Everyone dreams of staying on the road for an extended period of time; going beyond the handful of days or weeks that constitute normal vacations, and spending a few months as a footloose nomad. After all, there’s a special level of awareness and openness—an acutely perceptive eye—that comes with a long sojourn. Toward the end of a typical getaway, we may just begin to sense the slightest glimmer of this in-the-moment mindset, but our flight home and the resumption of our workaday lives pull us away just at the cusp.
Journeying for weeks on end introduces you to entirely new rhythms and meditations. A long-term journey—say, three months or so—takes planning and preparation. Logistics you don’t have to bother much with on shorter trips become on-the-road realities. The sort of daily splurges you can afford on a weeklong vacation—excursions, meals out, cocktails at the poolside bar—can ruin your budget on longer journeys. Similarly, many travelers who try to extend the typical approach of days packed-to-the-gills with sightseeing across weeks and months find themselves quickly burnt out, run ragged by too many cathedrals or beaches. But the challenges of extended traveling are more than compensated for by the pleasures.
Perhaps you’re hoping to really globe-trot, roaming from country to country with nothing more than a backpack and a passport. That can be a grand adventure, but consider other strategies, too: Maybe you want to scale back your itinerary to only a few countries, allowing more time for in-depth exploration of each; perhaps you'll decide to travel widely but just within a single region, using your generous allotment of weeks to really get to know the culture and the landscape.
One way to structure a long trip is to give it a theme. You might develop a route based around Roman ruins in Europe; the national parks of Australia; or a retrace of Lewis and Clark’s odyssey across the American West.
Whether you’re on a themed journey or not, it’s often a rewarding strategy to keep your itinerary on a loose leash, so to speak: Use your pre planned schedule to backbone your travels, but embrace spontaneity enough to accommodate sudden side trips—maybe even a total reinvention of your plans—based on chance discoveries and encounters.
So—time to crack open that atlas (or Google maps) and start dreaming! Even if it's several years down the road that you’re able to block out the requisite few months for such a journey, your trip-of-a-lifetime will be here before you know it.
Tanzania
Nepal