Krakajax

Remember you can just about ski Mount Hood anytime of year.

How about a Jefferson or Olympic climb ?

And I bet you miss the zillions of custom high-grade microbrews
of Oregon / Washington state.

Crossing the border into and from Canada -- expect customs & immigration
lines to be alot longer. Need more than just a driver license. Best to carry
your passport as Birth certificates not embossed wont do it for you.

Only idiots will get themselves the new passport card as it won't allow
for travel beyond Canada-USA-Mexico.

I'll save you some Salmon to fish

Krakajax

Hey guys

don't forget to visit Rachel Nevada (2 hours west from Las Vegas) and have an Alien Burger at the Inn and just maybe you'll spy one of those extraterrestials just outside of town at 'Area 51'...aka Groom Lake...

Marathon Man

met a lot of Aussies who pack up the home, kids and dog, sell the big stuff incl. house to buy a camper, and travel around the country for a year+. When they get "back" they send the kids to Uni, get new jobs and set up a new smaller home somewhere and start over all happy.

no worries, mate!

****

another thing you could consider if in the USA is to just go around all summer catching baseball at different ballparks. Of course, I suggest seeing a Red Sox game IN Fenway but those tickets can be so expensive you'll NEED a job to get them! hehehe

MM

graraps

Wrong guess. Pound's been falling a fair bit recently. It's 133 Eurocents, down from 148 not too long ago.

boberonicus

Skip the cruise. Too structured. What happens if you love Sydney and want to stay there for weeks? There goes the boat.

I have some distant relatives (a UK couple) who traveled around the world visiting their highly extended family. When I welcomed them to their week at my house (in the USA), we had to spend quite some time traversing the family tree to figure out how they were related to me. But they had a great strategy! They spent one week with with Distant Relative A, then traveled by train/plane to stay in the guest quarters of Distant Relative B, etc. Zero hotel cost.

UA Fan

wow 2.5 years on the trot. here i am worried sick about quiting for 2 months:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=771285

hope you have saved enough for 6 months when you come back.

SylviaCaras

[QUOTE=Yes, I'm over 15!;9096903] there was an article in one of AA's magazines a few months ago about "voluntourism."

I think this is interesting, one of the links Google found:

http://www.voluntourism.org/

Thanks for introducing me to that word.

Sylvia

jerriblank55

Remember to keep a diary. You'll thank yourself later

Yes, I'm over 15!

As someone who earns a living in USD, I'd still take that exchange rate !

Mwenenzi

I have done several long stints on the road (that is more than 6 months at a time). Plenty of others doing the same, although a minority are from USA. Australians, New Zealand’s & Germans are the majority, and the some from UK

My travel style is towards the mid-low budget end. I don’t usually stay in 5 star hotels and eat in 5 star restaurants, but at times have done so. Landing into a city at 10:00pm when you don’t speak the local language, its good to go to a Hilton for 2 nights. Your 15K budget will soon shrink if you stay, eat and especially drink in top end places. You will also meet a majority of fellow country men and like people from Europe-USA.

Seem to be two different patterns of travel. Some are always on the move. Stay 1, 2 or 3 days in one place and then they hit the road to the next town, bar, mountain, beach, national park or country. My preference (and that of many others) has been to spend a least a week, and often much more, in any one place. Get to know the surrounding area and how the locals fill in there days. If I skip a well known town, beach or whatever and travel 1000 km to somewhere else sobeit. In touristy places you can then get away from the touristy areas with local bus-trains or rental car. Its also worth getting out of the big cities. Toyotas & traffic lights are the same in many many cities. Actually travelling for months on end can be hard work. You need a break of a at least a week from time to time to recharge. If you can work (legally) it’s a good way to recharge.

Many web travel blogs can easily be found like
Globecrawler
Travelling tim
terry's trek 3 years on the road
blogs on Lonely Planet

Just do it. You will not regret travelling for an extended period of time ^^

gt_croz

Be sure to check out BootsNAll. It's the only other message board I visit with the same frequency that I do FlyerTalk. It's an entire website dedicated to RTW budget independent travel.

You'll have a blast on your trip!

http://www.bootsnall.com

Silkroad

My story's a little different, I guess. I got caught in the Great Tech Downturn of 2001, and in July I was offered a choice of finding another assignment or taking severance package and going away without talking about it (I had to sign a confidentiality agreement) -- it took maybe 5 seconds to decide which to do. Severance + 401k + savings was about $250K. I travelled for five years, saw almost everything I wanted to see.

