How do you plan a 12 month trip?

This is a question we’ve been asked a lot and we doubt there is a right or wrong way to do it. It’s a personal thing; how do you like to travel, what are you interested in, what type of accommodation do you prefer and what your budget is?

We started with a wishlist of places to visit or re-visit and then tried to join them up in a sensible route without going back on ourselves or spend hours in airports. Then having already agreed on a 12 month trip, we realised we’d have to be moving on very frequently to see everything. Hmm, this was supposed to be a holiday rather than an episode of “Race across the World” so out went South America – to hopefully be visited later in a separate trip. Also some of South East Asia as we have been lucky enough to have visited several countries there before and Europe was never on this agenda anyway so we were then left with something more manageable – now to join it all up. Most of it was straightforward until we got to the South Pacific – not so easy to island hop across from West to East as we had thought! After spending many hours on the internet we gave up and spent even more hours with the lovely Emma at Bournemouth’s Trailfinders and eventually came up with a route. We opted for a Round the World ticket (many pros and cons of the RTW versus smaller budget airlines but it suited us for this trip) and then went about filling in the blanks ourselves – accommodation is a mixture of budget hotels, hostels, AirBnB and campervans and 2 indulgences – a train trip and lastly for a celebratory birthday, a cruise. So maybe not your usual run of the mill Gap Year!

Oh and just as a side note when planning such a trip, don’t forget to check what visas are needed (check our lessons learned page for a near miss), what they cover and how long they last for – that will also help with deciding how long to visit a particular country.