FEATURE STORY

How we traveled around the world in one year, cheaper than living in suburban America!   



    I was priveleged to travel the world at the young age of 14 years old.  My mother had received a sabatical from her teaching position at Valentine Elementary school and armed with nothing more than her modest teachers salary, she took my sister and I out of school for one full year.  With one bag a piece, from Ebags [20% off Purchase at ebags!], we set out for the adventure of a lifetime!  Basically, anything purchased online is going to save you in a big way! Don't take my word, price compare luggage at a retail store with Ebags. Also of huge importance is to utilize a "Pre-Departure Checklist" , such as we provide on this website. International traveling takes much planning.

From Los Angeles we flew to New York and then on to our first destination, Paris. The research we did before our trip paid off and I will pass all those valuable dollar saving tips on to you. We knew we had to have the lowest fares for cheap family travel, or should we say budget travel. This would include lowest airfare, budget hotels, discount car rental, anything to do with a travel deal and we were interested. We bought a book entitled "Europe on five dollars per day" and found that by following the "trade routes" you can travel the most economically. 

In addition, a must is pre-booking all flights online through one of the many online travel sites. [Despite what others tell you, there is no hard and fast rule for when to book a flight -- we discovered the cheapest flights to be either booked 3 weeks in advance minimum, or 2 days before the flight on "last minute" bookings. Late bookings are often at lower prices in order to fill up the plane, though you run the huge risk of not flying at all, should they sell out, or worse if you're with a group, being split up. If you book straight through a travel agent, expect premium prices. 
Our research chose, Cheapoair.com ,as having the lowest fares, greatest value, and dependable service. We tried many of the other services for cheap air fares and continued to come back to CheapoAir.com. In addition they are able to book the best hotel deal at a price you can afford. Other great online travel agencies for cheap vacations and the cheapest airfare are both Expedia.com Get great deals on Expedia.com!  and Travelocity.com. .

Another company we used which saved us over 50% on the walk-in rates at hotels is HotelsCombined, which is the world's leading hotel price comparison search engine. HotelsCombined.com features over 200,000 hotels in 20,000 destinations across 195 countries with over 900,000 hotel deals.  Search Hotel Prices on Over 30 Sites at Once! 

Okay, so occasionally we roughed it in youth hostels[ ],and camp sites to stretch our money, but interspersed it with nicer accomodations every few days. In that way, we felt like both traveler and tourist.  

We sometimes even stayed in rented rooms from nice local people. Arranging stays in Bed and Breakfast rooms was another highlight of our trip, as we were more part of the local people.. You must pre-book a bed and breakfast online, as you will find the walk-in rates to be prohibitively expensive.

From Paris we traveled through France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and made our way via a Eurorail Pass  [cheapest European train transportation], to Greece, where we parked it for an entire month. Did I mention I was given the choice of skippping school for a year or taking a correspondence course. I could not bare the idea of leaving my friends to advance a grade without me, so I opted for home or rather "travel study"!

After a month on the island of Ios, our favorite Greek island, we took a trade boat over to Alexandria, Egypt. There we took another trade boat down the entire length of the Nile River, eventually finding ourselves in South Africa. Again we lived like the locals most of the time, though splurged on a couple of fancy resort hotels called Treetops and the Ark, places you can see the native wildlife in the game parks of East Africa. 

When I say trade routes or trade boats they are just that. You find out at the docks, which boats hauling cargo are going to your next destination and they usually offer a limited amount of space for travelers to ride along at rock bottom prices. With our budget it was a must! What shocked us was how nice these cabins actually were. 

We traveled by rent-a-car booked through Cheapoair.com , local busses, trains, and no we never hitchhiked. Way too dangerous for this family! I should mention though, often locals would take us around the city for free, something you don't see too often in the United States. We prefered this to tour groups, as we liked the culture of being strictly with the local people vs. traveling with other Americans. 

We traveled through the Middle East to India and settled for another full month on a house boat in Srinigar, the Kashmir, India. We found that even though you don't have a laptop just about every major city has Internet Cafes, so booking budget travel was effortless. 

I finally finished the eigth grade up in India.  We then made our way through Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, and finally flying back to Hawaii and California.  In this way we had circled the entire globe.  Our expenses were most the time on a shoestring budget, true cheap world travel. There is a lot to be said with all inclusive travel, which much of our trip was.  After returning to the United States it occured to us that we actually made an entire trip around the world for less than the cost of living in our home in South Pasadena, California.  This was truly the trip of a lifetime!  

           May all your travel dreams come true--  Roman Terry