Mountains and Miles

Sorry everyone, I couldn't resist a good (or bad) April Fools joke. The truth is we did win, but only one of the many NT$ 200 prizes (~$6 USD). Still need a few more of those to cover a ticket back to Asia. Well folks, we thought we were rounding some of the last turns of our trip, but as it turns out, while we were in Taiwan, we learned about the country's free national lottery. Here's how it works. Every time you purchase something in Taiwan, no matter how big or small, your receipt comes with a free lottery ticket. Why do they do this, one may ask? If the population demands receipts, and in turn their free lottery tickets, then businesses are forced to accurately report their sales to the government. Clever way to combat tax evasion huh? Oh, and they draw the winning numbers every two months, for the preceding two months. So I had to carry these things around for almost 4 months to find out that I had won. Here's the prize list: Special Prize - NT$ 10,000,000 (~$3

We spent 5 nights in San Carlos de Bariloche in Argentina (more commonly referred to as Bariloche) and it wasn't nearly enough. Here's a glimpse at how we filled our days in what felt like a different world.

After recently posting about our 2017 financial summary , I figured it would only be appropriate to follow it up with a post about airline miles and points since these valuable currency forms account for a fairly significant portion of how we pay for our trip. Before setting out on our global adventure, Heather and I signed up for a total of 17 credits cards.

Before leaving the amazing country of Uruguay , we decided to spend two nights in the tiny city of Carmelo. I had read a few blogs that recommended visiting some of the vineyards in the area, and anything with caramel in the name sounds like a good idea to me.

In 2017, we spent a total of $20,158. This may seem like a lot at first glance, but for about $125 per day we went to 9 countries on four continents and completed an entire circumnavigation of the globe. Because it's been a while since I've posted about our finances, this post encompasses every Dollar, Euro, Dirham, Pound, NTD, Yen, and Peso that we spent in 2017. When we complete our trip, later this year, I'll publish the rest.

As most of you know from reading about how we packed for a year travel , we took just enough clothing to get us through about a week of travel. I brought a few extra items compared to Ricardo, like an extra pair of shorts and more undies (which I was grateful for during the Camino)! This plan has worked out great since we are carrying everything we own in our backpacks, but this also means needing to do laundry more often than we’d like.

We spent a week on the road driving up and down the coast and enjoying the freedom of having our own set of wheels. Check out our video of our hostel living, beach bummin' life!

We traveled about 20 hours from Mexico to Houston to Panama City before finally landing in South America. I was overjoyed to step off the plane into the hot, sunny city of Montevideo, Uruguay. But, with a change in country comes another change in the Spanish accent. It took me about a week before I could actually hear the accent and understand. Ricardo and I have both been to Uruguay in the past at different times in our lives, so this wasn’t a surprise, but still something to get used to.

After our 4 weeks of intensive spanish classes at Escuela Delengua in Granada, Spain I felt confident that I had learned enough spanish to have a basic conversation (mainly about food…) and more importantly, I could understand people most of the time. But, the biggest mistake I made over the next couple of months was that I rarely practiced since I had Ricardo to lean on. Walking the Camino de Santiago should have been my prime time to practice, but I never felt confident enough to try. Another month passed as we traveled through London, Taiwan and Japan where I never looked at a single flashcard on my Tinycards app (a great app for flashcards!). I thought I forgot everything. So, we decided to enroll in more classes at Escuela Mexicana since we still planned on visiting more spanish speaking countries. But, to be completely honest, even on orientation day I wasn’t exactly thrilled about trying to do it again…