7. How would I go about planning a trip like this?

Overview Planning

This is a very personal question. One of the things I learned quickly about traveling with other people is that traveling preferences are as unique as fingerprints. The way you plan your trip will depend a lot on your preferences, your budget, your time, and your physical abilities. The best I can do is to tell you how I planned my trip. To understand how I went about it, you need to know my priorities. Some of this information is available on other parts of this site. In general, I hate organized or all inclusive experiences, and I don’t like to waste money even when I have plenty. Specific to this trip, I wanted to go around the world, I had three and a half months to work with, I did not want to go a lot of places I know Stephanie wants to visit, and because she wasn’t coming, I really wanted to keep costs down. Further, I wanted to do mostly land travel, and I wanted to avoid countries where obtaining a visa would be difficult, or where there might be a political obstacle to us visiting.

Planning Flights

I started out by building a theoretical skeleton around flights, figuring those would be the most expensive part of the trip. I knew we would have to overfly the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and that we would need to fly over places like Iran and Myanmar, as visiting them would be politically too difficult for a barnstorming trip like this. I booked Stephanie’s part of the trip a bit further in advance than I did the remainder. I learned that most flights need not be purchased so far in advance. Regional flights in Europe and Asia are not as expensive as domestic American flights, and the “inside two weeks” penalty we are used to in the U.S.A. is not applicable in other parts of the world. This is particularly helpful to me, as I like to retain maximum flexibility.

Deciding What to See

I wanted to maximize what we could see as we traveled through Europe, but I understood I would not be able to see everything. In fact, I often had less time than I would have liked to research what to see, since we stopped at so many different places. I knew of the major attractions in places like London, Paris, and Berlin. I still often looked at the blogs and youtube videos posted by other travelers. I took some ideas from other peoples’ sample 3-5 day visit itineraries. I quickly learned to discard certain suggestions that had to do with drinking or other pursuits that I knew would not interest us. I also learned quickly that recommendations on time spent at historical and cultural venues often substantially underestimated the time I wanted to spend at those places. The key to all of this attraction planning for me was retaining the ability to discard stops to preserve the quality of the visits we kept on the schedule. This strategy served me well as I sometimes scratched potential stops off of a single city agenda, and other times scratched whole cities or countries off of my travel plan. Caleb’s waking hours and his ability and willingness to walk long distances also dictated some decisions about the ambitiousness of my plans. I often exercised, wrote, or farmed while he slept.

Deciding Where to Stay

For most of the trip, I tried to schedule accommodations several days to a week ahead. I used a combination of booking.com, expedia.com, hostelworld.com, AirBnB.com, and vrbo.com. AirBnB and VRBO are sites where you usually reserve whole houses or apartments, though they sometimes also have shared venues like rooms. These can be screened out in your search if you are uncomfortable with shared spaces. These sites work well for multi-day stays with the family. Although there are some things I like about VRBO, I ultimately discarded it in favor of AirBnB for houses and apartments. About half the time, VRBO hosts canceled reservations on me within 24 hours of my arrival, leaving me over a barrel to find a new place to stay. AirBnB offers hosts the opportunity to accept or reject potential guests, which eliminates the hosts need to cancel on late notice.

We used hostels some in Europe after Stephanie went home. Some deals could be found on hostelworld, but often they were also listed on booking or expedia. For motels, booking and expedia have similar prices. The motels themselves often have difficulty confirming expedia bookings. For this reason, I shifted nearly all motel reservations to booking.com. They have a loyalty program that offers some discounts. Although it is not an issue in more developed countries, reserving rooms on a website negates the hassle of dickering for prices in places like India and Nepal. We were warned – and rightly so – to always examine rooms in India before accepting them. Initially, this made booking rooms online seem impossible. Booking.com offers the option to cancel reservations as late as 6 p.m. the day of at a cost of just about a dollar extra for the entire stay. My eventual MO was to pay this small fee and book a room in advance, knowing I had the option to cancel after looking at the room if it proved unsatisfactory.

Land Travel

My plan for this trip was to travel by land as much as I could. The idea was that I could see the landscape from the windows of buses and trains even when I was moving between points. While a good idea in theory, it was a bit misguided. Land travel can be excruciatingly slow in some parts of the world. You cannot see anything from an overnight train or bus anyway. Much of the time spent on buses or trains can also be used to write, research, make reservations, sleep, or just talk to other travelers. So if my main goal was to maximize the amount of physical geography I saw on the trip, the results were mixed. Sometimes it is better to just get where you are going and see the important things.

