900 days of travel: Reflections

Last Updated on February 22, 2021

Thursday, 11 October marked our 900th day of travel! Days 801 – 900 of our life of travel have been the most remote of all the days before, spent on far away beaches in far flung locations…

A running theme of our travels is taking advantage of living life on a whim. Not that we don’t plan. Before arriving in a new destination, research and planning factor heavily into our how we spend our time.

Where we go, however, changes on the turn of a dime, the drop of a hat, on a whim. Once, it meant flying from Panama to Germany even though we had planned on continuing down to Colombia. Another time, it meant spending three weeks in Lisbon (and loving it!), just because we had time to kill before flying to Canada.

Most recently this meant a snap decision to spend two months in Costa Rica on the beaches of the Nicoya peninsula for a housesit. We had fully intended to travel Mexico for a month after our housesit there. Costa Rica was never on the plan until suddenly it was.

Our beach in Costa Rica

Housesitting is another running theme, and one that we are increasingly passionate about as we continue the life of freedom we have established. It allows us to rest, cook for ourselves and really get to know a destination for longer periods of time. These last 100 days have been almost entirely spent housesitting.

While we don’t regret a single whim, these past 100 days taught us a few things. Living a life on the beach is the stuff dreams are made of, but our views on that have shifted. We both still love the beach, and spending a month or two at a time hearing the waves crash against the shore, watching the sun set or rise beyond the horizon, soaking up that inevitably relaxed, chilled out culture that exists at the beach…we love those things.

But we are city people.

We need culture, restaurants, art, and the chance to watch the millions of different ways that people express being human all in one place. We certainly lived out one of those sitting-in-the-office, dreaming-of-what-you-would-do-if-you-won-the-lottery dreams these past 100 days, but in between the two housesits, stopping in Mexico City was an absolute must, and now we are about to put our ‘life on the beach’ dream behind us and moving on to another dream.

Our beautiful beach in Mexico

To live in Buenos Aires, Argentina for a month.

Before we left, over 900 days ago, we originally looked at flights from London to Buenos Aires via Rome. Instead, on another whim, our trip began in Las Vegas. Every time we start a new leg of our travels, however, we always assume it will be Buenos Aires and then all of South America. Somehow, it took us over two years, but now the flights are booked and this dream is real.

And to think, the next time you read one of these reflections posts, the big 1000 days celebration set of reflections, we will have been and gone to Buenos Aires and will be tasting our way through Argentina’s wine country or hopping around glaciers at the bottom of the world.

After a month in the Argentine capital, we’ll get back into a rhythm that we had been keeping before these last 100 days. We have only been to two countries in that time. Just Mexico and Costa Rica. And in those two countries, we have only really been to four or five places, since housesitting took up huge chunks of that time. This complete stability is what has been so unusual about days 801 – 900. We traveled at the rate of a tortoise, but we needed that. Maintaining breakneck speed, changing hotels (and towns!) every few days is exhilarating in spurts, but the longer we continue the journey, the longer these breaks in between need to be.

Turtles slowly making their way out of the water | Costa Rica

Despite a spot of navel gazing about whether we had lost our travel mojo, the butterflies have begun, wine and cheese palates have been whetted and we can’t wait to wipe off our moldy passports and move in to our Buenos Aires apartment (which we found on Wimdu.com) to explore the city, and the country, where this whole journey was supposed to begin in the first place.

Read on for our top travel moments and most disappointing places in our Tops & Flops of 900 Days of Travel!

Looking back:

• Reflections of 100 days of travel
• Reflections of 200 days of travel
• Reflections of 300 days of travel
• Reflections of 400 days of travel
• Reflections of 500 days of travel
• Reflections of 600 days of travel
• Reflections of 700 days of travel
• Reflections of 800 days of travel

Related posts:

1000 Days of Travel: Reflections 800 days of travel: Reflections on the last 100 days Tops and Flops of 1000 Days of Travel: Days 901-1000 Reflections: 400 days on the road