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thepearlandheroyster · 6 years

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Trip Prep!

Hello to the deep internet!

If you’re reading this, I most likely provided you the link to my very cliche travel blog or maybe you happened upon it in your late night tumblr browsings, either way: welcome! My current plan and hope is to update this more frequently than any other form of social media to help diminish being that annoying girl who took an LOA for 6 months and is spamming everyone’s timelines with travel updates and photos. So, without further ado, I’m going to jump into this travel blog stuff and get to my first post....PRIOR to the trip.

Trip prep!

Many travelers don’t touch on the amount of time and energy that it takes to actually plan a trip of this girth. Six months long. Three continents. Twenty seven countries (give or take some). Holy. I get dizzy sometimes thinking of how much prep has actually gone into this trip.

The first steps to taking a trip of this caliber were taken about 1.5 years ago. My boyfriend, Jeff, and I set out to buy a house. We booked a few meetings with banks who were a complete waste of time by not actually talking about our finances but insisting that we attend these first-time-home-owners-don’t-understand-how-mortgages-work seminars. Which we attended and then decided to see my parents’ mortgage broker, who was unbelievably helpful. He informed us that although we could get a mortgage, it would solely be based on Jeff’s income as I did/do not have guaranteed hours with my job and would have to work it for at least two years in order to get an average of my income to be qualified. After this meeting, Jeff and I left feeling fairly dejected. Then we got to thinking: we are never going to have this little responsibility ever again in our lives...we should travel! We don’t have kids, we don’t have a mortgage/house, we have cars but those are minor...We thought about the possibility of quitting our jobs and going to travel and the idea spiraled from there.

As time went on, we stocked up on items that we would require (more accurately thought would make our trip easier) to actually complete the trip. Items such as backpacks, hiking shoes, special clothing such as UV protected shirts and heat retaining lightweight jackets, new watches, a tablet... We bought these items spaced out over a long time (1.5 years) so as to help reduce the massive bill we were footing in prep for the trip. As the trip approached we got our first round of immunizations. Holy. The immunizations alone were a lot to take in. You have to get some immunizations at certain time periods prior to travel. The fact that we are travelling to so many different places (Europe, Asia, New Zealand/Australia, and South America) posed a slight issue for our lovely travel nurse who needed to know exactly where we were going in each country in order to ensure we were properly immunized. At that first travel clinic apt we actually hadn’t sat down and gone through each country and where we wanted to visit. At our first apt, we ended up getting the first half of Japanese Encephalitis immunizations, hepatitis A, thyphoid, and altitude sickness prevention pills. Then massive debate ensued over malaria pills. Still debating, actually. We then saw our family doctors to get boosters on anything possible (TDAP). We have our second follow up apt coming up to get the second round of immunizations.

As the trip continued to approach, we needed to figure out what we were doing with work. Jeff had already asked and received leave of absence. I hemmed and hawed about what to do and decided to give notice to my love/hate job of community nursing. The morning I went to give notice, I ran into a supervisor I’m quite fond of, and told her my plan and she advised me to try to get LOA...so I tried and was given LOA for six months! My supervisor was adamant that she didn’t want to lose me and that she truly didn’t have a choice between giving me LOA and quitting. So happily and very luckily, both Jeff and myself will be returning back to jobs when we return home from this lengthy trip.

Next, Jeff and I decided that we need to plan at least a little. The goal of the trip was to fly by the seat of our pants and not plan ANYTHING. Easier said than done. As we have come to realize a little planning is necessary for the aforementioned reason of immunizations (don’t even talk to me about malaria pills...they could probably get their own post by themselves), but more importantly, we didn’t want to miss out of anything because we stayed too long in another place. So we decided to plan, minimally. We made a very VERY rough timeline of how long we want to stay in each country and then gave ourselves a month’s leeway. We know many things aren’t going to go to plan, but the hope of the rough schedule is to help facilitate a better timeline to ensure we actually get to see everything we want to see.

Planning this trip has been very daunting but very fun. It’s been a great distraction from current stresses and something that both Jeff and I have been looking forward to for many months. It is now just around the corner and we will actually be living the trip!

Stay tuned for more updates.

Lots of love,

Joyce

#travel #travelblog

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