
The Best Things In Life Are Free
Travel Log: Day 12 (7/9), Costa Rica Today was the undisputed best day so far in Costa Rica, thanks to a completely free activity (aside from a $3 Uber ride). This is exactly the antidote to yesterday’s failures. The place we went to is called “El Salto” or “The Jump”. It’s a small waterfall with

Rental And Budget Failures
Travel Log: Day 11 (7/8), Costa Rica Failures It was a day of rental and budget failures, and lessons learned. Lesson #1 – We aren’t professional cleaners This lesson kicked off first thing in the morning with an email from our property manager saying the new tenants thought the kitchen and bathrooms weren’t cleaned sufficiently.

The Hunt For Our Next Lodging
Travel Log: Day 10 (7/7), Costa Rica This morning we made a trip to the grocery store and came back with a pretty decent haul for $60. We spent the rest of the day searching for our next location, aside from a nap, duolingo, and an improvised rock throwing game. The urgency to book our

La Fortuna Waterfall – A Torrent of People And Money
Travel Log: Day 9 (7/6), Costa Rica Ride Shares Today we went to the La Fortuna waterfall which is only a couple miles from our Airbnb. Rather than attempting to walk on the roads with no shoulder, we opted for Uber. This was our first experience with Uber in the country. After using it, it’s

First Days Traveling Costa Rica – Torture Via Motion Sickness
Travel Log: Days 0-3 (6/27-6/30), First Days Traveling Costa Rica and motion sickness I plan to keep a short log of the things that happen each day on our year long adventure. Travel logistics got in the way of that, so I’m covering three days at once here. Day 0 (6/27) I don’t count this

Whirlwind Out The Front Door – Preparing For Long-Term Travel
With my employment ending, I expected to have ample time to devote to preparing for long-term travel. I was entirely wrong about that. We would have been in an hours deficit had I stayed at my job any longer. JC and I were cranking through tasks almost non-stop over the last week. We even had

We have health insurance, now leave us alone…
As was forecast in in a previous post, we selected the Cigna Global Silver plan for our international health insurance on this year of travel. Hopefully we’ll never find out how good, bad, or mediocre our new international health plan is. Wasting thousands of dollars on premiums and never using health insurance is a great

Point Of No Return: Crossing The Event Horizon
Smorgasbord Of Updates Over the past few weeks we have made our way into the thick of preparing for gap year travel. We have been hustling on a variety of fronts, none of which are noteworthy on their own but may be interesting collectively. Up to this point everything was conceptual; mostly research without a

Travel Vaccinations Cost Planning
When you have a list of 27 places that you might travel to, the plan for travel vaccinations becomes a project of its own. It is also an important consideration for cost planning. Reading through CDC recommendations became complicated enough that I had to put together a tracking spreadsheet. It was either that or one

FIRE Travel Budget
With tariffs bringing chaos to the market, this is an entertaining time to take a look at FIRE travel budget for the upcoming premature FIRE experiment where we will travel internationally for a full year. I find the budgeting aspect of this interesting because we have different moving parts that we don’t normally deal with









