Traveling lower and slower

Hello!

     We seem to have moved to a more leisurely schedule here, so let me direct you to our more frequently updating Facebook, Instagram Andy and Instagram LuAnn if you are hungry for news. Whilst we are reloading the kitty for our further adventures we are still doing some traveling but, especially with LuAnn still on the mend, we are moving a bit lower and slower in our pace. Now that LuAnn has gotten her cast removed though, we are hoping that we can start to "trot about" again!

     So. Some things that have been happening: I took part in the RPM Challenge this month, which is "Ten songs, or 35 minutes of original music, created during the month of February. I did a bit better than that. As of today I have 17 new songs up on MY SOUNDCLOUD, some 50 odd minutes of music. 50 minutes of odd music? Whatever. I just discovered there is also FAWM, February Album Writing Month so I did that too. Man, people really want to help kickstart my creativity!

     I'm pretty happy with that result. I wasn't nearly as productive on the road as I would have liked, music-wise. I did write some stuff that I ended up using, but considering I dragged the whole recording apparatus around the world, well... let's just say that I spent more time sightseeing than working in any capacity and leave it at that. Anyway, I hope you get to listen and enjoy it! 

     In other music news I've done a bunch of gigs with Back Alley Cadillac and that's been going well. LuAnn has been invited back to show her watercolors again at The Cool Moose in April. She was delighted to have sold a piece there last month. She's been painting a bunch and doing her regular day job thing so that's all fine & dandy. I haven't managed to land a straight job yet so that's a bit disappointing but these things take time.

     In travel news our recent long weekend trip was to Cocoa Beach Florida where we stayed at the lovely Inn at Cocoa Beach which we highly recommend. Reasonably priced, well located with a wonderful ocean view and heated outdoor pool it was, to use my favorite phrase, delightful!

     While everyone told us to eat at the Florida Seafood Bar & Grill, even with call ahead reservations, you couldn't even get up to the hostess it was so crowded. Unbelievable. It must be great but we'll never know. We almost gave up eating out that evening, but we walked to the river to see the view and ended up going in the Sunset Waterfront Grill instead. They get pretty mixed reviews on the food & service but I don't see why. The wait staff was great, the food was tasty & reasonably priced and the view was amazing, especially when you are watching a gorgeous sunset sitting on an open deck in February. Thank you, Florida. 

     For Valentine's Day we went to Millikens Reef in Cape Canaveral. It was sort of weirdly situated on the waterfront, but it was sort of industrial waterfront. They have live music outside but we sat inside. It was a big place and fairly crowded but no wait. The food was decent and again fairly reasonable considering the hotel tried to sell us on Valentine's dinner for $95 per person.

     Our last day there we decided to spend the day at the Kennedy Space Center, and we were so glad we did. It was fun as hell. The pavilions are really quite well done. There is an IMAX theater where we saw the story of the Hubble telescope, with its dazzling images.  Another pavilion housed the  space shuttle Atlantis, and after that a bus trip out to the launch pads and the Atlas V rocket they sent to the moon. We also  learned a whole bunch about what NASA and SpaceX are up to now, and hope to return to see an actual launch. It was well worth the $50 per person. 

     Coming up, we hope to explore what spring holds for us locally, like the Okefenokee and Everglades. We've been noticing the azaleas blooming, which make garden people like us happy. We have another weekend trip to South Florida planned mid-month. And somehow whenever the weekends roll around, even if we have nothing planned, somehow we stay busy! Happy exploring! 

So many choices!

What to do, what to do?

Choosing a direction on the road, or in life, can be one of the toughest things you do.

This road or that one? This country, city, apartment...or that one?

I thought that traveling for a year would give me a clearer direction in life but that doesn't seem true.

                                    (photo: Abel-Tasman on New Zealand's South Island)

Here are some current possibilities, in no particular order.

Future travel short term:

Definitely going to Cocoa Beach for the long weekend in February.
Definitely going back to Boca for a long weekend in March for the art show.
Definitely going to Austin Texas and Los Angeles California to visit the kids in May or July.
Definitely going to New Orleans again because NEW ORLEANS!
Definitely going to Key West again because KEY WEST!
Driving a Harley down through the Florida Keys is one of my favorite things ever.
Usually I am not one for repeating trips but in those two cases...nuff said.

