By: MJ + PJ
What is the point of this website?
A) To help ordinary families envision and plan extraordinary adventures by sharing and explaining our approach, and providing some very specific data examples.
B) To have a multimedia diary and record of this adventure for when we are old(er).
C) To have a common portal for our family and friends while we are on the road away from them.
Why are you doing this?
Life is short, its a big world out there, and the potential regret was too high. We could not find a reason not to. Our questions to you are: Why have you not done this? Why are you not doing this?
Why would you put yourself in such danger?
There are thousands of things more dangerous than traveling around the world. We can, like, read warning signs and heed them and look both ways and not touch stuff. We listen to and take advice.
Has anyone ever done this kind of thing before?
We could give you examples from the last 500 years, or beyond this millennia. The short answer is that humans have been doing this kind of thing for eons, and will continue to do so for eons. There are many families traveling and sharing their story… right now! Search around on social media (and see who we follow @cakesncampfires) and you will find some amazing examples.
How did you prepare for this?
Like anything, if you want it bad enough you will take whatever steps and jump through whatever hoops to get what you want. Besides that, it took at least 18 months of getting stuff ready and trying to minimalize. Read the Advice + Tips posts.
What about all your things?
They are just things. They can be re-aquired… but hopefully not. We will be gaining experience and perspective and meaning and fulfillment – these will comfort us on our deathbeds.
Where are you going to go?
We will start in Colorado and then go somewhere we want to go. Then we will leave there. We will repeat this until we are compelled to declare that we are done. You can see where we’ve been on the MAP page, and search the details on the 365 DATA page.
You guys must be loaded, like super rich… what’s this going to cost?
If you did a cost benefit analysis you’d be missing the point and wasting your time. This venture is clearly valuable, needed, yearned for and needs to be played out. We saved and had cheap hobbies and past times. We never had a TV, we used the low cost things we bought heavily. We have enough smarts and are low maintenance enough to push our dollars a long way, and are willing to be uncomfortable at times. The daily budget target for our family of three is USD $150/day. We should be much richer in experience when when we finish, and that is much more important than being money rich in life.
What if you run out of money and this only lasts 6 months?
We will either work it out, or be done with it. Thank you for your concern!
What if you run out of money and it is 2 years later?
We will have really worked it out. You’d better have been paying attention!
Will you come back to where you were?
Literally and philosophically: No. We are leaving a fantastic place and great friends, but we will probably end up in Australia… somewhere. We would logically move to Connecticut if we returned to the US because it is the next state alphabetically after California and Colorado.
What about your child?
Our child will be fine. This is not a year long bells and whistles and frills vacation. It’s an adventure, and that means planning and challenges and learning and dealing with complicated and random stuff. He will still receive an education and be held accountable with a curriculum.
What about your family and friends?
They will be ok. We started this whole website and blog thing. They have been invited to join us somewhere down the road to meet up and hang out with us if they want a vacation somewhere during this time. They can’t really come to our house since it has been sold.
When you are done, then what will you do?
Good question! We have no idea. It will probably be something very different to before.
But what if/about…?
Yeah, probably got it considered if not already covered. This is the age of the internet. We will work it out one way or another.
Are you Swedish?
No, it’s just a nice vibrant color scheme that we both liked. Arvid Carlsson is cool, man. The blue came with the WordPress theme we are using, and the yellow is from PJ & AJ’s painting of our Rocky-Dog which is now our logo.
If I comment on your posts I have to submit my email. Why?
That is simply a standard way of ensuring you are not a spammer or a bot that will clutter up our website and make it sluggish. Nothing is done with your email, but it is available for us to reply to. It is not visible or available to anyone else when you comment on a post.
If I subscribe to your website, what do I get?
On our home page you can subscribe by submitting your name and email, and then by responding to the confirmation email you receive. This is to ensure that someone who subscribes really wants to. Our website only sends out notifications about new content being published on the site. There is no marketing or other email. If we post something new, you are the very first to hear about it. Within the next day we also notify our social media channels of new content.
Why are there disclosure messages?
The United States FTC regulations stipulate that if a website can potentially earn a commission through what is called an affiliate link, then it must be overtly disclosed in proximity to the link. So you will see disclosure statements if we are blogging about something in particular that we used. Any commission earned for us is a simple way to subsidize maintaining this website. Following an Amazon ad on our website takes you to Amazon, but Amazon gives us credit in the way of a small commission for anything you then purchase. (If you start at Amazon, they don’t have to give anyone credit for bringing a product to your attention so they logically save that small commission.) Google ads appear as more traditional advertisements which loosely relate to our content, but pay commission on page impressions and clicks basis. Read more at FTC.gov
How do I navigate this site of yours?
