Our flight to Cincinnati landed 10 minutes early – this kind of sums up our trip! We couldn’t have asked for more as we saw virtually every item we set out to see three months ago!

Thanks to the 125+ of you who signed up to follow our blog (who viewed our content over 8000 times!) We know that many more read via Facebook links and stopping by the site itself. We hope that something we posted along the way was enjoyable and interesting. If not maybe we provided you a nice distraction from time to time!!

We are headed back to work tomorrow (yes, tomorrow!) so it is time to rejoin the real world!

This will be the last blog post. We plan to keep the blog up for the foreseeable future in case there is something interesting you might want to reference. This blog is also our personal journal of what we saw and did for the day we don’t remember anymore! 😉

People always ask what your favorites of the trip were and what it was like to be outside the US for almost three months. Here are our thoughts:

Trip Stats:
-Days Traveled: 89 (including international date line days for you travel geeks out there :))
-Flights delayed: 30 minutes over 22 flights!
-Countries Visited: 20
-Miles Flown: 37,500
-Miles Driven: 8,316
-Unique Hotels Visited: 54 (Maybe I shouldn’t have counted that one!)
-Trip Cost vs Budget: Over by $2 (stupid expensive Cincinnati taxis! Thanks to Emily the forecaster ;))

What it is like to continuously travel?
-The first two weeks you feel like you are on vacation.
-Then, you start to realize that this is your life for 3 months…you must take time to monitor the normal aspects of life like your bills as well as do dreaded laundry!
-Slowly, you have no idea what day of the week it is, but you do know the date (otherwise you might miss a flight!). You start to say things like “I know that today is Sept. 1, but I have no clue what day of the week it is. A few days ago was Tuesday, right? So, today must be in the Thursday-Monday range.” We had breakfast with one of Ryan’s coworkers in Geneva and did this. We felt like retirees!
-Now this feels like our day to day life. That means going back to work will likely be an adjustment!!

Best practices:
-Plan, plan, plan! We are crazy planners and had a 126 page itinerary. Ok, that is probably not for you, but the more you can plan ahead of time the less decisions you have to make on the fly. Changes early in a trip of this length can snowball into later scheduling disasters. Minimizing surprises is key when possible.

Full Disclosure: Given our crazy nature we did plan in free time 🙂

In the end we had virtually no issues over 90 days which was our goal!

-Do your own research: Only you know what you like so don’t always trust the top 10 lists sight unseen. Some of the top 10 lists have some uninteresting sites (to us at least!)

-Make restaurant reservations: People think we’re crazy, but we almost always got to eat at places known to be really good. Getting recos from other people and hotels can be dicey. Also, we noticed that in many places people don’t make as many reservations so being an international diner with reservations often resulted in the best table in the house.

-Register all your stops with the US State Department: There is a program called STEP. Hopefully you don’t need any help, but we appreciated the emails we got for any activity in the country. We also wanted to make sure the government knows where we were in case something happened to us or something went awry in the country!

Our Favorite Stops:
-Bora Bora (Natural beauty and relaxation)
-Japan (Historical sites, Amazing customer service)
-France (Paris: Food and museums, Brittany: Natural beauty and food, South France/Monaco: Luxury and natural beauty)
-Swiss Alps (Natural Beauty)
-Australia (Perth and Sydney)
-New Zealand (Natural beauty)
-Bolivia (Better understand how developing nations live and how we can help)

That’s all for now! Thanks for being part of our journey!

Ryan & Emily

Many people have asked or wondered – why are you taking time off without pay to take this crazy trip? We could have taken a 2 week vacation and might have been further ahead in many ways. Well…here was/is our thinking:

1. Saves Money!

Traveling on a Round The World (RTW) ticket is actually much cheaper than visiting your top 5 places in 5 consecutive years. Here is an example:

-We have always wanted to go to Australia and New Zealand.
-A round trip ticket to Sydney is generally around $1,200.
-If you want to see a lot of Australia and New Zealand, you have to buy additional in country flights. These can often be a few hundred dollars per city/stop.
By the time you do that you at talking about $2,000 – $2,500 or more per person!
At this point you are approaching 40-50% of a RTW ticket in just one trip!

2. Cultural Comparisons

We had not thought about this prior to the trip, but it has been one of the highlights! On a daily basis you get to experience new cultures and compare/contrast. When you visit just one spot, you experience that culture versus your own only (or what you remember from other trips years/months ago). While this is great, we could compare many cultures in a short time span!

It is awesome to have a small understanding of many cultures and countries when you hear media reports on a country. Maybe the report is 100% correct or maybe not…but once you have some insights, you can now draw conclusions.