Future travel long term:
This is trickier because it means time off work for LuAnn, at least some of which depends on my job situation as well and our income generation efforts going forward.

Nevertheless, some places on the list we want to see soon are: National Parks USA, including
Everglades, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Death Valley, Joshua Tree, Mt Rushmore, Shenandoah, & Zion. We are hoping to see the California ones while visiting the kids (maybe).

Central and South America are on the list. We've been to Brazil & Costa Rica, but I hear good things about Belize & Panama. Still want to visit Ecuador but preferably near the coast.

I still really want to tour Scandinavia and see St Petersburg Russia.
Germany is a big place with lots to see also, especially the Rhine river.
There is some amazing stuff to see in Canada but all those Northern latitudes are summer trips.

One thing travel did not cure me of is my aversion to cold weather. I like it hot.
Another thing travel didn't cure me of is my aversion to high elevations. I like sea level.
I realize this is severely limiting but f*ck it. I'm not going to be miserable just so I can satisfy someone else's idea of a cool itinerary.

Speaking of decisions, we have been pondering whether to buy a house again or continue to rent?

While we're at it, do we want a house or a condo? There are some great condos with boat slips here that are very affordable, and someone else does the yard work. On the other hand I'm not much for neighbors right on top of me. I'm not crazy about buying at all, but if we can get a place we can rent out and get some income from that would help fund more traveling for sure.

Meanwhile I have been having some success with music here in florida playing bass with blues and soul with Back Alley Cadillac, doing my solo thing and starting up another guitar trio so that's good.

LuAnn is having some success selling her paintings at The Cool Moose, the local coffee shop.

Jacksonville Hot Rods has been put on the back burner until I can raise some more capital to work with. Mostly it's a collection of photos of all the cool cars I see around here!

So as you can see the travel aspect of We Trot About has been hindered by LuAnn's broken leg but we are thriving pretty well here in Jax for the time being. Thank you all for following along. Be sure to follow on Instagram for up to the minute pix of Andy & LuAnn's adventures :-)

Full Time Travel VS Gap Year Part 2 of 3

     In today’s blog, full time nomads Chuck and Lori of www.chuckandlori.com interview us about our travels and we talk a bit about how it all came about. We hope the conversation helps shed some light on the full time versus sabbatical decision. 

Q. First off Andy and LuAnn, tell us a little about yourselves, and tell our readers how we met you guys.

LuAnn is an interior designer and watercolorist at www.LuAnnDunkinson.com, and Andy is a software quality assurance guru, plus a photographer and musician at www.AndyToomey.com. Most people are a something-slash-something else nowadays, aren’t they?

TO READ THE REST CLICK HERE

Full Time Travel VS Gap Year Pt 1 of 3 with Chuck and Lori!

Today we're featuring (and being featured by) our pals, fellow travelers Chuck and Lori.

Here is a link to the article on blog, the first in a 3 part series where we talk about Full Time Travel VS taking a Gap Year.

Quoting Chuck:
Wanderlust is a serious affliction. It can incite otherwise sane, mature people to sell everything they own and hit the road or to tell their employers they’re taking a year off so they can travel the world. If you have an acute case of wanderlust, you might be asking yourself some life-changing questions. Can I just run away and travel the world for rest of my life? What if I just take a year or so off and do a round-the-world trip?

We hope you follow along! 

Cheers!

Andy & LuAnn

A Few Lessons Learned From 'Round The World Travel

     Lessons learned? Always get the conch fritters.

     Also, walk very carefully, wherever you may be:

     Despite the fact that this post is about lessons learned from traveling, the pics are all from our more recent adventures in North Florida. We're still trying to draw some conclusions about our whole travel experience. Was it worth it? You bet! Would we do it again? For sure! Will we? I hope so! I think we might do a few things differently next time though, and of course we'd probably go to places we haven't been yet.

     I dunno how many people get to take a year off and just travel the world but it can't be a big percentage of humanity. I think we saw more Chinese tourists than any other type, followed by Germans.  We saw quite a few Canadians everywhere, but did not run into many Americans until we were well into Europe.

