Step One: Plan an itinerary (...?)
We had no idea how to plan a journey this immense. The idea of the sheer vastness of what we wanted to experience seemed a bit intimidating. We knew we wanted to take off to travel, but how? For the first couple of months, we just talked to each other about this aloof plan. Michael started buying travel books and Lauren started listing all the people we knew all over the world. Then one day Michael brought home a map of the world. We hung it up on a wall and took turns putting tacks in all the places we ever dreamed of visiting. There were a lot of tacks on the map. Right then and there we knew we were in trouble. While gawking at the whole container of thumb tacks on the wall we realized that if we followed this dream itinerary we could quite certainly be traveling for the rest of our lives. So, we had to trim it down a bit. We knew we wanted to be in south eastern Africa during the Great Migration and we knew we didn’t want to be in Nepal during January. So we took some tacks out of the wall and saw a route emerge that (somewhat) made sense, heading east (chasing the rising sun…) all around the world!

Step Two: Save Money!
How much does a trip around the world cost? A lot. Even when you budget $15 a day for food, shelter, and fun. Where does this money come from if you’re not independently wealthy or not lucky enough to win the lottery? We have only one word: BUDGET. Do you realize how much money you can save by not buying that cup of Starbucks coffee everyday? That’s 365 days times $3.50 which roughly equals two months of travel through India. Now just adjust your mentality to that way of thinking for everything else in your life: seeing movies, eating out, buying new clothes, buying new music/movies. You’d be surprised by how much money you can really save by being industriously cheap! For those of us who are bad with money (ahem…Lauren) we would like to recommend getting yourself a high-yeild savings account (something like ING direct). You can set it up to automatically withdrawal a predetermined amount of money from your checking account and put it in your savings account each month. With that and your BUDGET (not drinking coffee, seeing movies, having a social life outside your one-bedroom apartment for a whole year) you too can travel around the world! Trust us, it’s a lot harder than it sounds, but in the end all those sacrifices will totally pay off. Big time.

Step Three: The Nittty-Gritty
We now knew where we’d like to go and how we would pay for it all (kind of), but what would we do when we got to all of those incredible places? We each took one travel book at a time and spent a few weeks highlighting and dog-earing must-sees and must-dos. At the end of each week, we would have verbal book reports due to each other, summarizing the confusion of yellow post-its and scribbled margins that had become the book. In the meantime, we also found a travel agent and started talking about round-the-world plane tickets. We took home brochures of excursions and travel insurance pamphlets and dove into even more research. This was the most grueling of tasks for the trip, but of course, the most important. With the help of our travel agent, Francesca, we finally decided on a point-to-point plane ticket and on an insurance policy that would cover all our crazy shananagans. So, now we have plane tickets, insurance, and we’ve put money down on some awesome sounding excursions. But we still wanted to volunteer in some way and give back to these communities we were visiting. So, now began another round of R and D (research and development). For the results of this research please see the “Support the Cause” section of the site…and please feel free to read generously.

Step Four: Sell your stuff!
Get rid of it all! If it doesn’t fit in a pack, you don’t need it. You’d be surprised by how liberating it really is to sell off all the crap you’ve accumulated and realize how much you don’t need any of it. We started by having a massive yard sale and in one sweeping fall day, we pulled in almost $1000! (holy cow, that’s a whole month in Nepal!) Sadly, Michael did have to say goodbye to some guitars, but one of those babies is worth 6 days in Egypt! We consigned most of our clothes and vintage nick-nacks and posted all of our furniture (and anything else not bolted down) on Craig’s list. Michael had an art exhibition in the name of this project and all the paintings he sold from that show (90 in all) are funding our volunteer projects. We have unintentionally become bohemian, zen minimalists, eating dinners on the floor while contemplating jazz (in our heads of course since we sold the stereo)...

Step Five: Preparing to leave
We discovered that while it’s really rewarding to travel to developing countries, it can also be a pain in the arm. We had to get a lot of vaccinations (please see Health and Safety section), like 6 shots, 2 horse-size pills (Typhoid) and a year’s worth of malaria doses. Mosquitos suck..literally…blood.
We also had to pack a bag for one and a half years of travel. Now think about that. Lauren usually brings 6 pairs of shoes for 5 days of travel. That really wasn’t going to work for this trip. Everything we are going to wear, all products we were going to use, pretty much everything we owned was going to have to fit in a backpack. That takes some real planning and a lot of creative control. Check out the “Living Out of a Pack” section to see how we did it.
The final step to leaving was saying goodbye to friends and family, which was really hard: leaving the life we knew and everyone that cared about us for an uncertain future. There’s not much more to say than the obvious, but we know we’ll miss everyone immensely.

Please check out the rest of this section for a more “how to” approach to the details of planning.