The Plan

Hello reader, and welcome to the very first ever blog post produced by yours truly! I’m not nearly as proficient in writing as I am at eating so pardon my literary growing pains. You’ve found yourself in the world travel blog of Chandni Patel and Michael Barton! Yes, I know it’s terribly exciting, so let’s begin by previewing our next year of world travel and how we got to this point. Our plan is to visit over twenty countries through Europe, the Americas, and Asia starting in August 2023. The map shows our planned destinations right now. Right now because who knows where we’ll go once we start! What we can confirm is that we’ll spend a few months bouncing around each continent before returning home for a national park road trip. We’ll see what happens in between!

So why go now? Why not?! There will never be a perfect time for a trip like this, and we got tired of saying “we’ll do it next month/summer/year” so we finally committed! We’re at a great point in our lives to travel; neither of us are home owners, so no mortgage to worry about, no kids to coordinate, no doggies to say tearful goodbyes to. Someday we both want a home and kids, but for now, we’re travelers first. However, the biggest reason we’re able to do this is our religious saving.

Our very first planning step wasn’t just picking destinations, it was picking them within a set spending limit agreed to upfront. Weeks of research went into travel costs, and after nine rough draft schedules, we chose the countries mapped above. We met our first financial goal by saving up to our rough spending limit of $40,000 each. Our second financial goal was to make sure we have enough saved to live life without needing to find jobs immediately. Spending all our savings only on travel would be a successful financial failure, without planning to return to our lives back home. Travel finances will be a major focus of our trip and this blog, but our goals aren’t only financial.

We want to eat the weirdest things and meet the friendliest people! We want to visit friends we haven’t seen in years and make new ones along the way. We want to appreciate how little is needed for happiness not just by living out of our backpacks but by experiencing it in new cultures. We want this blog to encourage sustainable and efficient travels, because while it’s made for family and friends to keep updated, we hope it also helps anyone on future trips.

Travel appreciation is at the core of each of our goals. Keep an eye out for blog and photo updates because we’re about to head out!