So you’ve made the decision to save your money so you can spend some time travelling the world. That, my friend, is the beginning a beautiful story. By now you’ve probably got big lists of all the places you want to visit and you spend your nights on travel websites filled with inspiration for your future dreams. I know because I was there. But then a few months pass, and you still have the same dream but you’re still at home working your little butt off, slowly but surely transferring money into your savings account every payday. You see, on all these travel blogs we become so inspired from, no one ever talks about the big elephant in the room: how hard it is to save for travel, and how crazy you can make yourself with anticipation and excitement for the big departure.
But don’t fret, I’m here to help you. Calm down, relax, and keep reading for a list of all the ways I (somewhat) sanely made it through a year of saving for travel.
1. Start a blog
There are so many reasons to start a blog, but for me the greatest relief was having an outlet to express my excitement. I’m not good with technology at all, so creating my own website was a learning curve of its own, but having a space to record my past travels and future plans was both exciting and liberating. To be honest, this blog was created before I even had the crazy plan to leave my job and travel for an entire year. I had been at my job for four months then, and my feet were getting very restless and I needed to have an outlet to express my wanderlust. Six months after that, and here we are. Jobless and on my way to Bangkok!
2. Keep a journal
Writing things down on paper has always had a therapeutic effect on me. It’s amazing how fast time flies when you keep a journal. You write every time you’re feeling frustrated and then all of a sudden you have a full notebook! And plus, now I have so many interesting memories of all the emotions I experienced during my brief stint in the corporate world.
3. Read
This one is obvious. Reading is good advice for just about anything! But having a book to occupy your mind during free times helps to distract you from your excitement. And also if you pick the right book, you can be educating yourself for your travels. Here were my top 5 favourite books I read in the past year that helped inspire me for my travels:
- Catfish and Mandala by Andrew X. Pham: A book about a young man raised in America who returns to his home country of Vietnam and bikes from the South to the North in an attempt to reconcile his past.
- The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss: A book about maximizing your time.
- The Hapiness of Pursuit by Chris Guillebeau: A book about how having a life with big dreams and big quests actually makes people live happier and more fulfilled lives.
- The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner: Following a man’s path around the world to discover the correlation between geography and happiness, this book is full of so much wit and humour I found it hard to put down.
- Touch the Dragon by Karen Connelly: A book about a high school Canadian girl who studies abroad in Thailand for a year. Very relatable for me, but also a great book for anyone travelling to Thailand as there are a lot of cultural differences explained.
4. Find a New Hobby
You need to be having fun. All the saving will get to your head, and that’s not a good thing. So as soon as Spring rolled around, I devoted myself to planting a garden. For a good month, all of my free time was devoted to working outside planting my best garden yet. And now I have some very tasty vegetables to show for all my hard work! Likewise, you need to find your own outlet for creativity, something that makes you excited and distracts you momentarily from all the stress of saving.
5. Treat your Hometown like a Tourist Destination
I can’t tell you how many times I drove down the main road of my neighbourhood thinking “I need to get out of this town”. Until one day instead of thinking that, I simmered on why I was so miserable in my hometown at that exact moment and why travelling was such a tantalizing option. The thing is, I’m the kind of person that craves novelty. I need new experiences and inspiration, and I get bored fast. So from that day I decided to treat my hometown as if I were in a new place. I would take a different route home, I would try new hiking spots, I would change up my workout routine, I would try different restaurants for happy hour. As many things I could change in order to keep my hometown seeming different I would do. And it helped!
6. Develop Blogging Contacts
When I first started my blog I needed encouragement and motivation. And since there wasn’t anyone around me to keep me on track, I would look for other bloggers to inspire me to dream big. I would find my favourite bloggers and email them asking for helpful words of encouragement and pieces of advice.
7. Find Friends with Similar Interests
Surround yourself with friends that love travelling as much as you do. These are the kind of friends that will hold you accountable for your savings goals and help you stay motivated until the day that you leave. And most important, these are the friends that won’t nag you to death and ask you all those tough life questions that fill you with doubt about what the heck you’re doing with your life. That’s always good.
8. Host Dinner Parties
Enjoy the fact that you have a space to invite friends over too, because you’re not going to be able to invite friends over for dinner when you’re travelling. So take advantage of that now! Here’s some dinner party menus to get you started…
9. Go on Day Trips
It’s important for your mental health to get out of your hometown every now and then. If you can go somewhere for the day, do it. This will help remind you that a World does indeed exist outside of your town limits. And taking breaks to get outside of your routine life will help rejuvenate you to keep on going towards your savings goals.
10. Embrace the Seasons
Stop obsessing over your departure date and take a minute to enjoy each season that passes by as you spend your time at home. Enjoy the little things, and don’t take the beauty of each passing seasons for granted. Here’s some ideas to help you truly enjoy the special moments of each passing season:
Winter
- Go sledding and ice skating.
- Have your friends over for a big Holiday cookie exchange party. Here’s some cookie recipes to get you started….
- Have a Gingerbread house decorating party. This can get very messy very fast…
- Catch up on some new books on a snow day.
Spring
- Plant a garden. Even if you live in an apartment you can create a little windowsill garden.
- Get in shape: take up a new sporting activity to switch things up. For me, this was yoga.
- Participate in spring cleaning to get ready for your big move. Only keep the things you actually need.
- Explore the new restaurants that have popped up in your area over the winter.
Summer
- Plan a beach weekend with your friends.
- Learn how to make “poptails” so you can impress your friends. Here’s some recipes to get you started.
- Decide to be baseball fans for this year and go to as many games as possible in your town.
- Explore your town’s best creameries.
Fall
- Go Apple Picking and then compete with your friends on who can make the best apple pie.
- Have a pumpkin carving party.
- Go to a corn maze and get lost.
- Tour a winery on a warm fall’s day.
11. Practice Yoga/Meditate
Finally, yoga and meditation can help you learn to relax your mind and focus on the present. The day you leave might seem so far away and every now and then you might feel anxiety about that, but it’s also important to take a step back and live in the moment. Life moves too fast for you not to.
So take a deep breath and relax. Seriously, calm down. Just remember: life is about the journey, not the destination. Soon enough you will be on that plane ready for departure, but in the meantime don’t forget to have some fun in the present, for the present is all you have after all!
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