Dueling Backpacks

One of the most frequent questions we got after our return home was, ‘where was your favorite place?’ This question makes a lot of sense. Everyone wanted to know a bit more about our trip and they were also hunting for some travel recommendations. But truth be told, we hated this question because it was so hard for us to answer. So much had happened over the last 16 months and we had been to so many places that it seemed impossible to pick a single favorite. Our activities were also highly variable. How were we to compare a week of deathly strenuous hiking in Peru to a week spent on the beach in Thailand or to a week of exploring one of China’s massive cities? We enjoyed all these experiences, but for different reasons. So after we each stumbled through non-committal answers to this question the first few times (and probably giving the false impression that we weren’t impressed with anywhere we had been), Travis and I got together and we strategized how best to respond to this inquiry....

We tracked our spending on this trip for simple budgetary purposes so we would know how long we could afford to keep traveling, but it turns out that these records are a wealth of information that tell us all sort of interesting things about our trip. A deeper dive into over 2,600 line items of expenses tells us how often we moved around, where our cheapest accommodations were, where our highest bar bill was, how much our average meal cost, and much more. This post is all about taking a close look at these facts and figures, which shed light on what this trip was like for us.

At the very beginning of our trip, we set out to travel around the world for $50 a day. This was a rough figure that we came across in our research. In fact, there is even a book titled, How to Travel the World on $50 A Day , which we bought and read cover-to-cover before departing. But in our online research we had heard of others who had also managed to travel on similar budgets. So, after 500 days on the road, how did we do?

We made no excuses. We knew a cruise was way outside our typical budget. But we justified it by the facts that it included what would have otherwise been a long-haul flight across the pond and, for a cruise, it was a pretty good deal. In the past we had paid similar prices for one-week cruises, but this was for two weeks and it took us through some new locations in Spain and Portugal on the way home.

Day 500 (November 10, 2019) – Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA On the 500 th day of our trip, the Nieuw Statendam docked at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale. We were up before dawn to pack up our bags for the last time and to grab some breakfast. After eating we went up to the top deck to take a look around. It was a beautiful day. The sun was rising over the ocean and it was already pleasantly warm out. Of course, Port Everglades itself wasn't much to look at. It’s mostly parking lots and shipping docks, but it was our first view of the US in over 16 months.

Day 499 (November 9, 2019) – The Atlantic Ocean We had a full week of sailing on the Atlantic to get from the Azores to Florida. I wouldn’t say that we were bored during that time, but the repetition in our daily routine was very noticeable. We were content having nothing to do anyway. We spent a lot of time lounging around, reading books, and eating. Probably too much and too frequently on that last activity. We met a lot of nice people too, although it was difficult to really find any new friends to hang out with since, as I mentioned before , w e were perhaps the youngest onboard by at least a couple decades. But we were glad to have chosen the slow boat home rather than a flight. We were eased back into being home with each passing day. It was much more enjoyable than what I imagine would have been the jarring sensation of walking off an airplane and suddenly being back again.

Day 493 (November 3, 2019) - Ponta Delgada, Sao Miguel, Azores It took two days at sea to make it from Cádiz to the Azores, a group of nine small islands in the middle of the Atlantic. The Azores are officially part of Portugal and Portuguese is the native language. Our Spanish skills were one again useless, but we did enjoy the few occasions we got to use them during our prior port stops in Spain. The two days it took us to get there were fairly uneventful. The weather was cool but pleasant. The sun was warm. The Atlantic was relatively calm, but it did rock the boat enough to be a constant reminder that we were on a floating ship. The glass-like stillness of the Mediterranean was long gone. When we arrived in Ponta Delgada I was kind of glad for the opportunity to get off the water and onto land. It never seemed to matter how many motion sickness pills I took, the swaying of the boat always seemed to get to me a little bit. Not enough to feel ill, but enough to not feel like I...

Day 490 (October 31, 2019): Cádiz, Spain Sometime during the middle of the night on our way from Málaga to Cádiz we left the Mediterranean Sea, passing through the Strait of Gibraltar, and entered the Atlantic Ocean. It felt like one small step closer to home. Cádiz was our third day in a row of trekking around Spanish towns, but it was perhaps my favorite. The weather kind of sucked, being extremely cloudy and overcast, but Cádiz felt the most intimate. It was a small town with dozens of narrow streets to get lost in and was surrounded on almost all sides by the ocean, separated from the town by a huge city wall.

Day 489 (October 30, 2019): M á laga, Spain Another day, another port stop. It took us a while to get up, eat some breakfast, and get properly slathered in sunscreen before hitting the streets of  M á laga  for the day. The pier for the cruise ships was far out into the water, so we had a long walk to get to shore.  M á laga  was a much larger city than Cartagena , and it seems to be a bit more tourist oriented. There was long stretch of sandy beach out to our right and an equally long row of beachfront high-rises. And despite how late in the season it was, people were still hanging out on the beach and a few of them were even swimming.

Day 488 (October 29, 2019): Cartagena, Spain It was a weird feeling to get on that cruise ship. On the one hand it was sad to think that this was the last leg of our trip, but on the other hand we were thrilled to get on board and have nothing to do for a couple weeks. The thought of slowly heading towards home was appealing. As strange as it seemed, we were excited to be stuck on a boat for 14 days. It would be the longest we had ever stayed in the same place during this entire trip. After unpacking our bags in our cabin, we would only have to pack them back up again one last time when we disembarked in Florida. We also had zero travel plans left to arrange for the first time since we left home. Everything was set and we were on our way home.

