HOW WE TRAVEL
Getting there is half the story.
We don’t have one way we travel.
Sometimes it’s a plane and a hotel. Sometimes it’s a house sit. Sometimes it’s a cruise ship, a rental car, a train, or a ridiculously overloaded little car pointed toward somewhere we haven’t been yet.
The method changes depending on the trip.
What doesn’t change is that we’re always looking for ways to travel longer, make the money go farther, and spend more time actually experiencing a place instead of simply passing through it.
This is where we share what we’ve learned about making that work.
House sitting
House sitting became one of the biggest ways we changed the economics of travel.
Instead of paying for lodging every night, we’ve cared for homes and pets while their owners traveled. That has allowed us to stay longer, experience neighborhoods instead of only tourist areas, and build trips that would have looked very different if we were paying hotel rates every night.
It also comes with responsibilities, surprises, and the occasional animal that makes you reconsider every decision that brought you to this moment.
If house sitting interests you, we have an entire section devoted to how it works and what we’ve learned doing it.
Road trips and extended travel
There’s a big difference between taking a road trip for a week and living out of a car while moving from place to place for months.
We’ve done both.
Longer travel changes the questions you ask. How much stuff do you actually need? How often should you move? What happens when the route changes? How do you make a temporary place feel like home without hauling your actual home behind you?
We learned a lot of that by doing it badly first.
We’ll share how we plan longer trips, organize the logistics, pack, choose routes, and keep travel from becoming one long exercise in moving luggage.
Here’s One: The Ireland Roadtrip
Flights, trains and getting from here to there
Getting somewhere is part of the trip.
Sometimes the cheapest flight makes sense. Sometimes paying more for the right schedule is worth every penny. Sometimes a train is easier than flying. Sometimes renting a car gives you freedom you wouldn’t have otherwise.
And sometimes you find yourself driving on the left side of an Irish road while the person sitting next to you operates a highly sensitive human collision-warning system.
We’ll share what has worked for us, what hasn’t, and how we think through transportation when we’re putting a trip together.
Cruises
We like cruises.
There. We said it.
They’re not the only way we travel, but they can be a very good way to see several places without packing and unpacking every few days.
Different cruise lines, ships, itineraries and cabin choices can create very different trips. We’ll share the cruises we actually take, what we liked, what we didn’t, and when we think cruising makes sense as part of a bigger trip.
Packing without bringing the house
Packing gets more interesting when you’re traveling for weeks or months instead of a long weekend.
We’ve packed too much. We’ve packed too little. And at one point we packed what felt like our entire life into a small hatchback and drove away.
That tends to clarify the difference between something you might need and something you actually need.
We’ll share the systems, gear and packing decisions that have made travel easier for us, along with the things we probably never needed to drag around in the first place.
Planning trips that actually work
A great itinerary on paper can still be a miserable trip.
Too many stops. Too much moving. Bad flight times. No breathing room. A brilliant plan that requires two people to wake up at 4:30 every morning and sprint through Europe carrying luggage.
We’d rather build trips around what we actually want to experience.
That might mean moving quickly for a day because there’s a lot we want to see. It might mean staying somewhere for a week and doing almost nothing.
The goal isn’t to travel according to somebody else’s rules.
It’s to build a trip you’ll actually enjoy taking.
There’s more than one way to travel
We’re not trying to convince you that our way is the right way.
We don’t even have a way.
We house sit. We stay in hotels. We cruise. We fly. We drive. We take trains. We plan ridiculous travel days and occasionally wonder who approved them.
What matters is having enough options that you can build the trip that works for your time, your budget and the way you actually like to travel.
That’s what this section is about.