Travel for a Year

Step 2: Wrap-up Pre-Travel Admin Loose Ends  

 

Once you figure out how you’ll finance your travels, you need to wrap up those pesky administrative loose ends. These are the things that, while seemingly small, can potentially derail your travels or cause you huge headaches while overseas. Though certainly not an exhaustive list, here are some of the key admin tasks you’ll need to complete before departure:

 

• Renew or order a passport

• Break your lease (if renting)

• Rent or sell your home (if owning) 

• Buy a travel medical insurance policy (don’t want to be on the hook for thousands of dollars if you get malaria somewhere!) 

• Confirm a plan for where you’ll live when you return (no fun wrapping up a trip and not having anywhere to go…) 

• Move your household items into storage

• Set up a mail scanning or forwarding service 

• Sell or store your car and update your auto insurance

• Make sure you’re up-to-date on all shots for places you plan on traveling (e.g. get your “yellow card” for yellow fever)

• If you require regular medication, secure a year’s prescription (or confirm ways to get more while traveling) 

• Identify a close friend or family member to troubleshoot Stateside issues that may arise while traveling (never know what emergencies can pop up!)

• Related to the above, consider granting a trusted individual power of attorney

• Write a will (macabre, yes, but critical if you have any assets) 

 

Hopefully the above list provides some guidance and a foundation for your own unique admin requirements. Whatever you end up identifying as your critical admin tasks, we highly recommend building a checklist with no-later-than dates for completion. This will keep you organized and serve as a sanity check to make sure you don’t forget anything. 

 

Step 3: Broadly Outline Your Whole Year

 

A year is a long time to travel, and a lot can change. It’s silly to make a dinner reservation before you leave for your 300th night abroad. Instead, make a broad outline of your entire year on the road. This will serve as a framework for your travels without wasting your time making detailed plans that will inevitably shift. 

 

Some of the key “big picture” plans include:

 

Departure and Return Date 

 

These bookends will factor into your above financial plans and admin tasks. And, when you’ve defined the front and back end of your trip, you can begin to focus on the details of each individual leg. 

 

General Geographic Areas and Directions of Travel

 

Yes, your daily and weekly travel itineraries will inevitably shift. But, it helps to create a general outline. For example, you may want to start in South America before flying to New Zealand. This will drive considerations on available flights and associated costs. Alternatively, you may only want to explore Southeast Asia. This potentially means you only need to consider major flights to/from there and can minimize transportation costs while actually living overseas. 

 

Regardless of what you decide, a broad outline provides shape to your travels and drives the detailed planning you’ll conduct for each individual leg of the trip. 

 

Step 4: Book and Plan the First Leg of Your Travels  

 

With a broad outline set, you can get down to planning the nuts and bolts of the first leg of your travels. This is the detailed planning discussed above. At a minimum, for your first destination, you should:

 

• If required, secure a visa for your first country (this may require a trip to an embassy in the States, buying one online, or simply paying for an entrance visa when you arrive)

• If required, learn some key phrases in your first country’s native language (‘hello,’ ‘goodbye,’ ‘thank you’, ‘excuse me’, and ‘sorry, I don’t speak [insert language]’ all go a long way in establishing credibility with locals) 

• Book your flight

• Book your first lodging

• Confirm how you’ll get from the airport to your first lodging

 

Unfortunately, many people overlook this final task. Traveling to a new country, especially one with a different language, can be pretty overwhelming. Arriving outside an unfamiliar airport, you absolutely don’t want to have a panic attack while cab drivers and vendors are yelling at you in a foreign language. 

 

Instead, from the comfort of your own home, confirm exactly how you’ll get from that first airport to where you’re staying. This may involve confirming Uber works in that country and where rideshares pick up in your destination airport, reserving a shuttle, or mapping out the public transportation you’ll take. Whatever route you choose, make sure to plan it in advance. 

 

Step 5: Book and Plan Subsequent Travels 

 

Once you’ve settled into life in your first location, you basically begin a planning rinse-and-repeat cycle. Within the context of your broad, year-long travel outline, each individual leg feeds into the next one. 

 

For example, after our time in Istanbul, we headed to Ukraine to visit Jenna’s family. From there, we decided to return to Turkey to see a different part of the country. While in Ukraine, we confirmed our next destination city (Izmir), found an AirBnB apartment in the city, booked a flight, and confirmed that we’d be able to get an Uber from the Izmir airport to our apartment. If we had instead tried building a detailed itinerary for our entire trip, we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to hear about how awesome Izmir is from people we met in Istanbul and update our travels accordingly! 

 

For the rest of our time, we repeated the same cycle. We’d get to a new place, explore, meet people, and get recommendations for cool places to see next. Then, we’d take those recommendations and build a detailed itinerary for that next step - all within the broader bookend of our defined return date. That’s also how we ended up spending a month and a half camping and traveling through Namibia, a leg of our journey 100% inspired by people we met in South Africa who raved about the country. 

 

Step 6: Be Flexible!

Last but not least, be flexible! Even the best laid plans can fall apart, and surprises (some good, some less so) inevitably pop up on the road. When you travel for a year, you have to embrace some element of the unknown. Bumps in the road are just unavoidable. But, if you take a flexible approach to things, you can translate any situation into a happy little accident!