For those who have been with us since the beginning, you'll likely remember the RTW Tally from my first long-term trip in 2010-2011. We had such a great response from this feature that we knew we had to bring it back for our second 465-day journey that recently finished. Just like with the last one, I made sure to track every little detail to report to you now that the journey is over.For new readers to this blog, the RTW Tally was created to measure some favorite and unconventional metrics of long term travel and the second iteration was made to take a deeper look at the important topics we've been asked about over the years.
So let's jump into it and see what our RTW Tally was all about as we traveled around 38 countries, 149 cities, and 465 days on the road!
Days on RTW Adventure: 465 Days
Highest: India: 34 Days
Lowest: Liechtenstein: 2 Minutes
Average: 12 Days/Country, 3 Days/City
Dollars Spent (USD): $74,814
Dollars Per Day: $160.89
Highest Average: $354/day in the Galapagos (7 days)
Lowest Average: $79/day in Colombia (28 days)
There will be a full dissection of our spending in a future post, so do not worry about that! At this time it is just important for us to highlight our overall average range. These numbers were for a middle-of-the-road traveling couple that liked to stay in private rooms over hostels (see below) and splurged a lot on food.
Pictures Taken (Jeremy): 29,406
Pictures Per Day: 63
I'm actually a bit surprised that my photos per day decreased by an average of 16 when compared to the last long-term trip. Baby steps to saving the space on my new computer's hard-drive (which is now pretty much full thanks to all my travel photos).
Miles Traveled: 54,693 (87,508 km)
Average: 117 Miles/Day (188 km/day)
Planes: 32
Trains: 45
Vehicles: 95
Ferries: 5
For this trip I did not break down the distance traveled per each overland method because the sheer number of days on the road would have made this a nightmare of a task. What we can say is that when coupled with our city stay average of 3.1, we traveled an average of 362 miles every time we moved around.
Days of Rain: 15.5
Probability of Rain: 1 in 30 Days
You probably think we're fudging this number, considering my last trip had a probability of 1 in 14, but it is true! We only have 15 1/2 days interrupted on this trip as a result of rain, although we did see rain a bit more throughout our journey (and did not count it if it did not interrupt our plans). The interesting thing on this one is that throughout our travels around South America, we saw very little rain at all outside of Ushuaia, Easter Island, and the Galapagos. In fact, around 30% of our rain days came from our travels in Costa Rica and Mexico alone! This definitely serves as a great reminder as to why planning for the weather is so important.
Sick Days: 12.5
Like our number of rain days, our sick days were measured by the amount of time we were prevented from doing what we wanted. In this one instance Angie and I counted our own sicknesses separately, so a good majority of this time was from when we were feeling under the weather in India.
Itinerary Changes: 4
Our itinerary was always setup to be flexible for this journey. We knew the general countries we wanted to see, but had very little thought on the cities we would visit once we got there. So for the purpose of calling an itinerary change, we only picked the big things that caused us to skip a whole region altogether.
They were:
- Replacing Egypt with Bulgaria as a result of the revolution a few weeks earlier.
- Skipping Northern India due to scammy travel agents, feeling sick, and wanting a beach for Christmas.
- Our Mystery Destination of Africa got a point regardless of what we had chosen because we really had no idea where we were going.
- Missing out on Antarctica for lack of a good deal and a low bank account. (Worst change of the bunch!)
Arguments: 11
There are two kinds of arguments in my mind. The first is petty bickering, which Angie and I would be guilty of several thousand times on this trip. The second is all out arguing where tears are shed and one of us (mostly her) runs out of the room in a fit of rage. It is the latter that we had around 11 times on this trip- another relatively low number considering all of the stresses we had.
Days Apart: 12.5
This number syncs up very well with the number of days we were sick for very good reason - there were only 2-3 times that we were both sick at the same time (resulting in 4-6 points on the sickness tally). On the days where only one of us was sick the other would still go out and this would get an increased tick. Other cases where we split up were the 2-3 times that I had to stay in and work on website issues, and then 2 days at the end of the trip where we split up for separate itineraries with the Cancun Visitors Bureau.
Nights in a Dorm Bed: 39
Say it with me now: we hate dorm beds! Since we started our trip out in Europe, where accommodation prices were quite outrageous, we stayed in a good number of dorms to keep our costs low (the mountain villages of Switzerland are a great example). By the time we made it to Slovenia about 4 months in we had enough of the drunk party crowd and people being incredibly rude in the middle of the night. We vowed to not do any more dorm beds and only had to stay in a few in Patagonia as the price for privates were also outrageous. Luckily everyone in that part of the world was on the same hiking schedule, and we had a great time.
Combined Books Read: 49
Bottles of Wine: 49
I'm lumping these two together thanks to a few reader observations: they are the same number I wish I could say that we downed a bottle of wine every time we read a book, but this one was purely a coincidence. Our books read was much lower than I anticipated as we started ramping up our business activities on our site towards the end of our trip, and our bottles of wine were low because we only spent brief periods of time in the world's best wine regions (Bordeaux, Tuscany, South Africa, and Argentina to name a few). When good wine is as cheap as it is in these regions, it is hard to pay a premium for them elsewhere!
Dogs Adopted: 1
This statistic was only added on after we got home, and was made purely to share our story about our new team member, Tamale! She is a gorgeous rescue dog that we fell in love with in Mexico and brought her home to have lots of love, treats, and belly rubs. We have some great posts coming about Tamale in the future, so we'll leave this one here for now. But expect us to start posting a lot of photos of her on Instagram when we launch our newest social media profile in the next few weeks!
Have any other numbers you'd like to know about? I likely have them tallied in one form or another, but forgot about it. Comment below and I can try to include them in this post! Further entries into this series will feature the financial aspects of long-term travel and more!