The modes and effectiveness of land travel differed greatly from one part of the world to the next. The high speed trains we took in Western Europe were comfortable and fast, but often more expensive than flying. The flexibility of not having an itinerary allowed us to learn the best means of getting around while we were traveling. Through most of Europe, our best means of getting from one city to the next was usually by bus. I would check with a planning website like rome2rio.com to compare available means of transportation, then book the tickets directly from the vendor. I liked using trains when I could, because you have more freedom to roam while moving. Since trains were less available on some of our routes in Europe and often more expensive, we usually resorted to buses. We found Blablabus and Flixbus to be relatively inexpensive and quite comfortable. They always had bathrooms until we got to Bulgaria – then they had bathrooms the drivers kept locked or full of supplies so they would not have to clean them. Unlike the Asian flights, it did seem to pay to book European buses at least a couple of days in advance to get better fares.

As you may recall from my Romania article, the one Eastern European train we took was miserably hot. The train may have been the better option in Turkey. Our 20 hour bus ride was uncomfortable and not up to Flixbus Europe standards. The prices between KamilKoc and the Turkish trains were roughly similar. The train would have left us further from where we needed to get off to get into Georgia, so we opted for the bus. The train in Georgia was inexpensive, but did not go where we needed, so we took marshrutkas (minibuses). These were also very inexpensive, but the drivers were often obnoxious and there was no set schedule. They left only when the bus was full.

We rented cars in Scotland, France, the Netherlands, and Oman. Driving was safe and straightforward in all of these places, even if some of them drive on the wrong side of the road. Retrospectively, a one way rental through as much of Europe as the car company would allow us would have been a nice way to have a bit more freedom in routing. I never thought to ask this until I was about to turn my Dutch car back in at Amsterdam. I could have taken that car east as far as Germany, but I already had my train ticket to Berlin. The car was especially useful in Oman. There is a city bus system in Muscat, but no metro. The city is so elongated and has so many empty areas that it spreads out over some 20 miles. Having a car is almost a necessity. Further, many of the sites we wanted to see were outside the city and would have been either inaccessible or far more expensive to see with guided day trips. Some websites suggested we would need an international drivers license to drive outside of the U.S., but I was never once asked for this.

We were warned by many who had lived in or traveled extensively throughout India not to take Indian buses. Apparently, drug use among the drivers is very common. We took an overnight train in India, which was surprisingly comfortable, if not the fastest means of transportation. Our sleeper compartment was nicer than some Indian motels. Navigating the direct purchase of Indian train tickets is very confusing – even for me, and I pride myself in making such arrangements on my own. We ultimately resorted to booking trains through a 3^rd party website called 12go.asia. This was much easier, and the fee was so small as to be not noticeable. I found it far preferable to navigating state owned ticket websites in a language where I could not even recognize the letters.

We ended up using buses again rather than trains in Nepal and Southeast Asia. The buses in Nepal were comfortable, but the roads were so bad that sometimes a 200 kilometer trip took over 12 hours. Since Nepal has no rail system, the only other option is to fly these short distances. Flights are available for about $100/ticket. For travelers pressed for time, the ticket may be worth it to trade a bus trip that may be six hours, or may be 12 for a 45 minute flight. The scenery was nice, but the time penalty for taking the bus is not a small one. The Southeast Asian buses were very comfortable. They had far more legroom that most flights I have been on. With the exception of our Kuala Lumpur – Singapore trip, the drivers were quite professional. I believe the trains would have also worked fine, they just weren’t convenient to the locations we needed to get to in Thailand and Malaysia.

Worship Planning

For us, there was one other element of our trip that required planning. We wanted to worship at Churches of Christ wherever we could. We often found churches. We missed once due to a bad cultural assumption on my part, once due to bad communication on the church’s part, and a couple of other times due to lack of a nearby congregation. Most times, however, we found a place to worship. Unfortunately, the best online church directories have either disappeared or grown too old to be useful. Those remaining rely on churches self reporting, which just doesn’t work. Sometimes I found evidence of a church via a Facebook page. Other times, I reached out to contacts in the missions area of Sunset International Bible Institute. Of course, not every church that lists itself as a Church of Christ is what we think of in the United States. Facebook pages and posts helped to resolve this. Our particular religious tradition has its own terminology and ways of stating things that give some clues about whether we were actually looking at an American Restoration Movement church. I was surprised a few times by being asked to preach by churches who apparently did not expect visitors on vacation from America. I guess they assumed I was there for some specific mission purpose. I was happy to oblige, and we made some very good friends this way.

Planning Summary

I suppose the takeaway from all of this is that you must begin planning with your trip objective in mind. For us, this was to circumnavigate between May 22 and September 1, seeing as much as we could without making the trip unenjoyably fast. To do this, I needed to retain flexibility, with the exception of my requirement to hit the American West coast before the end of August. I planned visits, transportation, and accommodations roughly 3-7 days in advance using the various web tools listed above. If you have questions, or need some guidance planning some similar adventure, feel free to send inquiries to david@farther-beyond.com