Author: Sean Keener

Travelers of the Week – Rachel and Jeff

If you haven’t had a chance to check out our new traveler profiles, then this is the perfect time to do it.
Part of what makes indie travel great is all the meaningful connections one makes with both locals and other travelers.  So what we wanted to do was to give indie travelers a place to get together and share their adventures with other like-minded people.  These traveler profiles are short and sweet and offer a variety of information about each person’s round the world trip (or for those who have not yet gone – their dream round the world trip).
Each Tuesday, though, we are going to highlight one traveler from our profiles and offer up a little more information about them.  Learn more about traveler’s of the week Rachel and Jeff below!

1. When do you leave for your trip and where is your first destination?

We actually just left on August 29th. Our first destination was Mongolia – originally we meant to be there 3 weeks but we ended up staying just a week. We’ve just arrived in Beijing at the time of writing this.

2. What is your biggest concern at this point of your trip?

In Mongolia, Jeff’s card was eaten by an ATM and Rachel’s was not accepted by most ATMs or even in many banks. We are now worried about getting Jeff a replacement card – at the moment, Rachel is paying for everything! So we are sort of worried about continuing to have issues accessing our money.

3. What are you most looking forward to on your trip?

Jeff can’t decide between eating fruit in Southeast Asia or seeing incredible world monuments. Rachel is most looking forward to returning to Italy after having majored in Classical Civilization, and also seeing Angkor Wat.

4. Did you buy a round the world ticket or point to point? Why?

We are just buying point to point tickets because the great majority of our trip will be done overland. We bought tickets with mileage points from Seoul to Ulaanbaatar and will be traveling by bus and rail from there to Thailand or Malaysia, and then we’ll be flying from there to Turkey to do the Europe portion of our trip. A round the world ticket didn’t make sense for our trip. We like slow travel and prefer overland to flying (honestly, we both kind of hate flying). If we were doing a route that had more flying, we would have considered it. Our schedule is also not in any way fixed, so we’d rather buy tickets when we know we want to move on rather than have to stick to a time limit.

5. What would you tell someone who was on the fence about going on a round the world trip?

If you are in the position where you are pretty sure you want to do it, and won’t have to go into massive debt to do it, we say go for it. If your concern is missing out on life at home, don’t worry – true friends will still be your friends after a time away, and most likely everything will work out when you get back. You can travel now and have a great time, or wait until later when there may not be such a good opportunity, and then you will regret it.
We’d love to see you fill out a traveler profile and be featured on the BootsnAll blog. Fill one out today!