You have a few options here. We will also be posting to our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter feeds, so you should get notifications to link back to this site from there. Once here, you have a few options:
- Use the menu links that lie across the top of each page.
- Follow the “recent posts” list on the side or in the body of the home page.
- Use the search box on the side of the menu page (or below if using certain mobile devices).
- Go to the bottom left of the home page and follow the link to our site map, a listing of all of our posts.
- Go to the bottom right of any page and select a topical tag/keyword.
What if I have further questions?
Use the comments section BELOW to ask any questions you have not found answers to elsewhere on the website. Alternatively, use the comments section on the relevant post or page on this website. This way other users with the same question can find the answer also. Due to posts and threads being difficult to relocate on Facebook, we will not be using that as a Q&A forum.
Kelly
June 11, 2018 at 6:19amFAQ was very helpful.
Are you traveling in a car? SUV? Van? Camper?
What about health care? Just go to the Minute Clinic or Urgent Care if needle?
Are you planning on other continents besides NA and AUS?
If you stopped today and had ONE MORE “must see” before you actually called it quits where would you be heading?
Admin
June 11, 2018 at 4:16pmThanks for the questions!
A car/sedan is our vehicle. So this is the volume of belongings we aimed to pack. While we had a SUV/4WD it was much older and less secure and probably would not have made it around the US. The sedan is more efficient and comfortable, but less space – a problem we continue to address. We can fit it all in, but we like leg space and to recline and don’t want too much gear either floating or visible in the back seat. Some have assumed we are in a camper or RV or large vehicle, but we are not. A sedan enables us to access more parking lots, ferries, roads, restricted areas where a larger vehicle may have limitations or higher costs.
Health care while in the US for us comes down to utilizing COBRA if needed, and by the time the COBRA window has expired we will be out of the US. There are international options for health care insurance, but there are some restrictions on pre-existing conditions and nationality vs origin of insurance purchase (I.e. are you in US or somewhere else wanting overseas insurance?). Most Commonwealth nations and other combinations of nations have reciprocal agreements for their citizens utilizing health care when abroad. We will have our previous health care contacts for advice, but for most scenarios we will just present to appropriate level of care settings. We have some time to sort out the international piece for when we depart the US. This is a challenging and potentially expensive aspect of travel.
As we finish in North America we will be looking at “what’s next?”. We have several criteria for that question:
1. Where is the next cheapest flight deal?
2. Where is it still warm? (We are following non-winter to save on clothing space/bulk)
3. Do we have necessary immunizations for that target location?
4. Is it somewhere that has access to the places we want at that time? (I.e. wet seasons limit access)
So your guess is as good as ours! Watch https://www.cupcakesandcampfires.com/map/ to see what pans out!
If we had one more “must see”, it would be the people we know in the US… but that is clearly impractical! Where would we be heading? Let us get a bit closer to that point and hard question before we answer!
Janet
June 19, 2018 at 7:31amHow did you plan your for daily expenses? Food, campsite, gas? Do you have a contingency account for car repairs, upkeep? Your photos are anazing.
Admin
June 23, 2018 at 12:52amReading ahead gave us an idea on how to project expenses. The USD$50/day/per person rule/target seemed feasible, so we have used that as our expense target. This is an average – some countries and regions are more costly (like N.America, Scandinavia, Australia, Europe) so we need to limit or play these areas carefully. Asia, Africa, S.America are cheaper so we can claw back over budget days by being in those places for good lengths of time.
If you keep an eye on our DATA page, you will see how it is going! The left side has a little green “+” symbol that shows our current average cost. We have been lucky to have had quite a few days in private stays with family and friends which has saved us $10 to $130/day at least. We have camping gear and can car camp anyhwhere with what we have. Our account is to cover all costs – car we give away before we leave the US so that problem will disappear!
We have far too many photos to share! A good problem, but culling them down is very challenging – we are trying to keep each album at <100 photos.
Katie
August 12, 2018 at 7:28amHow do you handle mail? Did you get a P.O Box or have it sent to a friend or family member’s house?
Admin
August 13, 2018 at 9:38pmWe handle mail by having it sent to a US ‘home address’, which we changed our address to since selling our home. Most of our mail is of US origin so it makes sense geographically.
There are several companies who can act as a receiving point for your mail if you don’t want to burden a family member or friend! These companies are a little different in how they operate, but generally act as your physical mailbox, then charge for scanning or sending per item that you want opened. We elected not to go with these as have minimal pertinent mail – we don’t have very many bills since we sold our house! In addition, many companies and utilities prefer to have you opt in to electronic services.