The first thing you have to do is come up with a rough list of destinations and a budget that you can live with for the year.
We settled on the following:
Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Bora Bora, Costa Rica, USA and Canada.
We then got quotes for flights from various round the world flight ticketing companies (we did try organising it ourselves using Expedia or Kayak but it worked out hugely expensive). The company we used in the end was www.roundtheworldflights.com who were excellent and really seemed to know exactly what they were doing and understood the reasons why we wanted to go to certain destinations.
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| Packing the house up, boxes, boxes and more boxes |
Once we had settled on the route and budget and timescales we put more meat on the bones, started contacting friends overseas by Facebook to let them know when we were likely to be near them.
Our next plan was to write a massive to do list and just keep adding to and ticking off items as we went. Key things we had to think about were (in no particular order):
- Whether we were going to sell or rent our houses out.
- Where were the cats going to live for a year?
- Ensuring all debts were settled before going abroad (this involved selling vehicles/ clearing credit card accounts etc) to reduce our outgoings.
- Handing over and finishing off work projects
- Organising Cash/Visa's/insurance/contacts
- Getting Jabs for those destinations.
- Finding storage for all of our stuff for at least a year.
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| The first box into storage! |
The only 2 definite things that we had to fit into our itinerary was a friends wedding in Perth (Western Australia) on the 10th February and we have to be at the Grand Canyon from the 3rd - 19th December 2013 for our own privately organised Raft trip down the Colorado river, just a small added pressure to organise before we leave the country on the 16th Jan!!!
Where have we got to as of today?
Well... Storage has been organised and we are in the process of packing the house up and moving it into a 20ft storage container
All the above points have been completed.
We have managed to pack our traveling kit into 2, 40l rucksacks weighing just over a stone each!
We are now just catching up on all the little jobs that you need to do e.g.: getting international driving permits, picking up cash for the trip, getting haircuts and catching up with friends before we leave!
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| Tech for the trip |
Catch you next time
Dave and Gemma
Nice blog, just been reminded by the wife that you're off round the world for a bit first before the raft trip.theres me thinking we should get some paddling in this year! Doh..
ReplyDeleteyou are both to old for kayaking .dave are you heading back by the way of asia on the return?borneo is a must stop if you are pick you up at the airport
ReplyDeleteWow! An around-the-world trip for a year sounds really exciting! But as you said, there are a lot of important things to think of and attend to. It's great to hear that you were able to cover everything up in a timely manner, especially packing the things you're going to bring with you, and the rest of the things which you would leave in a storage unit. Good going, and I hope you're having a great time with your trip.
ReplyDeleteClay @ World Packaging Inc.