Planning

Long term travelers are forced to deal with a lot of challenges while on the road: dealing with bureaucracy, finding accommodations, navigating locales without knowledge of the language, and more.  The difficulties begin even prior to traveling in figuring out what to bring on the road as a traveler’s entire life can be fit in the contents of a 45-90 liter pack.

Going into the pros and cons of packing any item can be a headache, so it is almost easier to just pack the travel supplies you are comfortable with and go from there, regardless of what other people say.

Still, every item in your pack will have a shelf life, a period of time in which they can be reused over and over. This could be re-wearing of clothes, depleting a bottle of shampoo, or even the inevitability of electronics breaking. During the course of my travels I’ve been keeping track of my habits of product usage and come up with some good rule of thumb for many items that you might take with you.

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In all of my travels, I never carried a phone.  I’m going to repeat that to let it sink in.  Out of the 66 international countries I’ve visited, totaling well over 700 days of travel, I never once used a cell phone.  In fact, even when I was at home I never even owned a smart phone.  Crazy, right?

Call it a mix of wanting to save money and not getting hit with roaming charges when abroad, but the truth of it was that I never had any desire to be that connected.  When I was out exploring I didn’t want any distractions, and I loved every second of it.

But now that I use a phone when traveling, I wanted to have data on the go. Naturally, I purchased my first smart phone with a Simple Choice plan- a T Mobile international data plan with data and text included in 200+ countries.

If I’m going to do it, it will be done right, and with a starting price of $50/month I was sold.

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Before leaving for our long-term trip, we opened up two Hilton Citi and two Hilton American Express credit cards in order to have an upgrade in accommodations for several nights during our travels.

We spent several months using the cards to meet the minimum spending limits to get the sign-up bonuses, and even used the Citi affiliated cards as our primary card during the trip to rack up a substantial amount of points.

But does opening four Hilton reward credit cards, two with a $95/year annual fee, really save you money on a long-term trip?

Let’s find out.

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Prior to leaving to our 465-day trip around the world, we were really excited to be sent a few pairs of KEEN shoes to wear on our journey.

We were particularly interested in these shoes as they were clearly designed by someone who had our type of journey in mind.

Comfortable for city walking, rugged for mountain hiking, and waterproof just for good measure, they really did seem to be the best shoe for traveling on an adventure such as ours.

But did they live up to the hype?

After 15 months on the road, visiting 38 countries on 5 continents, you could say that we put them through the ultimate test to find the answer.

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