After returning from my first trip to Europe in the summer of 2005, I held the assumption that it would be the biggest trip I’d take for at least a few years. Two months from beginning my senior year of college, I had resigned myself to a future as a worker bee of some kind. At the time, I didn’t realize that the American dream wasn’t at all my dream.
When I began having my own dreams again about a year later, however, I couldn’t continue ignoring them — even in spite of the fact that my $11.50 per hour desk job didn’t leave me near enough room for the return to Europe I was conjuring up. So I didn’t ignore them.
And you shouldn’t either.
If you’d rather be staring at tides under a full moon in India, an active volcano in the Philippines or even a stranger’s naked body at a sex motel in Brazil, changing your scenery is as simple as changing your outlook toward the things you dream about. Translate your travel dreams into reachable goals and point all your resources and energy toward achieving those goals — and don’t stop until you’ve seen the whole world.
Manifest Your Destiny
All it took was the announcement that my then-favorite singer’s 2007 world tour would commence in Rome and snake through several places I’d always wanted to go during the course of its first two weeks for me to make the decision: My butt would be setting in an Italy-bound economy seat by May 28.
Without delay — it was the first week of February when I made the decision — I began mentioning the prospective trip to friends and certain family members, who were less than impressed by my lofty ambitions. You don’t make enough money to take a trip like that Robert, they’d say, and besides, you have bills and responsibilities now.
I didn’t let the naysayers get me down, however, and kept any thoughts that trip might not happen out of my head. Manifesting what you want — saying “I am going on this trip” as opposed to “I want to go on this trip” or “I wish I could go on this trip — is the first and most important step in meeting travel goals.
Fill in the Blanks
Of course, saying you’ll be somewhere and having any idea what bring there will entail are two separate things. In my case, I was lucky enough that an itinerary had been mapped out for me — this is one of the benefits of going through an “I stalk my favorite singer” phases — now all I had do was head to Google and get to searching.
Since Leave Your Daily Hell didn’t exist way back in ’07, I had to settle for Wikipedia and Google images. Regardless of whether or not you take advantage of the more than 100 travel articles I’ve posted here, reading up on places you plan to visit and seeing what they look like is a great way not only to drum up excitement for the trip, but also to further manifest it into your life.
When you want to go on a trip — or, worse, you wish you could — the places you want to visit, the people you meet there and the things you do together are exist in a hypothetical future. If you allow yourself to think like this for a long period of time, however, your future will consist only of working hard enough to pay for a lifestyle you didn’t even want to begin with.
Once I visualized myself cutting in line at the Notre Dam in Paris on June 1, smoking marijuana legally at a “coffee shop” in Amsterdam on June 6 and accidentally running into said then-favorite singer aboard a ferry from Germany to Denmark June 13, the possibility of me staring into a computer monitor entering diagnosis codes into the records of cancer patients disappeared completely.
Don’t stop just because you decided you were going. Instead, dream greater depth and detail into your trip with the help of an information and image resource like Leave Your Daily Hell. Envision yourself being where you want to be when you want to be there to free yourself from a future filled with wanting and wishing.
Make It Official
If you don’t believe in taking serious risks, you will probably never travel extensively as a middle-class person. You will also probably be horrified with how I made this trip happen.
The first step to making any trip official is buying your plane ticket, but I didn’t have enough cash on hand to purchase one when I found a deal I couldn’t pass up. Without hesitation, I dusted off the credit card I never use — using credit cards only when you must allows you to harness their full power — and charged the motherfucker on it.
Why, you might ask, did you put a huge purchase on a credit card when you didn’t have two cents to rub together? Simple: Because I knew I soon would.
After accepting a second part-time job, teaching GRE classing two nights a week at a local test preparation center, I knew I would have enough disposable income over the two months leading up to the trip to pay the card off in full before I departed. As for spending money?
Even crazier — I decided to leave my apartment for the summer, which would leave me with an entire month of income an no large bills to pay with it. Once I returned from my trip I’d find a service industry job at home in St. Louis and work my butt off all summer. Afterwards I’d return to Austin, find a cheaper apartment and begin plotting my next move.
And guess what? It all worked out according to plan. After making my last credit card payment, I spent almost three weeks traveling through seven countries just a few days after quitting a job that barely paid my bills. Likewise within two days of stepping back onto U.S. soil broke as a joke, I had a serving gig at a nice restaurant, one I was able to transfer back down to Austin with me.
Buying a plane ticket is perhaps the most effective psychological motivator for seeing a trip through to its completion. If you don’t have enough money for your ticket lying around — but did responsibly manage your credit during young adulthood, as I did — don’t think twice about charging it: Going on the trip motivates you to repay the debt quickly and to find a means of repaying it if you don’t already have one. Do away with unnecessary monthly expenses (hint, this includes most of them) and the self-imposed financial limitations that accompany them.
But Don’t Stop There!
It was during the aforementioned 2007 Europe trip that I made the acquaintance of my now best-bud Bianca, who invited me to come stay with her in Switzerland the following summer. Thanks to a combination of frequent flier miles and extremely diligent work for a restaurant whose manager was nice enough to let me take a month off as appreciation for said ass-busting, I found myself in Zürich — and also in Paris, Bruges and Barcelona — in August 2008.
It didn’t take me long after returning to Austin, only a few days really, to realize that my next trip to tackle was India. Jonny, my boyfriend at the time, expressed doubt that I’d be able to do it by March, my target departure date. Further hard work, savings and discipline proved him wrong, even though I got fired from my job literally the week after I purchased my ticket: Thanks to sizable savings accumulations from tips and another faithful devotion of available credit, I spent the month of March 2009 in India.
I lived the five months after my return from India unemployed and unable to find any sort of job. Then, I hatched the idea to move to Asia and teach English for a year — and, more importantly, earn significantly more than my would-be cost of living for as long — in order to re-pay my debt and save for a future trip I referred to as “The Big One” in my dreams. After returning home from The Big One just over a year later (hint: my “teach English in Asia” idea worked), the record I kept of it on this blog won me a free trip back to Southeast Asia, where I found the clarity necessary to manifest my recent South America trip into reality.
Of course, I’m not saying any of this to brag. I’m simply emphasizing that all it takes to turn your travel dreams into reality is a change in the way you look at things: Do things instead of wanting to do them or wishing you could do them; Plan for a future of being exotic places on actual, not-so-far-away dates; and rid your life of superfluous expenditures that don’t aid you in making travel happen for yourself just like I did.
About The Author
Robert Schrader is the author of 255 posts on Leave Your Daily Hell.
Robert founded Leave Your Daily Hell in 2010 so that other travelers would have an entertaining, reliable source of information, advice and inspiration at their fingertips. Robert has traveled to more than 36 countries since he got his first passport stamp in 2005. Want to travel more often? Subscribe to email updates today!
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