Preparing our Trip

When you decide to take a trip around the world, that’s pretty neat! You picture yourself on lots of adventures. You picture yourself visiting places you’ve dreamt of for the longest time. You picture yourself discovering lost temples in the middle of unexplored jungles…
Preparing this trip however is way less fun! But you gotta do it! So for those interested, here is how we’ve done it:

First, we thought about the way we would travel and listed every country we wanted to discover.
That’s where we’ve learnt our first lesson: ADAPTABILITY.

A Kayak World Tour?

At first we thought of traveling with a 4×4, to be freer (moving around, accomodation, stuff we could bring, etc.) but we quickly realized it was not such a good idea after all. The logistic was too complicated and the costs were way too high for our budget (funnily enough, it’s not easy to cross oceans with a car).
So we had to adapt our “country wish list” (goodbye European countries and Iran). But the way we would travel was not the only constraint to that list. We had to adapt to wars, Covid, revolutions and a budget which was not without limits (goodbye Sri Lanka, China, Botswana or Namibia).

We ended up choosing the plane: fast and efficient. We know it may not be the greenest mode of transportation (well, a 4×4 isn’t either right?!) but cycling is tough on the rear end… And with a child, plane is really more practical. The only constraints are flight hours. So we had to find short flights (4 to 5 hours) or overnight flights. It’s a bit more expensive but the comfort of everyone is priceless (patience is not Côme’s best strength). So we spent many, MANY hours of research on “kayak.fr” to find the cheapest flights and we ended up establishing an itinerary (there’s still a part we have to figure out, but most of it is set).

So, what do we bring?

We then thought about the stuff we would bring. The keyword(s): light travel.
So we asked ourselves two questions: what do we need to live for 9 months without a (mobile) home and without being loaded like donkeys? That led to another question: what will be the weather like in the countries we’ll visit? We went to check on this website:
https://planificateur.a-contresens.net/quand-partir.html

The result was: country 1: hot. Country 2: hot (45°C/113°F), Country 3, 4 and 5: hot, hot, hot. Country 6 and 7: temperate. Ah! A bit of cool will do us good. Country 8: hot, and so on… Conclusion: Good news, no winter this year! No warm clothes to carry. A huge difference for our carrying capacity!

That settled it, we’ll take small backpacks (40L), the ones you can carry on with you on the plane. We’ll spare ourselves luggage check-in with all its troubles and back aches.

So, for the curious ones, here are the things we’ve packed:

Julia:

• 4 Shorts
• 1 Jean + 1 Legging
• 5 T-shirts + 1 Tank top
• 1 Long-sleeved shirt
• 1 Warm sweater
• 1 Warm undershirt
• 2 Bras
• 1 Swimsuit
• 6 Socks (pairs)
• 4 Panties + 3 Menstrual ones
• 1 Jacket
• 1 Cap
• 1 Sneakers (pair)
• 1 Flip flops (pair)

• 1 Solid shampoo
• 1 Soap (prepared by Emilie, a friend)
• 1 Solid toothpaste
• 1 Razor
• 1 Alum stone
• 2 Parfume samples
• 1 Mascara
• 1 Black pencil
• 1 Toothbrush
• 1 Hairbrush
• 1 Towel (quick dry)
• 1 Tweezers

• 1 Shoulder strap bag
• 1 Fanny pack
• 1 Phone charger
• 1 Earphones
• 1 Sun glasses
• 1 Spare glasses
• 1 Raincoat
• 1 Health kit
  • Headache
  • Stomachache
  • Diarhea
  • Tick forceps

Eric:

Côme:

That seems to be a lot, but it all fits within our backpacks and weight just about 7.3 kg (16 lbs)…

Did we think of everything?

We also estimated the budget we would need for each country we’d visit so we could plan our savings accordingly. What would be the costs of accomodation, food, transports, sightseeing? The previous website helped us answering that question but also www.numbeo.com (cost of living), official websites of the places we wanted to visit and accomodation websites (booking, airbnb and hostelworld.com). So we calculated the highest budget for each country (we hope) and included a “safety” margin for the unexpected.

We then booked most of our flights as well as most of the accomodations for the first few months of our trip. We would have liked to leave more room for improvisation but with a child traveling with us and our budget constraint we thought it would be best not to leave it to the last minute (we’ll see how this goes).

And then there were many more constraints: taking vaccin shots, opening a bank account which would facilitate payments in other countries, a last minute application for our international driving license and our passports (last minute because it takes the French administration about 3 months to provide you with the documents…no comment), etc. etc.

And there were many more things to organize: creating this blog, buying stuff we would need for the trip (universal travel adapter, power bank, USB flash drives, etc.), downloading ebooks for Côme (for bedtime stories), preparing activities for “home” schooling, gathering all the information from our bookings (flights and accomodations), downloading offline Google maps of the places we would go, downloading the languages in Google translate that would be helpful, etc. etc.

But now, we’re ready! (almost)
We take off on Septembre the 3rd. First stop: Istanbul !

PS: Thank you to everyone who read that far. That’s us sharing a bit of the suffering we went through with this preparation. 🙂

PS 2: For future world travelers who want more details or help for the preparation of their trip, don’t hesitate to contact us.