Welcome Back to Breakfast with Lisa & Josh!

We just finished up a full year of travel, going to 19 countries, and spending just over $40,000 doing it. Since we’ve gotten so many questions about this - NO, this is not the end of our channel! Not even close.

More videos coming very, very soon.

Our RTW trip was incredible, and we’re so lucky to have been able to slice out enough time in our lives to be able to do it.

But, there are some things that we would do differently if we were to do it all over again. We’re theoretically wiser after a year of travel, and we learned a lot about how we both like to travel, and what’s important to us. Here are the 5 things we would do differently next time around.

#5 - Eating so much at grocery stores instead of restaurants

We ate about 75% of our meals from grocery stores. Countless meals of muesli, meat and cheese on bread, or whatever was about to expire and was cheap. I think we missed out on a lot of experiences while traveling by trying to save money on food. Our first real meal on the trip was in Genoa (sponsored by a kind viewer!), and that one meal absolutely made the experience of the city for us. We got to meet incredibly friendly people, ate food so good that I still dream about it, all while watching the sun set and the lights of the city come up. I wish we could have made room for more experiences like this.

#4 - Spending so much on hotels

The reality of the way that we travel is that we spend very, very little time in our hotel while abroad. We’ll wake up, eat breakfast, spend literally all day walking around enjoying the place we’re at, and then come back after dark and sleep.

We basically need just a bed, and a shower. That’s all we ever use.

I feel like we overspent on hotels - we don’t really value or use any of the perks of a nice hotel. To be honest, I’m not really sure what the difference is between a $50 / night hotel, and a $150 / night hotel. Does anyone know?

I wish we had stayed at more hostels, or just stayed at generally less nice hotels (except for when we use points, that is) - this could have freed up the money for us to have a nice meal at a restaurant every other day. Better food, less money spent on something we don’t actually care about.

We definitely don’t regret staying at the Grand Hyatt in Jeju with points though.

Our beautiful hostel in Lisbon, Portugal.

#3 - Not knowing enough of the local language

In the few places where one of us spoke some of the local dialect, our experience while traveling was so much better. We would connect in a much more real way with the people we interacted with, and it gave us a much richer experience overall.

I’d want to spend a bit more time learning more of the language of wherever we travel next time. It’s not required - we gratefully have been able to get by anywhere by the kindness of others around us, just using charades and the handful of words we do know, but it would definitely make our travels just that much better to be able to have a bit deeper conversations than just “Hello. Beer please.”

#2 - Not inviting every person we know to travel with us

Traveling with just the two of us is great - we can move fast, change our mind whenever we want, not have to compromise about whatever we want to do.

But, looking back at our trip, the best moments were all the ones that we could share with friends or family. There’s just something about being able to share a bit of this life that we live with the people we love that makes everything that much better. Not only that, but traveling with others brings different perspectives, which means that we end up doing things that Lisa and I would have never even dreamed of before we left on this trip. Without having others on the trip we would have missed out on so much.

We would have never known about that homecooking restaurant on that tiny island in Croatia. We wouldn’t have been able to have that ATV race in Santorini. We definitely wouldn’t have gone to that mind-blowingly beautiful hike on Jeju Island.

So many moments like this come to mind, but the thing we’re going to focus more on in the future is letting all our friends know where and when we’re traveling so that we can go on these adventures together.

#1 - Moving too fast

This is, without a doubt, the number one thing we will change the most on our next trip. We were changing cities on average every 4 days for the entire year. It would go like this -

Day 1: Arrive, likely via plane or train, be exhausted, check into hotel at night, see nothing

Day 2: Sightsee all day, edit at night

Day 3: Sightsee all day, edit at night

Day 4: Hop on another train, head to a different city

So, really, we would only get to experience the place that we were in for 2 of those 4 days. We always felt behind, or like we weren’t really able to get a good feel for many of the incredible cities we went to, and this is why. Not only that, but moving all the time was expensive - both monetarily, and energy wise. Traveling can be tiring, especially at that pace for that long.

Next time, we’re going to spend much more time in each place we go to.

Today

Everyone we’ve ever met is getting married right now, so we’re celebrating with friends and family. Every single weekend. It’s awesome :)

The (Near) Future

More weddings, then more travel!

Videos This Week

Exactly, precisely, down to the penny. This is how much a 1 year trip around the world costs.

Top 8 Things To Do in South Korea. You know what it is.

See you next Sunday…ish :)

- josh (and lisa)

Oh, and if you want to learn how we afford to take all these trips after quitting our jobs last year, you’ll likely be interested in our Skillshare course on Travel Hacking and Frequent Flier Miles. It’s been really taking off lately, but we still have a few uses of this link left for those of you who want to see the class for free. It comes with a free month of Skillshare, which is more than enough to watch our class and any of the other great courses on there!

Check it out here: https://skl.sh/lisaandjosh02221

Bonus Cat Content

A very sleepy, cuddly, comfy Octavius.

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