I few weeks ago I decided to use my savings to travel around the world (or at least to the parts I want to visit) for seventeen months. Awesome!
Planning? Not so much!
It sounds so cool to say, “yeah, I’m gonna hop over to Africa next year” – but when you really get down to the nitty gritty, it’s kinda tough. I’m not taking tours, so organizing a trip that is as good as a tour (and better!) has been a long arduous process.
In addition to doing lots of reading, I’m getting ready to have a dozen vaccines (hopefully not all poked in the same place), trying to figure out where to get the best travel insurance, reassuring my family that I will not be dying of some unknown disease in the African wilderness, and trying to learn how to distinguish between Chinese destinations (which, at this point, all sound the same to me).
I’ve arbitrarily set my budget at 20K. Don’t ask me where this number came from, because hell if I know! I guess I figured that this would be enough for me to do a lot of awesome stuff, and not come home with all of my savings completely depleted.
Either way, I’m slowly reading my way through my stack of books…hopefully I finish sometime this century 
For those of you interested, I’m reading everything written by lonely planet, as well as a book called First-Time Around the World by Rough Guides.