     So what was the return on that investment? Memories that will last a lifetime? Yes. Pictures to prove it? Yes, sir. The chance to see so many things I've always wanted to with the partner of a lifetime? That's right. For example, colonial Mexico, unspoiled New Zealand, the Temples of Thailand, the gardens of Japan, the islands of Indonesia, the streets of Singapore, the mosques of Istanbul, the monasteries of Meteora, Ancient Greece, Lake Como, the canals of Amsterdam, the hills of Lisbon and the English countryside, just to name a few highlights.

     One pretty valuable thing I got was the affirmation that we are all basically the same. People want to improve their lives and the lives of their children. That despite the occasional jerk most people are basically decent all over the world. When you see the news on TV you might think that wasn't true, but we found it to be so by and large.

     Another interesting tidbit is that people around the world don't hate Americans the way the press like to portray. A lot of people asked questions about things they couldn't understand or believe, especially racism, police brutality and the easy availability of guns here. I got asked about those everywhere I went, often in the local language. I also had lengthy discussions about politics in Spanish, French, and halting English.

     I also learned that in places where politics is dangerous, like Thailand, people do NOT want to talk about it. I tried pretty hard to find out what people there thought was going on in their country and they were clearly scared to talk about it. LuAnn finally convinced me to shut up about it because people were so obviously freaked out by questions, as if the secret police might come drag them away no matter what they said. It reminded me that, whatever the problems in my own country, we still have it pretty damned good.

     A lot of people asked me why we work so hard with so little vacation, and why we tolerate a lot of the crap that we do. Many Europeans seemed to think we weren't nearly active enough in our own government and I could only agree. They tended to say things like "For a country with so much wealth you don't seem to spend nearly enough on education or the well being of your people, especially the needy, and where you do it's completely ineffective!" Again, nothing to do but say "Yep."

     I will say that type of thing wasn't nearly as common as you might imagine. People didn't just offer opinions, or pick me out as an American and jump on me. It had to come up in conversation. Most people don't think about us nearly as much as we think. I will say we Americans stand out. The accent is always a dead giveaway. Most English speakers abroad tend to sound British. Also, we are LOUD. Only Italians and maybe Russians are as bad.

     What few regrets I have mostly pertain to what we didn't do or places we didn't go and the fact that we had to stop so soon. In retrospect perhaps we should have made a better effort at generating a revenue stream while we were traveling, such as renting our house or such.

     On the other hand we always said we would probably eventually come back and settle in Florida and I have to say we have been pretty happy here in Jacksonville so far. Other than LuAnn breaking her leg while visiting California it's gone pretty well.  How crazy is that? We travel 40,000 miles around the world and don't get a scratch. Come back to the states, go away for a long weekend and she breaks her leg? Still we're pretty grateful that didn't happen while we were traveling. Besides the obvious fact it would have brought us to a complete halt the medical facilities I saw were sub-optimal. I wouldn't have wanted to go to the hospital in many places we visited outside the "West".

     So what now? We keep exploring the American SouthEast and blogging our travels, within the limits of LuAnn's leg and her job. I'll keep looking for work. I've started doing some local gigs and finding some music students and I hope www.JacksonvilleHotRods.com will take off. We'll see! Adventure! Speaking of adventure, most of the pix in the post are from our explorations including Thanksgiving in Boca Raton, Deerfield and DelRay Beach. Florida! Yay! Some highlights were Selwyn Birchwood at the Funky Biscuit and lunch and the Old Key Lime House!

 

A Retrospective on Nine Months of Continuous Travel

     Hi gang!

     This is a bit of a throwback post as I wrote it Aug 19th which was 280 days since my last day at work Nov 12th 2014. That's 40 weeks, approximately 9 months, coincidentally as long as it takes to have a baby. I was not having a baby but I was having a bit of a cow, so to speak. Even now it's still only just beginning to register what we've done and what comes next. Pictures are from our new home in Jacksonville!
 

     We had planned to be gone for all of 2015 since, for tax purposes, we would have zero taxes for 2015. It's ironic therefore that the unexpected tax burden from 2014, some $6000, was the thing that kept us from accomplishing that goal. Still kind of pissed about that but them's the breaks.

     Nevertheless, as goals go, it mostly worked out as expected. We started out with $90K and said we would travel until we had spent half, then decide what to do next and thats what we did. I was unsure how much time and energy we would be willing to invest in finding ways to make money while traveling. Predictably, perhaps, that turned out to be a very small amount of time. You can't see the world working at a desk.

