“Wow, I can’t believe you two still look the same!”—one of the first things our friend said when we video called her from New Zealand. My reply: “It’s only been a few weeks.” It was only when I said it that it truly hit me how short of a time we’ve been on the road. It feels like we’ve learned so much and packed a lot into every single day. We’ve traveled from Hawaii to Australia to New Zealand, and we’re resting for a few days before we embark on our road trip around the South Island. During this time of reflection (and to celebrate our first month of travels), I wanted to share some lessons we’ve learned so far.
To start, here’s what we’ve learned about managing our time and day-to-day living:
Early birds gotta leave the nest.
Oftentimes, we’ll wake up at a decent hour, but then really take our time lounging in bed, eating breakfast, getting dressed, and planning for the day. Leaving the house in the afternoon doesn’t always feel great—we lose a lot of momentum and feel limited in our daylight hours. Moving forward, we want to be more intentional about how we start our days. There are simple things we can do, like packing our daypack or preparing our outfits the night before, so that we can hit the ground running the next day.
Make time for settling down.
When you arrive in a new place, all sorts of things come up: getting a local SIM and public transportation card, buying groceries and toiletries, exchanging money, and planning your next destination. We’ve found it helpful to set aside time to do these things all at once, so they don’t keep surfacing up (and stressing us out) later. For us, the best timing has been the day after we arrive. On our first day in a new place, we usually feel so pumped with adrenaline and eager to explore that it’s hard to calm down enough to do errands. However, we’ve found that we tend to feel more chill and relaxed the day afterward, so it’s perfect timing to get things done.
Get to know a city by working in it.
It’s easy to want to spend all of your time in a new place enjoying the daylight and walking around. It’s also natural to fear missing out on experiences if you just sit down and work. However, we realized an even worse fear: fear of missing out on our goals. It’s been motivating us to carve out time to write, and it’s an added bonus when we can find a coffeeshop where we can do so. We underestimated how nice it is to just drink coffee, work, and listen to the buzz of local conversations around you—but it’s amazing. Instead of seeing the sights, you’re working among everyone else, and it makes you feel like more of a local.
Journal on the go.
Originally, we thought we’d journal at night, but we’ve found that we end up being too exhausted and fall asleep before we can fully process our day. Now, we’ve learned to squeeze in writing time whenever we have a few minutes, whether it’s on a bus ride or while waiting for food at a restaurant. We’ve found it helpful to not just document what happened in a day, but also to process our emotions and impressions. My current motto is free flow while it’s fresh—filter later. It’s way easier to capture the present moment as you go than to try to fill in the gaps of your memory afterward. There’s so much happening every day that a lot of memories can get buried…or they can simply build up and make you feel like you’re constantly playing catch up.
Weekdays > weekends.
When we were in Melbourne, we absolutely loved the weekdays. The city was emptier and it felt like we could take our time and experience things fully—we had stores to ourselves so we could talk to local shopkeepers and we could explore laneways without fear of crowds. When we experienced our first Saturday, it felt way too overwhelming. The museum was packed, public transportation made us feel like sardines, and the streets were chaotic at night with everyone going out. Now, we try to plan most of our activities for the weekdays, and use the weekend to stay in and work.
There’s always good and bad timing.
There’s always something that will make you feel like you landed at the right time or left at the wrong time. We landed in Honolulu the opening weekend of the POW! WOW! street art festival, but left Melbourne right before Rone’s Empire show (one of the most hyped street art events of the year). We arrived in Sydney the day after the heatwave, but in Wellington the day it started to get exceptionally cold and rainy. We also arrived in Wellington a few hours after the Te Matatini festival, a celebration of Māori performing arts that takes place every two years, but then we ended up viewing a surprise performance at the Te Papa museum where we spent the afternoon. Cities will always have events going on, so you’ll always be just making or just missing something. Don’t sweat it, it all balances out anyway.
Watch out for hidden fatigue.
Adrenaline and caffeine can temporarily fill you with energy, but issues can build up if you start to neglect things like sleep and down time. There were times when we didn’t even realize how tired and exhausted we were, or how much information we’d taken in, until we had a relaxation day to let it all out and recover. When we first arrived in Hamilton, New Zealand, we were so exhausted from the previous weeks that we just crashed…and woke up the next day around 1pm. It reminded us to pace ourselves.
Your body is predictable—use that to your advantage.
You know what your body needs, so prepare accordingly. We tend to wait until it’s too late, and we’re already dehydrated, tired, cold, or hungry, before we resolve a problem. Instead, we want to get better at drinking water before we leave the house, packing snacks and sunscreen, and wearing the right layers.
Learn, don’t linger.
We’ve made all sorts of mistakes, whether it’s waiting too long to book a flight or getting stuck in a parking lot hours from our home. However, we don’t have the time to linger in regret. We just need to understand that we’re going to fail, and continue failing, but we need to address problems in the moment and learn from them quickly.
Make your decisions easier (don’t be a maximizer).
From living in San Francisco, it’s easy to get caught up in “ratings,” whether it’s on Amazon or Yelp. You want the best thing possible, whether it’s the #1 drugstore moisturizer or the quintessential way to experience a place. However, it’s impossible to know what’s best, and your desire for it will just lead you down a lot of rabbit holes. You can’t optimize for everything on your trip (and you have too many decisions to make), so just pick what’s convenient and satisfies you in the moment. Choose restaurants with a solid menu and a decent amount of locals, instead of researching all the best places in a city. Decision fatigue can take a toll on you, and you could miss out on things simply from the time it takes for you to decide to do them.
Fly solo often.
As a traveling couple, we’ve had to spend a lot of time together out of necessity—packing, planning, sitting on a bus for long hours. When you don’t know a place well, it can be easy to default to hanging out with your built-in buddy. However, we’ve learned that we need to carve out our own pockets of free time, and it’s been one of the best parts of our trip. On my first “alone day” in Melbourne, it felt like all my senses were heightened. I enjoyed small moments, like washing cherry tomatoes alone in the kitchen sink, and random things, like talking to myself as I tried to figure out directions. I also felt like my mental pores were completely open, and I had a chance to just let my mind breathe and process things from the past. As a bonus, it was far more interesting when we met up afterward, since we had so much more to share about our days, and we could be fully present around each other.