I've been reading through a few travel blogs recently, for inspiration I suppose. Inspiration for ideas on where our travels could take us next (not that we need any more options in the mix!) and inspiration for where to take the blog. Originally we started to write this just to keep our friends and family up to speed with how our move to France for the winter season was going. It's just sort of grown from there really, as have our travels! It seems that we're probably going to be doing this "travelling thing" for a bit longer yet and so I've decided that I'm going to move the blog forward and try to develop a proper webpage, hence looking for inspiration.
There are myriad travel blogs out there on the world wide web, unsurprisingly - career breaks, gap years, digital nomads, and RTW trips are pretty standard for a lot of people these days. But there was something different about all the blogs I was reading compared with our own story. For us, there was no long drawn out decision about whether to make the break, no years spent saving, no big sell off of all our wordily possessions - we just went. From realising in the June of last year that we fancied doing something different and discovering that we both felt the same about giving a winter season a go, we applied for chalet jobs in the July, got the job in August and left in December. There was no time for a big saving plan, and we didn't really have any worldly possessions so a couple of carboot and eBay sessions easily sorted that out.
I suppose the fact that we were just supposed to be going to do a winter season made it all a lot easier as we didn't actually have any plans to make and we didn't really need any savings either. Everything was sorted for us - we just turned up and were given our apartment, lift passes, insurance, food and even our travel to the Alps was covered. Oh, and were were getting wages too! It made an easy break for us - it cost us nothing to go and try it out, if we didn't like it we'd be home in five months and we could pretty much pick up where we left off. We would have to have found jobs of course, and that's probably easier said than done these days, but we're both quite well qualified and experienced in what we do and anyway, we wouldn't have been picky.
From there everything just sort of… happened. We loved the winter season so much that we arranged with our employers to return the following year and that then gave us a summer to fill with, well, whatever we wanted! This is where a savings plan would have come in handy! We didn't have much, and what we did have we spent on going back to the UK, MOT'ing the car ready to sell, buying a campervan and then getting back over to the continent. We also had a weeks holiday in Holland booked, so that needed cash putting aside for too. Anyway, we managed to spend the whole summer in Europe, floating around places - mostly France - and we've even made it as far as New Zealand, where we are now. Okay, so we've had a little help along the way - we spent ten weeks doing Workaway, which helped us not spend money, and we're lucky enough to be able to stay with friends here in NZ so our hostel bill is not going to be so big that we'd need a mortgage. Oh yeah, and Mr Mastercard helped out with the flights!
Even though we've scraped through the summer with practically no money, we've realised that we don't actually need to spend much to travel. I guess that travel means different things to different people and maybe if we had been somewhere very far from home (culturally I mean, because NZ is pretty much as far as you can get!) we'd have taken it more seriously. Perhaps if we'd been in China, Peru, or Namibia we'd have spent a lot more time researching the place, finding sight seeing tours and experiences and of course safe places to stay. As "first-timers" to this whole new game we'd have needed a plan. Europe for us was safe and not too different from home. We knew that we could get around by ourselves and we felt safe parking up and "wild camping" wherever we felt like it. After we'd seen one city and visited one museum all subsequent ones more or less merged into each other to the point of us crossing off cities from our priority list. Don't get me wrong, cities are great - we both have a lot of fondness for Paris, for example - but we both get a much better feel from the natural aspect of a place. We love the sea and the mountains, we want to see the birds and the marine life and to see how different the countryside is. And that, of course, is free. Having done things this way might seem to some like we've missed out on some of the great things Europe has to offer - we didn't go to St Tropez or Amsterdam, despite them both being more or less on our route. We didn't go to the Mercedes Benz museum or Wilhelma Zoo despite them being in Trip Advisor's top 5 for Stuttgart. But what we did do is gain experience, and more importantly, confidence in our ability to make it around on our own.
Whilst I really love what we're doing and want to be a "traveller" for quite a while longer, I'm keen not to be branded with one of the titles I mentioned at the beginning. Not that there's anything wrong with being any of those things, but I've never liked feeling like a tourist, and backpacking round the world following tour guide after tour guide, ticking off the "must-do's" for each country and city seems a lot like being a sheep to me. Following the route predetermined by everyone else. A lot like the expected route of "go-to-uni, get-a-job, buy-a-house, settle-down, 9-5…, hate-Monday's"...
And isn't that the one thing we left to get away from…?
