Goals and thoughts before our 3-month trip
Itinerary
We are less than 2 weeks away from departing on our 3-month trip! We fly out from NYC to Madrid on June 4th, 2019. Here is the rough itinerary:
Madrid, Spain
Seville, Spain
Marrakesh, Morocco
Naples, Italy
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Rome Italy
NYC for a wedding on 7/6
Tokyo, Japan (and various other day trips)
Seoul, South Korea
Shanghai, China
Xian, China
Chengdu, China
Bali, Indonesia for a wedding on 8/10
Hanoi, Vietnam
Singapore
We are trying to be more spontaneous this time since we have lots of time so the itinerary might evolve based on our experiences.
Goals
Here are some of the goals we have for our trip
- Eat all the food! — We are huge foodies so we will be trying all the cuisines from all the cities we visit
- Making new connections — We are going to make a conscious effort to talk to locals and meet new people, either via tours, hostel stays, or language exchanges
- Learning history — Everything exists within a context, and history gives us the perspective we need to see and understand our surroundings in different dimensions
- Absorbing differences — I love finding differences everywhere I travel. The U.S. is good at certain things and terrible at others, traveling allows you to see the alternatives
- Self-reflection — There’s nothing like traveling to get some introspection on ourselves, we learn things about ourselves that we wouldn’t otherwise by staying within our comfort zones
- Checking the Bucket List — There are so many destinations on our bucket list, this trip will allow us to check off a large chunk of it. When we have more commitments later in life, we will have fewer regrets about what we didn’t do
- Step out of the bubble — We live within our own bubbles that we cannot see until we visit other places. Things we take for granted, problems we didn’t know still existed, and unexpected joys to be had. Maybe there are bigger problems to solve than the next Tinder for dogs?
Thoughts
We are super excited to finally have 3 months to ourselves to explore the world, this has been a dream of ours for many years, and its finally coming true! Ever since we formulated this plan to move to NYC, I have felt this is a trip we needed. There will so many unexpected experiences, things we will learn, and fun we will have, isn’t this why we are working so hard every day to be able to do? I don’t want to live my life on autopilot, forever climbing that ladder until retirement, we should be working to live, not living to work. If there is a time to do some extended travels, it’s now, between jobs and before we have house/kids where we can no longer travel on a whim.
Time to make some dreams come true!