I would travel for several months at a time, then return home and take some crappy temp job while I planned the next segment. Among other things, I did tech support for $10/hour (a real joy), did clerical for law firms, etc. This also allowed me to visit family and friends.

It was a lifelong dream and I'll never regret it for a second, even though I finished up busted broke with no job. It's funny, though, how almost nobody ever asks about it, even when I mention it. Since my return in March 2006, I've probably talked about it no more than a half dozen times, including my family (who obviously thought I'd gone insane, and tried to dissuade me from continuing every single time I came back home).

If you're wavering, I strongly urge you to do it. You'll meet wonderful people, have amazing adventures, and let's face it, when you're lying on your deathbed, you probably won't remember that new car you bought in 2008, but you might think about the nice lady you met in the train station in Toulouse.

RustyC

Re: OP. I did the very sort of thing you're doing in quitting to take a buyout offer and apply the proceeds toward travel around the world. Year was 1996 and budget at about $26K. Was thinking about going a year or so.

Even though I had been on shorter trips and had learned a few of the ropes of budget travel, it took some number crunching to be reassuring. No one I knew personally had done anything like it, there was no "gap year" custom (I was about 12 years past typical age for that, anyway), and Internet resources were just getting started.

I definitely planned for a bias toward "cheap" countries. Maybe the U.S. counts as that now if you have pounds or euros, but in my case I focused on southeast Asia, using Bangkok as a base and leaning on the airfare consolidators there to get me to a number of other places. Started out slowly (i.e. too much tendency to get comfortable in an inexpensive version of paradise), but after about a month and a half started doing trips to places like Chiang Mai, Bali, the Philippines, etc. That built confidence to take on others, like Sri Lanka, Nepal, Vietnam, Cambodia (back when the Khmer Rouge were still in business and not that many people went to Angkor), Hong Kong/Macau, Borneo, etc. The favorite had to be a month in Indonesia where I decided on the spur of the moment to try to get to Irian Jaya and the Baliem Valley. Also the Bandas in Maluku.

The strategy depended heavily on using either FF miles (had about 240K saved) or consolidator tickets to go around (nowadays you have LCCs like Air Asia, which you didn't have then). Budget-travel purists would do a lot more intercity traveling by ground than I did, but I wanted to concentrate on as many exciting places as I could. Would try to hold lodgings around $10-15/night, but would go up to $20 in cities or if the place was nice and could drop down to $5 in some areas (like Ubud).

The year became more like 3 as I caught a very lucky break with the currency crashes of 1997 and even dipped into the retirement funds to extend travel under such favorable circumstances. Any financial advisor would tell you it's a terrible move to take out IRA funds, but what was left got beaten up pretty badly anyway in the dotcom crash of 2000. My total all-in budget was amazingly consistent, though it bought a lot more with currencies depressed.

So, to summarize, I'd say to concentrate on inexpensive places (they'll still have plenty to see and do) unless you absolutely, positively have your heart set on a particular place. Maximize your non-cash resources if you have them (especially miles). You'll also have a lot of time vs. money decisions where something might be cheaper (bus vs. air travel, for example), but might not be worth it if it ties up too much time.

RustyC

Amen to that. Especially if you're in the U.S., you have a good chance of having family/friends who have never done anything like that and think you're crazy for not putting the money into, say, a down payment on a house, or some kind of retirement account or anything that appreciates. You also might hear about doing damage to long-term career prospects by staying out of the workforce (salary compounding and all that). You'll be a wreck by the time you retire but will at least be well-funded for those Gray Line tours.

But I wouldn't trade the experience for anything. It also can make you a changed person. Living out of a backpack for extended periods and having to carry all your stuff sure refocuses you on what you really need and how it isn't really that much. Meanwhile, people back home seem to be living cluttered lives where "more" never meets "enough."

tlhanger

You got some excellent advice as I read this through. We saw the movie "The Bucket List" the other night and it dealt with great ploaces to see before you kick the bucket. We had been to most of those places and loved them. I would add Turkey to that list as I thought it was amazing. Some of the places that have been suggested, I want to see too. Hope you check back in after the trip. Sounds like a once in a lifetime thing. Good luck!