

- Why Colchester?? Family connections?

fuuuuuuuck! good read, 5*

BOOM - Insta 5*

Nice

I thought you were just a low life troll but you sir have earned my respect.

5 stars

in on ground floor

Bring on more

I think most of us (me included) would be interested in more details of pretty much all of it lol

Those pictures are beautiful. Not a bad idea to take a long break from such brutal working days. And yes, the way people talk in Dixie is wonderful.

Nice.

Pretty pricey locations however. I would have gone to Asia earlier; cheaper living + you get used to a simpler and cheaper lifestyle (win win).

I met a guy in Bangkok once who just arrived after 2 months of India and he was like "Wow it's super-clean here, and the traffic flows!"

/pausehiatus

subbedlegitbragnewrespectforfid5*wouldreadagain

/resumehiatus

Does anyone even english in Asia

people even barely english in italy it's problem imo

Compared to Australia most places are cheap. I haven't been anywhere yet that I would say is more expensive (maybe England). Aussie dollar is going well too. We keep the costs down by doing a heap of house sits. Like right now I'm house sitting in Costa Rica overlooking the jungle with the ocean on the horizon. Every morning we wake up to the sounds of monkeys and toucans. Not bad for free rent!

Asia is definitely on the list, but before the trip we had recently been to Singapore, Hong Kong and Thailand, so we wanted something else.

I'm going to take that as a complement.

As you can see on the map we missed a fair bit. You couldn't do it all if you had 6 months. The main place we missed out on that we wanted to do was the North East area (Boston / Maine etc)

Colchester was a bit of a weird thing. We completed a house sit there. We applied for one of the first house sits we saw in England, which was in Colchester. We got accepted because we are awesome. After that we noticed there are a **** load of house sits in England and we probably could have been more fussy with location. But since we accepted it we did it. I liked it. Nice little town and only an hour train ride into London. Didn't like the weather though. It was the middle of summer and still bloody cold.

My gf lives about 30 mins away from Colchester. England is generally pretty cool but you are right about the bad weather and everything being expensive... *sigh*

niccccceee

Nice work bud. Please post more stories & pics.

Where in Perth did you grow up?

nice one bro. Don't forgot about new zealand roadtripping the south island is a must for any avid traveller!

This is awesome I'm jealous

We did that a few years back one xmas. Started at Auckland, drove all the way down to Queenstown and back up again. Think it was over two weeks.

South Island was great. Except driving those country roads at night. Very scary with the cliffs on the side of the road with no guard rail.

I also liked the Rotorua area on the north island.

In the hills area (Kalamunda). I loved Perth, but it is so isolated from the rest of the world.