It's a young man's game...

Well, here we go. Seems a bit odd to be writing the introduction to this blog after ten days on the road, but hey, that’s what you get when you hit the ground running.

In the past couple of months, it’s been a whirlwind for us personally. I moved down to join Rachel in LA, we lived the SoCal life for a couple weeks, went camping twice, did Coachella, drove across the country, had a big ol’ send-off party in Chicago (thanks everyone times a million for making it out for that!!) and still managed to pack our lives up to go travelling for a year. It’s been a lot. However, the funny thing about having so much to do and focus on “in-the-moment,” is that we didn’t get a chance to focus on the road ahead. And what a road, ladies and gentlemen!!

When we got on the plane from Chicago to Taipei, we were exhausted. We still haven’t gotten everything done that we wanted/needed to before we left for the trip! And because of this, I think it took a good few days in Hanoi for it to really hit us -- before we realized that we were really doing this. One full year of travelling. It still seems surreal, that, at 28, we’re finally doing this thing.

Which, I suppose it is a little surreal, because it seems like everyone else is doing this thing at 18 now-a-days.

I hate to seem like I’m having a quarter-life-crisis here or something, but truly, I think we’re too old for this shit. You see, you travel differently at 28 as opposed to 18. At 18, you’re fresh out of high-school, you just got out of the parent’s house, and you’re yearning for freedom, and for sex, drugs and rock and roll, all on about $6 a day. At 28, you’re well out of university, you’re a stable adult, and you’re still looking for freedom, but from your 9-5 rather than your parents, and you’ve become accustomed to the lifestyle that you’ve made for yourself.

The difference is subtle, but nonetheless it’s important. An 18 year old can just drop all of their shit and go travelling anytime they damn well please; at most, they have to worry about when the next semester is starting. At 28, you have to make sure your 401K is consolidated, your health insurance is up-to-date, your credit score is OK, your vehicle has fire-and-theft on it for the next year, your rent contract is up, and you have enough money in the bank so you can make the damage deposit and the first month’s rent when you eventually make it back home (because, at 28, you’re 100% sure you will eventually make it back home).

But, home is somewhere we definitely aren’t. So even though we are two 28 year olds playing at an 18 year old backpacker’s game, we are committed to doing this properly. We will be travelling the world over the next year, and though we can’t hang with the 6-nights-a-week drug and booze fuelled gong show that is the typical backpacking lifestyle, we can still hang with the travelling. We can still go out and experience the countries and the cultures of the world.

And we can still out-party the Aussies...

One night a week, anyway.

And we’ll go to bed at 11 and get up at 7:30 the other days.

So, it begins in Vietnam. We’re starting in Hanoi, and have started to make our way North, and those entries are forthcoming. We’ll update everyone ASAP when we finally get our feet under us.