Hi, I’m Debbie, and I am a “trip junkie.” I ALWAYS WANT TO GO; always want to be planning for or be on a trip. Really — always. A perfect life includes sunshine, talking to our dogs, travel research, travel planning, and travel! I love finding travel deals and discounts, finding new experiences, finding comfortable adventures (with a bit of the unknown), and experiencing the good kind of surprises. Let me share my trip planning skills and tips I’ve learned throughout the years and show you how you, too, can experience unique, fun-filled, comfortably economic, and adventurous memories with travel.
Do you want to experience spectacular, memorable travel adventures that you planned yourself? ME TOO!
Update: Now that we live in a COVID world, we have shifted gears for the time being and become avid RV travelers. We travel wherever we can and as often as we can in our Class C Coachmen Leprechaun 319MB motorhome. Bonuses of RV travel are that we take our house with us, remaining socially distant, and Tank and Lilly get to come along!
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
Gustave Flaubert
I do know how to plan a great trip and would like to share my knowledge with you as well as our travel adventure stories.
Do you want to how I…
- become motivated to plan our next adventure — and stay motivated?
- create a budget for our experience?
- find accommodation based on our budget?
- choose transportation?
- select tours, excursions, things to see and do?
- know what to pack?
- keep laundry from becoming a nightmare?
- enjoy myself every minute?
- make memories?
These are things I’ve incorporated into my travel; travel that I plan myself for my husband and me. There are a plethora of travel professionals to handle this for a fee. However, I am budget-minded, and my joy is in planning travel all by myself. If that is the way you enjoy travel, I would love to share my information and tips.
That is me and my husband, Steve, on our drive along the Ring of Kerry in Ireland, and this photo shows a drizzly chilly July day. While this may not be a professional photo, it was an amazing and memorable day for us. I cannot remember having such a spectacular day.
When I look at this photo, I smell the air; I feel the chill and drizzle; I remember the obliging young lady that took the photo for us and remembered how silly we were behaving all day long, and even remember those delicious ham toasties we had for lunch in that seaside village! We will have these travel memories for years to come. Ireland, incidentally, is our very favorite travel destination. Steve even looks Irish, doesn’t he?
We live in a coastal, boating, fishing, nature community near Galveston, Texas, with our two dog children, Tank and Lilly Bean. Tank and Lilly, without question, are in absolute charge of our home and lives, and we love this arrangement. They are the only reason we limit our travel.
We do not like to leave our dogs in the care of others too frequently, or our trips would be longer and more often. We have security cameras in our home only to have the ability to watch and talk to our dogs while we are away! They are more often than not with us now since we are RV travelers these days.
Tank loves the boat. Lilly Bean does not do boat rides!
We are FINALLY retired, all four of our children are adults; their children are almost all adults; we have all our moving parts and our memory skills and motor skills are acceptable enough to drive a car in public and still find it later in the mall parking lot (sometimes). Yay! We have taken many beautiful trips through the years, but those were always time-limited vacations. Now, every morning we wake up can become the start of a holiday, excursion, journey, adventure — and we have so many many places to go and see.
Except for spontaneous day and weekend trips and many of our RV trips, careful research and planning are necessary for our adventures, and guess what? I enjoy the research and planning almost as much as the actual trip. I take immense joy in finding a deal, discount, or exclusive markdown, but only when it fits in with what we want from our trip, not just for the sake of the deal. It is my experience that travel does not have to be expensive.
We certainly can make it expensive — oh, that is terribly easy to do, but wonderfully comfortable, unique, fun-filled, and inexpensive travel is possible. I realize expensive is a relative term, but if we, as a retired, fixed income couple, can manage it without draining our life savings, so can you.
The three ingredients we incorporate into our trips are (a) a defined budget, (b) a mindset that matches that budget, and (c) time. I always cringe when people tell me they “wish” they could travel like me or “wish” they could afford to go here or there. You can go a zillion places, take innumerable trips — if your time, budget, and mindset are in sync.
I hope you guys will join us on this journey of journeys.