Finding Inspiration Through Travel: Three Month Update

It has officially been a little over three months since we left home. Boy has it been quite the three months! We have flown over 13,087kms, driven over 4,068kms and had over 108 coffees to keep us awake through it all. We have been getting a lot of people telling us how it’s inspired them to want to travel or how they look forward to seeing our posts because they’re planning their own trips, or even how wonderful it is that we take them along for the ride. Even though people tell us how inspiring it is for them they have no idea how inspiring it is to us.

To hear these stories gives us a feeling like we are doing something right, we are becoming successful individuals in our own right.

These three months have been quite the roller coaster ride through the ups and downs of travelling. Each day is something new and doesn’t come without missing home, worrying about the decreasing numbers in our bank accounts, and wondering how we re-enter society when we finally do get back home. We have also scrubbed countless toilets, picked up an endless amount of cigarette butts, flipped a mountain bike, lost a bike tire going off a bike jump, been eaten alive by sand flies, slipped down a grassy hill surrounded by sheep poop (which thankfully wasn’t landed in), almost thrown up driving on way too many winding roads, and lived in a small dorm room with a snoring roommate for a month before moving into our small campervan that isn’t even big enough to stand up straight to put on your pants (which means we have also hit our heads one too many times to count).

But we wouldn’t trade it for the world because we have also; zorbed down a hill in Rotorua, visited Hobbiton, met people from across the globe which we can now call friends, dug a hole in the beach to reveal hot water for a sandy hot tub, mountain biked around Lake Wanaka, hiked countless trails, cruised Milford Sound, walked through Ancient forests, and experienced our first earthquake.

Visiting the WETA Cave Trolls in Wellington.

In the past three months we have learned more about ourselves and each other than we ever could have imagined. Things like the value of finding excitement and joy in the little things, laughing at yourself when you almost fall in a pile of sheep poop, or figuring out that living out of a backpack is possible and all the things and objects that fill your house back home are just that, fillers.

These experiences and lessons are things university and careers can’t give or teach us.

We are exploring the world and at the same time exploring ourselves.

Like we mentioned each day doesn’t come without worries, especially about how we re-enter a working society when we return back home. We will be those individuals in our early to mid-twenties who still live at home with our parents without a seemingly successful career, which society seems to view as unsuccessful. Sounds pretty glum doesn’t it? Well it’s not, sure maybe our decision to skip-out on an a-typical ‘successful’ life to sell all our stuff, get on a plane with a one way ticket to live in a van surviving on mainly pasta and rice will come back and bite us in the ass one day, or maybe it wont. Maybe it will teach us to be successful in a different way.

Maybe success doesn’t always come from a thick rooted education and career, maybe it comes from simply finding ourselves and inspiring others to do the same. Living each day as if it offers a new lesson, because it does.

Through the ups and downs we are learning about ourselves, each other, the world, and life. That’s not something you can buy a textbook for or ask your boss about.

Success is not just about what you accomplish in your life, it is also about what you inspire others to do.