It’s difficult to distill our time in Europe down to a few comments, but we certainly saw our fair share of town squares and old churches and we sat outside at countless cafes. Most of our time in Europe was spent within the Schengen Area, where there are no passport checks between countries and the currency is most often the Euro, but not always. Overall, it was fairly easy traveling. Especially after having come from China not too long before, traveling through Europe was a breeze. There are always delays, complicated logistics, and moments of intense confusion to figure out, but in general we had fewer of those moments traveling through Europe than other places we had been to on this trip.

Day 485 (October 26, 2019) – Rome, Italy Our trip to Rome was just like the last time we were there seven years ago – a whirlwind. Rome was expensive for us, so we only booked two nights. It was just enough time to make sure we got there on time to catch our cruise home, allowing ourselves an extra day just in case anything went wrong along the way. Fortunately, we arrived from Trieste without delay, and that gave us a day and half to see as much as we could of the city.

Day 483 (October 24, 2019) – Trieste, Italy We arrived in Trieste by bus. There was a train from Ljubljana , but the bus was less expensive and faster. Shortly after crossing the border into Italy we could see the ocean again, way below us and off in the distance. The bus followed a winding highway down the steep mountain slopes all the way down to sea level. As soon as we got off the bus it felt like Italy. Narrow streets, even narrower sidewalks, lots of mopeds on the road, and cars parked askew half-way onto sidewalks. We arrived before we could check into the apartment, so we grabbed a seat at a café to pass the time. Trieste was a very impressive city from our café table in the center of town. A large canal ran right through the center of town and opened to the ocean a few blocks away. Sitting along this canal and surrounded by stately buildings, it was a very picturesque spot to be.

Day 480 (October 20, 2019) – Ljubljana, Slovenia We struggled pronouncing the name of this place for the longest time, but I think we figured it out while waiting for our train to depart Zagreb . If we pronounced the j’s like i’s it seemed to be close enough. When spelled like Liubliana, it did not look so intimidating of a name to approach. The train ride was relatively short, but beautiful. It passed lakes, mountains, and farmlands at a rapid clip the whole way. We stopped at the border between Croatia and Slovenia to get our documents checked. There was a small army of border agents who got on the train to manage the paperwork. We weren’t stopped for very long. The efficiency of it all seemed to be a reminder that we were leaving the Balkans and returning to the parts of Europe that felt more familiar to us. I still remember the woman who checked our passports. When she saw that we had previously spent time within Europe’s Schengen Area she informed us very politely that we...

We have continued keeping track of our expense, even though we have not shared them since Georgia , which was nearly three months prior. We decided that breaking down expenses by country did not make sense for our travels through Europe. Countries were too small, and we did not always spend a great deal of time in each of them. We found that our travel costs by country could be more influenced by our transportation expenses than anything else, especially for shorter stays. Instead, we broke our Europe travels into three segments: costs from travel within the Schengen Area, costs for travel outside of the Schengen Area, and expenses incurred from our cruise home. This entry is for our travels outside the Schengen Area, which included Serbia, Montenegro, and Croatia, which for simplicity we just call the Balkans.

Day 474 (October 15, 2020) – Zagreb, Croatia Agh, why did we leave the coast? was our first thought on arriving in Zagreb. We had taken the train from Split . It was a very modern train, only two carriages long, but it traveled at a decent clip to cover the 250-mile distance. This trip from Slit to Zagreb was the Croatian equivalent of going from sunny southern California to the gray and dreary Northeast. It was cold here. We had to dig out more layers from our bag to keep us warm on the walk from the train station to our Airbnb apartment. This was also the very first apartment of our entire trip that had heating and that we felt a need to use. This isn't, of course, considering all the times we didn't have heating and would have really appreciated  it. We had a good time in Zagreb, but I kept thinking while we were there, we could have been at the beach right now…

Day 470 (October 10, 2019) – Split, Croatia Off mainland Croatia are thousands of islands scattered in a broad arc across the Adriatic Sea. The thing to do in summertime is to hop from one island to the next, which is made very accessible by a huge network of inter-island ferries. We thought about doing this ourselves, but we were a little late in the season. In October, many of the ferry routes were running limited service, and by November many would cease entirely until the spring. We'd also already had our island hoping experience across Thailand’s Andaman Sea , so we felt like we weren’t missing out on too much.

Day 466 (October 6, 2019) – Dubrovnik, Croatia At some point on this trip we got tired of bus rides. When we were planning the last leg of our trip around the Balkans, we were really trying to use train lines to connect the dots on our travel map. We found train journeys more relaxing, entertaining, and convenient than sitting on a bus for hours. So rather than thinking of where we wanted to go, we were instead thinking, where can the train take us? Well, we soon realized that the trains around the Balkans were not like their central European counterparts. It was near impossible to plan an itinerary entirely by train. There are sections of track closed for construction in random places (like the short distance between Novi Sad and Belgrade ), and disputes between countries have effectively closed certain international routes (like the connection between Zagreb and Sarajevo). As a result, we ended up on a handful of buses.

Day 462 (October 3, 2019) – Kotor, Montenegro M ontenegro kept surprising us. Budva wa s beautiful, but Kotor might have been even more so. Kotor was only a short bus ride up the coast and while it didn’t have the beach appeal of Budva, it had some spectacular scenery and a really charming walled town. It was a nice place to spend some time.

Day 458 (September 29, 2019) - Budva, Montenegro It took us absolutely forever to get to Budva, but it was entirely worth the effort. The trip involved a 12-hour train ride, an overnight stop in the town of Bar, and us waiting at a bus station for two hours before finally catching the hour-long bus ride from Bar to Budva.