     So we spent $45K in 9 months, inclusive of everything. That's $5000 a month, $2500 a month each. The vast majority of that money went to accommodations, followed by travel expenses like airfare. This was pretty much in line with my expectations. We could have brought it in for substantially less, but it would have meant moving far less and thus seeing far less. Oh, you traveled around the world? What did you see? Nothing.

     Also, we really didn't make an effort to go "low budget". We said early on that we would try to strike the middle ground of "Flash Packing". We would not be dirty backpackers eating ramen noodles, but neither would we be staying at Four Seasons eating caviar and drinking champagne. In this I would say we were pretty successful.

     We comparison shopped quite a bit for flights and accommodations and I was quite surprised at how much time that took up. In fact quite a few times we (OK, I) chose accommodations on the basis of "I can't look at this anymore" and, more often than not, if I did that it went badly. Still, only once (in Koh Lanta, Thailand) did we arrive at a place that was so bad we couldn't stay there and, unsurprisingly, that was the site of LuAnn's one and only melt down on the whole trip. I'm still saving mine up. ProTip: if the hostel is $25 a day it will probably be a bummer.

Here are some final numbers from the trip for us all to contemplate:
Total cost: $45K over 9 months/$5000 a month, $2500 a month each, or $83 per day, each.
Days on the road: 280
Weeks on the road: 40
Months on the road: 9
Miles travelled: 42,394 ><
Miles walked: avg 6 miles per day
Countries visited: 14
Cities visited: 61
Flights taken: 18
Cars rented: 3
Scooters rented: 3
Beds slept in: 62
Museums visited: 40
UNESCO sites: 15
Pictures taken: 10,000?
Videos taken: 29
Instagrams posted: about 100 each?
Blog posts: 80
Blog views: 8000 (about 100 per post?)
Sick days each: about 5?
Meltdowns: 1 (it was LuAnn. I'm saving mine up for the US)
Fights: 0

     That last one there might be a surprising figure to some folks, but there it is. A few people predicted we would kill each other being in such constant close proximity for all that time but that just didn't turn out to be the case. Travel is the ultimate test of any relationship and I'm proud we passed with flying colors.

     Speaking of flying colors, one of the numbers from this post was 29 Videos taken. Check them all out in one place HERE! Also Andy's Instagram & LuAnn's Instagram!

     I'm going to write a separate post about lessons learned and so I won't say too much more here. We're super grateful for everyone who followed along this far and we hope you'll keep watching as I think you'll see more adventures as we explore the South, from Key West to DC and out to Texas. There'll be swamps & gators, beaches and cities, and all kinds of grand tomfoolery and damfoolishness to come. Also I fired up a little side business dealing in cars here called JHR; Jacksonville Hot Rods so come check out THOSE adventures!
   

Not Gone; Not Forgotten

     In case y'all mighta been wonderin', we ain't gone and hopefully ain't forgotten. Andy is starting up a new venture called JHR aka Jacksonville Hot Rods which, besides tricking out and flipping cool cars and trucks, aims to shine a light on all the cool stuff in Jacksonville Florida. Hint: there's a lot of it. It's also on Facebook and Twitter if you'd like to follow along on those platforms. Anyhow...

     LuAnn, after making it around the world without so much as a head cold or a hangnail, took a bad step while visiting our daughter in California and not only broke her right leg but sprained her right ankle bad enough to need a screw put in so she'll be using a wheelchair and crutches for the next few months or so. To say the least she is none too happy about that. It certainly puts at least a theoretical damper on traveling right now.

Nevertheless...

     This past weekend we went to Savannah GA, another of our favorite places in the states, to see Mr. Ron White, one of our favorite comedians, and he was hilarious as always. While we were there we took some time to literally roll around a few of the squares, have a delicious lunch at the 1790 Inn, and head out to Tybee Island which had some fantastic views as always.

     We hope you all have been doing wonderfully and fantastically well wherever you are and whatever you are doing. We are certainly enjoying ourselves here, regardless of our setbacks here and there.  Please get in touch and by all means visit if you are in the area. We'd love to see you and hang out. Meantime we are soaking up all of the awesome Southern Charm surrounding us here until the next trip, wherever that may be.  Meanwhile don't forget to check out Andy & LuAnn's Instagrams! rock on!

     Best,
        Andy & LuAnn