Behind the Veil
Not every day is a glamorous adventure of wanderinggg and sightseeing. We have normal, unglamorous, “sweatpant” filled days too. We have bad days that don’t go according to plan and we have to pivot or change. We have experienced highs and lows and meh days when we are too tired to move. Consider this a small glimpse into the mundane everyday things associated with our slow travel life.
Laundry
Most of the places we have stayed have washers in-unit (it’s definitely high on our “want” list for any place). Dryers however are not so common (and really not good for your clothes or the environment) so we have pretty much gotten used to air drying all our clothes. We have also done our fair share of hand washing in sinks or bathtubs. This can look different based on each location, the type of drying rack, and climate that can lead to faster or slower drying times. We also now know which items take forever to dry and which dry in a flash so we don’t wash things that take forever to dry right before we are packing to leave a place.
Travel planning
We only have so much planned ahead of time. We normally spend at least one day at our previous location planning out our next 1-2 stops. We have decided that 6 days is mostly the bare minimum we will travel specifically to a place, unless we are visiting using our Hub model (for which we would leave our stuff in one place and take a short 1-2 night trip somewhere else) or are just doing a transport related layover. The 6 days leaves us at least one day that we can spend mostly focused on planning our next destination. We have booked accommodations as near as 24 hours ahead of time and flights as near as 3 days away. We certainly try to do it with a bit more time but we are really going with the flow so there is no hard or fast rule ever. Flights overseas aren't really like in the states either where prices dramatically rise the closer you get to a departure date either so we haven’t had too many issues playing it by ear. A couple of planning things we use:
Travel Calendar. We record all our major stops in a travel specific calendar that is shared with family so someone always knows were we are!
Google Drive. We keep receipts and track budgets within google drive.
Google Maps. We create a custom Google Map for many of our long term spots, we also have a running list of restaurants and accommodations saved to our google account so no matter where we are we can see great restaurants and places we have saved.
Budgeting
The only way this adventure works is if we can make our budget work. We have a detailed spreadsheet where we keep track of our spending. We can look at this info in a variety of ways (thank you pivot tables) such as by location, month, category. We download all our credit card transactions directly from their respective web portal so it’s pretty automatic, we just customize the location and travel category. We do this about once a month. It’s eye opening and empowering because it allows us to plan and know what track we are on. We don’t specifically limit ourselves to a daily budget only because some days will be vastly over (tour and travel days) and some vastly under (yay for hawker center dinners for less than $10 a day).
Grocery shopping
Before we arrive at a new place we already know where the nearest grocery or convenience stores are so that we can stock up on needed supplies first thing. We try to visit our accommodations before visiting the store because each place comes with a different assortment of utensils. It’s best to assess what we are working with for sure before getting things (no point in getting mangos if we have no sharp knives to cut them). In Asia the water is not potable so we have to visit the store a bit more frequently and we generally stock up on the 6L+ water jugs once every few days. Shoutout to Ryan who carries these home from the store every time.
Cooking
Every place comes with different levels of cooking tools and amenities. We have become so adaptable, both in circumstances and ingredients. Sometimes it feels like we are in an episode of Cutthroat Kitchen, with limited tools or trying to use and reuse what ingredients we have (such as leftovers and local market items). Some funny cooking instances:
We have had everything from a place with super nice knife set to a place that had one semi-rusted steak knife for cutting.
We had a place with an espresso maker but it came with the wrong pods (we just opened them to make cold brew) and we had an espresso maker that not a single store in the city sold the pods (except the apartment complex that sold them for an exorbitant price).
We have had places with ovens (great for our lazy staple of frozen pizzas) and places without (or with an oven but it didn’t work).
We used to talk so much trash about air fryers…until a few of our places had one and we fell in love. To be fair they are a mini oven and when you haven’t had an oven in months… you would love it too. We wouldn’t love it if we had an actual oven. Side note: 99% of places in our SE travels didn’t have an oven.
The pinnacle of kitchen appliances has to be a panini press.
Our favorite thing to cook is some of our home staples (when we can find the needed ingredients), since those are things we can’t get on the road.
Travel Days
This includes packing, checking out, transiting, settling, unpacking. It’s a routine we have gotten very used to. We have had more travel days than we have had actually places since sometimes we move accommodations in the same city. No two travel days are the same and we just approach each with patience and resilience. We know it will be a challenge and we will work through it as it happens. We normally pack the day before or morning of departure depending on our transit scenario (early flight, long layover, early checkout etc.). We have thankfully not had any airbnb nightmare checkouts and just clean up our space and leave. We have had flight delays and headache but as we said, just go with the flow. Our Lounge Access courtesy of our Capital One card has been the BIGGEST savior on long travel days as we have almost always had a place to relax and eat before our flight (except a few of the tiniest airports in the Philippines).
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Enjoy some of our other behind the scenes photos.
