I sometimes hear from respected members of the Go Curry Cracker Community that traveling internationally can be a daunting prospect.
“I wish I was as confident as you guys, to go off into the great unknown and have grand adventures! I’m too worried that I’ll make a big mistake.” – nice person from a GCC meetup
Mistakes? Oh yeah, those definitely happen. Let me tell you – I am an expert at making travel mistakes.
A hero ventures forth… (photo courtesy of Early Retirement Dude)
[GCC: Travel has a way of opening us up to the world around us and the people in it. The connections and friendships found on the road are some of the most longstanding and powerful we have. Early Retirement Dude abides.]
Early retirees like Jeremy and Winnie and I get to travel a lot. And as you know, we like to talk about it. So hear me, O My People.
Once upon a time there was a bicycle tourist—I, your humble narrator—who was riding section four of the TransAmerica Bicycle Route from West Yellowstone, Montana to the Adventure Cyclist Association headquarters in Missoula. I’d climbed all 7,241 friggedy feet of Chief Joseph Pass in a hellacious headwind on a fully-loaded bike, and I was now laboring down the steep slopes of the Bitterroot Mountains. Yes, laboring down, because that’s how bad the headwind was. Thirty MPH? At any rate, it was impossible to coast.
It was a low, low, moment in my life. I was sweat-crusted, jelly-legged, cursing plate tectonics IN A THUNDEROUS VOICE, and as physically exhausted as I’ve ever been.
(more…)
Welcome to Helsinki (photo by Winnie Tseng)
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A year ago we accumulated ~140,000 IHG points thanks to 2 different quarters worth of IHG Accelerate promotions and a credit card signup bonus.
Finally I get to put some of those points to use, and then replace them all again.
Where will you go today?
GCC: When we were planning our own early retirement we had the good fortune to meet with people who had already blazed that trail. It was insanely beneficial, and I told myself I would always pay it forward. So when this young Canadian couple emailed to ask if we could meet to share all of our best life secrets (not that we have any), of course we said yes. Fast forward a few years now, and they’ve gone from nascent early retirees with an abundance of vim and vigor into a full on Millennial Revolution.
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. –Mark Twain.”
This is the quote I copied into my final work e-mail. It was May 2015, I had given my notice, made up some bullshit excuse about taking a gap year to travel the world and “find myself”, and this was my sign-off to a company I’d given the last 9 years of my life to. But I wasn’t really quitting to travel the world for a year. I was walking out of the corporate world FOREVER.
At the age of 32, my husband and I were retiring with a Million dollar portfolio, enough by the 4% rule to sustain our $40K/year living expenses indefinitely.
But I didn’t tell my co-workers that. They’d find out about it more than a year later, on the front page of the country’s most read newspaper.
“How do you plan extended trips through multiple countries?” is a question we get often.
Sometimes people even ask us to plan their trip for them… which I’m happy to do for a nominal 200% commission.
For those who are less brazen or aren’t into paying triple, I can do the next best thing… here are the process and the tools that we use to plan and organize our extensive travel.
If I could summarize the human meet and greet ritual in a single phrase, it would be:
Hi… So, what do you do?
It’s an interesting question. What is it that we who no longer have jobs do? How can we answer this question in a way that helps us connect with others? What happens when we are completely honest with our new friends?
Over the years I’ve experienced this inquiry in numerous countries, languages, and cultures. Here are a few of the more entertaining interactions.
