When you’re embarking on long-term travel, you accept that at some point you’re going to get sick on the road. However, while suffering a cold or minor injury is one thing, contracting a serious disease is definitely not on our list of things to do, so we’re making sure we get all the travel vaccination advice we can before we go.  

London has turned golden and crispy, leaves littering all the pavements and parks - autumn is well and truly here. I love this time of year, even though it gets dark at four o'clock in the afternoon and our heating bills go through the roof. One of the things I like best about autumn is firework night, the 5th November, the day we celebrate Guy Fawkes failing to blow up the houses of parliament by well, blowing things up.
I can’t remember what Andrew and I used to talk about before we started planning our round the world trip. I really can’t.  Nowadays, everything revolves around trip planning – plotting our itinerary, reading travel blogs, sourcing gear, building up our savings, booking flights, organising visas…the list goes on.  I have become totally, utterly obsessed with our travel plans.
Some of the most tedious and frustrating tasks on our travel checklist are the financial ones. After much research, we finally found the best travel credit card on offer, but we then had to consider how we were going to access our money while we’re away. Turns out that the fees for using your debit card abroad can end up seriously eating into your savings, so we set out to find the cheapest option. So, what's the best debit card to use abroad? 
Stunning scenery, glaciers, skydiving and glow worm caves – it’s no wonder New Zealand is near the top of our travel wish-list. When it came to planning the itinerary for our round the world trip, New Zealand came first for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s an English speaking small-ish country that’s simple to get around in, so we can ease ourselves into our new travelling lifestyle. Since we’re leaving in March, it also makes sense to stop in New Zealand first to catch the end of their summer before we travel on to Australia and Asia.
You may not realise just how much work is involved in planning a round the world trip – we certainly didn’t. Now, with only 19 weeks left until we leave, our pre-travel checklist seems to be growing, rather than shrinking. I like to think I’m an organised person but somehow I’ve got multiple travel lists scrawled in notebooks, typed up on spreadsheets and scribbled on random bits of paper and yes, I am starting to panic.
Once upon a time, a traveller’s backpack wasn’t made up of expensive gadgets and shiny technological tools – or so I hear. Truth is, I can’t remember how I used to get through daily life without my phone or laptop, so imagining travelling the world without them is a pretty difficult task.However, part of the reason we’re going travelling is to get away from this kind of westernised, commercialised lifestyle – shouldn’t that include stripping away the gadgets? Well, not if I want to keep up this blog, for a start. As much as we’re trying to limit the amount of gadgets that make it into our backpacks, we’ve accepted that there are some things we can’t go without – that includes a new travel laptop.
I’ve thought long and hard about whether I should even write this post – but I think it’s only right to talk about the lows, as well as the highs of planning a massive life change like leaving everything behind to travel the world.  Right now, aside from being crazy excited that our departure date is only 20 weeks away and losing sleep over how much we still have left to do before we leave; I’m experiencing a case of travel guilt.