How We Travel
Chris has a small pension from her former job at the U.S. Congressional Budget Office. We both work as freelance editors, which we can do on the road with our laptops, as long as we can get a decent wifi signal. We have a base travel budget of about $90 a day for the two of us. We try not to spend more than half of that on lodging, which is easier in some places (such as Southeast Asia) than in others (such as Europe). We stretch our travel budget by housesitting or staying with hosts and supplement it with our freelance earnings.
So far, our favorite countries include Switzerland, Italy, France, Slovenia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and New Zealand. But who knows what places we’ll fall in love with in the future?
We typically fly from the United States to other countries. Between cities or adjacent countries, we take public transit, such as trains or buses. Within cities and towns, we usually walk or take a bus, subway, taxi, or ride share.
In the eastern half of the United States, we typically drive our friends’ extra car. We have an arrangement with them in which they keep the car registered and insured (something that’s hard for us to do without a home address), while we pay for repairs and maintenance.
We do all of our trip planning ourselves—that’s part of the fun. The only time we join organized tours is for day trips to places we can’t easily reach by ourselves.
We rarely rent a car, because of the cost. In places where public transit is scarce (such as Bali), we’ve sometimes found it more cost-effective to hire a driver who has a car than to rent a car ourselves.
Our most common lodgings are local guesthouses, small hotels, or vacation apartments (in places where they’re not harming the local housing market). In expensive locations, we sometimes stay in hostels (bunkbed dorms or private rooms) instead.
Sometimes we stay with people in their homes, through hospitality organizations such as Servas or Lesbian & Gay Hospitality Exchange International.
We also do a lot of housesitting, in which we look after people’s homes and pets while they’re away in exchange for free lodging (see below). We find housesitting opportunities through websites such as TrustedHousesitters or MindMyHouse.
Before we started housesitting, we sometimes worked at people’s farms or inns in exchange for meals and lodging. (Opportunities like that are available at Helpx and Workaway.)
We read a lot of travel blogs and magazines, watch a lot of travel shows on TV, listen to travel podcasts (such as “Amateur Traveler” and “Get Out of Here!”), and talk to other travelers.
Melissa, in particular, likes to read guidebooks for fun. So we always have a list in our heads of places we want to visit or revisit.
We also get emails every day with new housesit listings from the housesitting websites we subscribe to. Often, we’ll apply for a housesit opening somewhere that sounds interesting, and if we get the sit, we plan a trip around it.
In recent years, we’ve also been planning trips around regional or international Urban Sketchers events, which Melissa loves to attend.
Wherever we go, we try to learn a little bit of the local language—things like “hello,” “goodbye,” “please,” “thank you,” “excuse me,” “sorry” (an important one), basic numbers, and “do you understand English?”
We find that starting with even a few words of the local language, before we need to switch to English, brings us a much warmer reception from local people.
Beyond that, if we can’t find anyone who speaks English, French, German, or Spanish—the languages in which we can make some amount of conversation—we rely on phrasebooks, the Google translate app on our phones, hand gestures, or pointing at pictures.
We’re very lucky, as native English speakers, that English has become one of the main languages of tourism and business worldwide. (For example, if a Norwegian and an Indonesian want to converse, they’re likely to use English.) That means that in many places we visit, some of the people who work in the tourism industry are likely to speak—or at least understand—a little bit of English.
For about half of each year, we stay in northern Virginia with our dear friends AJ and Nick Ferraro and their young daughters, Francesca and Naomi.
Their generosity with their spare rooms gives us a home base, a chance to experience parenthood and family life, and a way to stay connected to our friends, colleagues, activities, and health care providers in the Washington, DC, area.
We also spend time each year visiting our relatives, who are spread out around the eastern United States. And sometimes we do housesits in the United States to see new places or to avoid taxing the hospitality of our friends and family.
Sometimes, especially when we’re feeling sick or tired, miss our developed-world comforts (such as drinkable tap water), or wish we had more of our familiar possessions around us.
Maybe someday we’ll buy a home, live there part-time to put down roots in a community, and rent it out the rest of the time while we travel. But it has never seemed like the right time for that yet.
For as long as we’re able to physically and financially. As time goes by, we may find that we value our creature comforts more (that’s already started), and we may stay in one place for a longer period instead of moving around as much.
But Melissa’s paternal grandmother ran her own farm well into her 80s, and Chris’s maternal grandmother visited Thailand and rode an elephant at age 80. So we have good role models for staying active in our later years.
Not as many as we’d like to! Since we usually travel for months at a time with backpack-sized suitcases, our space is limited. So we generally buy packable souvenirs—things like textiles, small carvings, baskets, or souvenir books.
We especially love buying things we’ve seen people make or wear in the places we visit. One of the attractions of someday getting our own home is so we can unpack all the mementos we’ve acquired on our trips and surround ourselves with them.
Learn as much as we can about the cultures we spend time in—history, religion, etiquette, food. Don’t expect them to conform to us.
Make sure our money benefits the communities we’re visiting. That means staying in small, locally owned lodgings instead of big chains, eating in family-run restaurants, shopping where local people do, and buying art objects directly from the artisans (or at least in their villages) whenever possible.
Try to be environmentally responsible travelers. Although we do fly sometimes, we try to use public transit the rest of the time. We carry reusable water bottles, a small Steripen UV water purifier, roll-up nylon shopping bags, and small bamboo utensil sets so we can minimize our use of plastic water bottles, bags, and utensils. We recycle as much as we can and try to conserve water in places where that is important.
Be good ambassadors so people can learn as much from us as we do from them. We hope that by being open, friendly, and respectful travelers, we can dispel negative stereotypes that people may have about Americans, women, or same-sex couples.
We generally avoid countries where homosexuality is illegal. That puts large parts of Africa and the Middle East, plus some parts of Southeast Asia, off limits for us.
We don’t avoid those places because we’re afraid of getting caught. We avoid them because if we do happen to run afoul of the law (say, through a traffic stop or an immigration problem), we don’t want to give the authorities an easy charge to make against us. And we don’t want our money to support governments that persecute queer people.
Since our marriage in 2010, we’ve always traveled openly as a married same-sex couple. We refer to each other as “my wife.” If people look confused (and if we have the language skills to explain it), we say that in the United States, women can marry women and men can marry men.
Most people seem to understand—even if they just think it’s another way in which foreigners are strange.
We’ve undoubtedly had potential hosts or housesitting clients rejects us for being queer, and we’ve gotten a few dirty looks over the years. But we’ve never experienced any real harassment. (In general, unfair as it is, female couples tend to encounter less antagonism than male couples.)
Anywhere we can, we love attending gay pride festivals, visiting gay bookstores or bars, and making contact with gay groups as part of learning about local culture.
One cherished memory is meeting a young Vietnamese woman who was helping with a food tour we took in Hoi An. As we walked along, we talked about our respective lives, and she remarked that it was hard to be a lesbian in her area because everyone is so closeted and she might have to move to a big city to meet anyone. At the end of our conversation, she said how happy she was to meet us—an open and happily married lesbian couple—because we showed her what might be possible someday for her country and for herself.
Peace of Mind for People and Pets
Housesitting
Let us take care of your home and pets while you’re away.
We have looked after people’s homes and beloved animals—for free—more than 50 times all over the world, and we love it.
Housesitting lets us experience a place as the local residents do, not as tourists, and lets us do other things we enjoy, such as cooking, gardening, and hanging out with wonderful animals.
Read more about our petsitting and housesitting experience in our TrustedHousesitters.com profile or contact us directly.
Posts About Our Life on the Road
