I’d say planning was the hardest thing to do. If you can even call what we did “planning”.
We knew we wanted to take this gap year and we had officially given it the green light. But we honestly struggled to plan anything. What was there to plan? Genuinely, we didn’t know where to start. We wanted to slow travel and have freedom to move where life lead us. That meant we couldn’t book anything yet. Was it even worthwhile creating an itinerary if we didn’t plan on following it? Visas? How long do we spend in each place? Where do we go? Where do we stay? It was all too much.
Let’s just say, I get overwhelmed very easily. And when I’m overwhelmed, I shut down and put a stop to planning. The number of times Piki and I would try and discuss our plans and I just shut down after 2 minutes is unbelievable. I take accountability for this, truly!
After many start, stop conversations, we eventually decided to create a rough “itinerary”. We researched routes and planned what we felt would be an efficient route around South East Asia and allocated a sufficient amount of time in each place. This provided us a guide but also the freedom to tweak it or change it if we wanted to. I listened to plenty of podcasts, YouTube videos, TikToks – you name it – to gain as much information on locations and routes to take. It was very helpful and great to hear other travellers perspectives and pros and cons of each place visited.
Once a route was decided, Piki researched visas and detailed a plan of when and how we would need to get visas prior to arriving to each new country. Piki also researched the price of flights/travel to give us a basic idea of what we would be looking at in terms of cost of travel.
From here, it was really just a waiting game. I spent time researching travel insurance, backpacking tips, budget tips and any other minor things that came to mind.
I continued to become overwhelmed at the thought that we weren’t planning enough and at times this lead to arguments between Piki and I.
Let me just say, Piki is a simple gal. She has the ability to take things as they come. Whatever will be, will be. I AM NOT LIKE THIS. I needed to feel 100% confident in our ability to successfully travel with as little room for hiccups as possible.
Piki would continuously say “What do you want me to look into? What is it you need to plan to feel better about this?” I didn’t even know what more we needed to do, I just needed to feel like we were doing something! I knew I was being a pain in the ass but I can’t always control my incessant behaviours.
As time continued, I learnt there wasn’t much more I could plan travel wise. So I poured my focus into preparing our departure. That meant selling our belongings, cleaning out our rental, starting to end subscriptions, insurances, closing accounts ect. Anything that we would not be using once we left. I left as little to the last minute as I could so that the transition was smooth.
We had so much to sell and empty out of our house and I can confidently say, this was the hardest and most stressful part of planning to travel. I am thankful we started to prepare fairly early. We managed to sell most of our belongings well in advance with minor things to dispose as we officially moved out. We successfully sold both cars a few weeks prior to leaving and luckily managed to work with the dealer to hand over the last one two days before we flew out. During this time of only having one car, I would drop off and collect Piki from work as she started earlier and finished later than I did. It was a minor inconvenience that really was the least of our struggles.
Things felt as though they were falling into place and as more and more became sorted, the stress started to lift from our shoulders. We were lucky things worked out smoothly but I also give us a well deserved pat on the back for attention and dedication we put into sorting out our “home-life”. The last thing we wanted was for loose ends to be left in the hands of our family.
Roughly 2 months prior to our departure date, we booked our one-way flights to Bangkok with our first few nights of accomodation and our train to Chaing Mai. The rest was left unwritten.
4 weeks out from flying, we gave our notice to our employers and 3 weeks out we officially moved out of our rental and moved into my parents house.
The last thing left were our goodbyes and stepping onto the plane.