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A Year Of Travel – Our Travel Plans For 2016

A year of travel

Usually I get to this time of year and I start thinking about all the places I could possibly go in the new year. I don’t make a list, I just start dreaming of exploring new places. Most years though, I end up doing way less travel than I’d like.

But next year will be different.

We have some exciting news about our travel plans for 2016… we will be travelling all year!

We’ve officially moved out of our unit, and by the end of the month we will be saying goodbye to Australia for a year of travel. I still can’t believe I just wrote that. Couldn’t be more excited!

Why We Decided To Have A Year Of Travel

Chris and I have been talking about this for the last year or two. It seemed like a good idea, but it never really seemed like the right time.

Sydney

See, we have always lived in Sydney and just taken as many holidays as we can throughout the year. This has worked really well for us so far, but a few things just stopped making sense, and all of a sudden, it felt like the right time to travel for a year.

Although we had talked about it for a long time, when we made the decision it was a very quick, spontaneous decision. We haven’t been working towards this all year, but we decided a couple of months ago and just committed to making it work.

We decided to travel for a year for lots of reasons.

We wanted to travel more and see more of the world.

We wanted to wake up every morning and make the most of every day.

We both wanted to be able to work full time hours on our travel blogs and improve and grow them.

If we were working full time on our travel blogs, living in Sydney, where cost of living is pretty high, didn’t seem to make sense anymore.

Travelling for a year, in many ways, is actually cheaper for us than staying here.

As much as we love our life here in Sydney, we both felt it was the right time and there was nothing holding us back.

Our Travel Plans

Although our plans are still flexible and might change, we have a pretty good idea of the countries and places we want to visit. Choosing them and making sure the year we had envisioned still matched was a hard and long process, but we’ll leave that for another post. Here’s a look at our temporary itinerary for the year:

Dec/Jan: Bali

Jan/Feb: Cambodia & Vietnam

March: Vietnam

April: Vietnam & China & Hong Kong

May: Singapore & France

June: France & Spain

July: France & Italy

August: Croatia

September: Croatia

October: Czech Republic & Austria & Italy

November: Bali

Bali

So this is how it stands at the moment. We chose each place for different reasons, we might have wanted to learn a language, taste the food, experience the lifestyle etc. Although part of us would love to just wing the entire trip, we also don’t want to have to organise everything on the go, as it can be stressful in itself. We wanted to avoid extreme weather and we didn’t want to pay the price for ending up in Europe during peak season with nothing booked. All this requires some pre-planning, as boring as that sounds.

What Our Year Means To Us

When we first made the decision, I’m going to admit it, we were scared. Excited, but scared. It was a huge thing for us to do. To move out of our unit, for Chris to quit his job, to leave our family and friends. But as each day went by, the excitement grew and the fear started to go away. Now, less than a month til we leave, we know we have made the best decision for us. We can’t wait to discover different places and we’re so excited about the potential for our business. We’re excited to make this blog and AlmostLanding-Bali.com the best we can.

I’m not going to lie, there were some tears when we said goodbye to our unit, and I’m sure there will be more of them. But when you give up something, and you’re still excited and still know your making the right decision, you know it’s something that means a lot.

Next year is as much about growing our business and the lifestyle as it is the travel.

By choosing a year of travel, we are choosing possibilities. We are choosing to go after everything we want.

Travel With Us

We are so excited to share our travels with you, to help you plan a trip, or to get tips off you if we’re going to a place you love!

Over the coming year you can read all about our travels on here and we will be making videos along the way too so you can travel along with us.

Other way’s you can keep in touch include:

Other Articles coming in this series:

  • How to plan a year of travel (and how much to plan)
  • Getting prepared for a year of travel: the boring but necessary things you need to do before you go
  • Packing for a year of travel… carry-on only!
  • Tools & resources we used to plan/book our year of travel

*Please note this article was written late 2015 but posted early 2016 (we are already in Bali as I post this)

What’s your travel dream?

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