3. Visit A Spot That Makes No Economic Sense

You can visit a lot of places that sound interesting but don’t seem worth a full vacation. We wouldn’t have wanted to pay a fortune to visit Easter Island, but when you can essentially stop for no added cost why wouldn’t you stop?!?

4. Jet Lag!

When you travel around the world, you generally don’t switch more than 4-5 hours at a time. Unlike most Americans we felt great on our first day in Australia vs acting like zombies!

You also save a lot of in transit days vs. taking several individual vacations. For example, visiting Hong Kong cost us a 2 hour flight. Flying from home would likely burn up to 2 vacation days to fly there and back.

5. Better Understanding of Those Visiting America

After living outside of the US for almost three months, we now have a better understanding of what it is like to be far away from home. Those that were unexpectedly kind to us will never be forgotten. We will go out of our way to help those who look lost while traveling even more than before!

6. Personal Reflection/Time to Relax

We all know that it takes about two weeks of work (in one week) to prepare for a one week vacation. Once you make it over that hump, it is nice to have longer than a week to decompress. We have been on 24/7 since we started grad school in 2010. It was nice to be most worried about our next blog post or whether the next chef truly deserved two Michelin stars…you know…the huge worries of life!

We also took the opportunity to read multiple books recommended to us over the last three years!

7. Carpe Diem (Seize the Day)

You only live once. How many times have you heard people say “I always wanted to go to X, but now I am too old, I am too scared to go, etc.”?

Taking such trips is expensive (we don’t argue that), but if you have the financial means and potential flexibility (as we fortunately did!) – why not? If there is something you really want to do (it doesn’t need to be traveling), put the goal on paper and ask anyone you know that can help make it happen! We are forever grateful to our management for giving us the opportunity to pursue this awesome experience!!

Plus….we don’t think our money comes along with us once we die!

If anyone has questions on our crazy journey or would like tips/help, let us know! Just leave a comment on this post, and we will respond via email privately.

We have updated our Tips & Tricks page!! All new items are marked with **

Take a look: https://mbaglobetrotters.com/ryan-emilys-tips-tricks/

All,

We have posted some interesting tips and tricks from our travels so far. As we go along and find more things that do/don’t work, we will continue to update this. If you have international travels in your future it might be interesting. Even if you aren’t traveling anywhere for awhile, you might pick up an idea or two!

https://mbaglobetrotters.com/ryan-emilys-tips-tricks/

If you are curious of any aspect of our trip, post a comment and we will get back to you with an answer …in a few days 🙂

Ryan & Emily

Step 2: Complete Planning the Trip & Packing

Several people have asked us what we are taking on the trip – well, we are not taking much! To keep us from lugging around lots of weight (and minimize baggage fees!), we are only bringing a backpack and carry on. Our goal was to take no more than 15 total kgs each (~33 lbs). Even this small amount of luggage will require some carry on fees along the way! To keep overall weight down we picked these two bags – let’s hope they hold up 🙂

Our main luggage bag is a Rick Steves bag that is one of the lightest on the market (he is the guy on PBS that goes all over Europe). The bag is a little under three pounds and can be carried, put over the shoulder, or even worn as a backpack. Reducing the weight of the bag itself really helps us stay under 15 kg.

For our backpack we picked a Pacsafe bag we found at REI’s annual sale. The bag has several security features like slash resistance and zippers that latch into loops to slow down pick pockets!

Here is a pict of our entire luggage set – this is it for 87 days!

To further reduce weight we both bought lots of light weight, breathable clothing items. Ryan found some nice Lacoste and Nike shirts that can be washed and air dry in about 2 hours. I found some great Patagonia clothing that converts between form (skirts can become dresses, etc.) that are also washable. We will have to do laundry along the way for sure! We also found that compression bags were critical to compacting our clothes into small areas.

Step 3: Finish Work

We both had very nice last days of work. Several members of Ryan’s team got him a giant card and my group took me out to lunch today. Ryan’s work group had its annual offsite and volunteered at Matthew 25 ministries in Blue Ash sorting products that are sent all over the US/world. It was a fitting way to end as Matthew 25’s work helps some of the same people we will be working with during our Bolivia mission trip in October.

My workgroup made my last day very special as well! My manager got salty carmel cupcakes from The Bon Bonerie that I love, and we had a great lunch out. They also gave me a signed caricature and frame which was really nice. Wow – I work with the best group!!

To finalize our last work day for three months, both of us closed out our remaining projects and got the email inboxes both to 0. Woohoo! 🙂

Time to Go!

We ate all the food (literally!) in our refrigerator for dinner so it is time to go!

Our flight leaves around noon on Saturday!! We hope to update the blog every few days with info and pictures from our stops.

Feel free to leave comments and questions along the way!