Our Grey Gap Year & Beyond
So as Covid-19 continues its rampage throughout the world we have cancelled our Grey Gap Year for now. Let’s be positive and just call it a postponement!
So until the world heals and opens up its borders again, stay safe, be kind to each other and we hope to see you in the future 🤞💝
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.
Seemingly it all started when discussing a 12 month travel plan with friends and family and they all wanted to keep track of our trip – “easy” Mary said “follow us on Facebook” – “Nooooo we’re not all on FB” they said. “Why not write a blog” someone suggested. Hmm, seemed like a good idea. However, after disappearing down a rabbit hole of reading blogs and watching YouTube videos on how to write a travel blog for what felt like several months, we emerged somewhat confused and apprehensive about the whole thing – so many things to think about – domain name, which blogging site to use, hosted versus self host, costs, themes, plugins, coding etc.
So taking a deep breath we went for it – domain name tested – yep it’s not been used – yeah go for it – ha ha first error made, rookie mistake – forgot to do a Internet search until AFTER registering and paying for our domain name. First search came up with a Twitter #meanderingmumfords tag made by another Mumford!
We decided to go down the WordPress.org, self hosted route, selected our hosting platform and here we are. There are many blogs out there that say it’s easy to start a blog; you just need a domain name, a hosting platform and 30mins of your time – believe you me it is not quite as simple as they make out. We are on a steep learning curve and no doubt will make many errors along the way (hence the Lessons Learned page which we aim to update regularly!!). Still we’ve accepted the challenge and hopefully the site will develop into something interesting and worthwhile reading – so feel free to join us as we stumble through the intricacies of blogging and living out of a suitcase during our long term travelling.