Alissa’s Reflections After One Month of Traveling
We left our home 1 month ago today. It still feels unreal, like we will be flying to freezing Minneapolis headed back to work tomorrow. But, we aren’t, and that is still exciting to me.
A few stats from our first 30 days:
Flights: 7
Miles traveled: 13,000
New Countries: 3
Blog posts: 26
I think a big part of traveling is having time to reflect on your surroundings and experiences, and I really have done that enough, so this post is my attempt to gather my thoughts on life on the road.
First of all, not having a full time job is just as awesome as I imagined. As much as I liked my job, sitting at desk all day was driving me crazy. Now, even if I’m sitting at a computer, its somewhere cool, and its usually limited. My patience and laptop battery life is about 3 hours, and so far the wifi has only cooperated a few times per week. Perfect. Dan, on the other hand, could use a little more computer time, but the ratio of doing things to writing about the things we are doing is always going to be a balancing act.
Traveling as a couple seems to be a topic of interest to friends, family, even strangers. Honestly, all of the questions from other people before we left and posts and tips from other travel bloggers about spending so much time together made me consider what our daily relationship while traveling would be like way more than I needed to. Dan and I have always spent a lot of time together – after work, weekends, and other trips of one week or more. This trip has not been much different than our relationship at home: we work together to get where we need to go, compromise on what we do and spend money on, share the work on our site and projects, and most of all, have fun together as much as possible. Sharing amazing experiences, especially those that push me out of my comfort zone like climbing the volcano, have been even better because we’re together.
Living out of a suitcase is fun for me. That might be weird, but so far, I like it. There is no deciding what to wear, because I wear what make sense for the weather or activity of the day, and I have basically one choice for each situation. We have become packing ninjas, and can fit together the puzzle of our packing cubes and array of electronics in under 5 minutes. Visiting villages in Vanuatu helped reinforce my joy of living simply. Most people there have less than we have in our backpacks, and they are completely happy.
Overall, I am so happy with our decision to travel, and there is so much to look forward to. Next month: Great Barrier Reef, Perth, and Indonesia!
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