Travel Q&A: How we plan trips, traveling with a dog, saving money, staying fit, & more!

Hey everyone! We hope you guys are staying safe and healthy during the current pandemic. In case you missed our note on our YouTube community page, we are back in Austin at my parents house. Well, we're currently in the van in my parents driveway until it's safe for us to travel again. Yeah and we've really missed vlogging but we've been stuck inside. Didn't know what to film. Our creative juices are kind of limited. So we asked you guys on Instagram and YouTube for some ideas and I think we have enough to carry us for the next couple weeks. Maybe a couple months but please hopefully not any longer than that. We're going a bit stir crazy. So our vlogs will look different for the foreseeable future. We'll be doing a mix of Q&A videos, some quarantine adventures, as well as some van life content. So if you guys have anything you want to see, just comment below and let us know and we'll try to make it happen. Yeah and you've already sent us a bunch of questions already on a variety different topics so we're going to kind of try to break them out into specific videos and this one first up we're going to start with some general questions about just how we travel. This is our first ever Q&A video. Yeah it feels I don't know I'm excited. It'll be different because it's going to be us talking the whole time so if you hate just watching us and talking the whole time you might not like this video. Just put some uh just uh put the phone down and just listen. Yeah maybe it's like a podcast. So we will put some time stamps in the description below with the questions we are answering and then what time we're actually going to discuss those things so if you only want to hear about a few things or you're limited on time go and check that out. We'll also put a link to any blog posts or resources that we mention in the description below but let's get started. Question number one how do we choose our next destination? So choosing where we want to go when we're in the van it's it's a tough mix between going to the places that we know and love and exploring those more deeply and seeing all the little towns around that versus going to somewhere brand new that we've never seen but there's two things that kind of guide our decision is one we want to see all 50 states and two we want to see all the national parks and so that kind of weighs heavily on our decision for when we're in the van traveling around the United States. Yeah so it makes the van decisions a little bit easier like we were supposed to be going up the east coast until about May but our plans have changed obviously so that's not happening but we had never really explored that area so that was our big priority for like the first half of 2020. And also we when we built the van we built it to kind of chase the sun, chase the good weather so we didn't plan on being in Colorado in the snow and ice so yeah that's what we're trying to do we were in Florida for the you know the winter and so yeah we're trying to chase good weather for a lot of reasons so we'll you know tend to plan out our travel schedule based on you know where the what the weather is that time of year not too hot not too cold so we do have some notes so if you see us looking we're sorry we just don't want to forget we want to thoroughly answer this yeah we want to answer the questions the best we can and not forget anything. So for flying trips so international or Hawaii it's definitely harder because there's so much more places to explore I mean in the van we're stuck with Canada and the U.S. mostly but beyond that the whole world is our oyster so figuring out where we want to go in the rest of the world is really hard but one thing that plays a huge factor is my job so I'll touch on what I do for work later but there are certain times of the year that are easier for me to travel that's the summer and then typically like mid-November to New Year's it's usually easier for me to take some time off so we'll look at what places are good to travel to during that time we'll also look for good flight deals so if we find a really good flight do flight deal we will consider going to that place so we kind of have like a a running list of places that we want to prioritize and if we find a good flight deal if it's a good time of year to visit that place we will go there we also you know there's if there's a certain thing we want to see like if we want to go to Glacier National Park there's a very small window where you can actually drive this one road so we'd prioritize that for that specific time of the year one example of a trip that we took and how we made that decision was Mexico City yeah we were we were watching TV I think and we were just like man I really want some tacos you know and we were looking up flight deals for Mexico City and they looked good and and we booked them I don't know if we booked them that night but that week that was probably like our spontaneous trip we had never planned to go to Mexico City at that point in time and then we wanted tacos so we we booked it and we went what is our travel planning process or tools that we use and do we plan out a trip or do we just wing it we are definitely more planners versus spontaneous travelers so we want to pack in our days as much as we can so that we can get the most out of the place that we're trying to experience but as we've traveled more we're trying to leave in a little bit more room to be spontaneous and so this can save you some time and some money so for example if you're looking to do an activity and you look ahead of time sometimes you can save a couple bucks and then also a big one is say you're walking around town and you're really hungry but you don't know where to go and you just kind of walk into any old place it might be great it might not be great and if it's bad it's you're not gonna be satisfied so it's good to plan ahead especially for food I think it saves you from that food heartbreak when you're very hangry or from wandering around for hours and just wasting time trying to figure out where to eat so when we figure out what destination we want to go to next the first thing that we kind of do from a planning perspective is start tracking flights on google flights we love google flights because you can track the exact routes you want so if you're you know picky on the airline or if you don't want to have like really long layovers you can pick the exact flights you want and then just see how the prices are going we also love a tool called fairdrop it's built by this youtube couple we and basically you put your home airport options so we've put all the major ones in texas and then kind of where you want to go to in the future what months you'd like to travel kind of a price point and they send you awesome deals we get so many deals we have yet to book one just because of my work schedule but we're always getting deals that just torture us so the next step for our travel planning process is just research research research we love pinterest pinterest is how we found a lot of bloggers that we like actually and you can just find some really high quality blogs on pinterest get a good like locals perspective as well as a perspective of someone who spent a lot of time in a place a lot of people have found our blogs on pinterest so that's really cool so we just read a bunch of blogs and we try to find like common themes so if everyone's recommending you need to go eat here or you need to go here we definitely write it down it definitely gets like a higher priority on our list we also love like the usual suspects yelp trip advisor and google reviews we found that google reviews are used more globally than yelp or trip advisor so depending on where we're going we'll read all three we'll read just a couple of them and try to find places that are both like the must visit popular place with thousands of reviews as well as those places that have way less reviews but tons of great reviews that are kind of like a hidden gem or maybe a local spot so we try to find a mix of those we look at a lot of youtube blogs to get ideas of things to do when we're going places for trails we look at all trails it's a in our experience a pretty like globally used tool and it basically tells you how far a hike is the elevation gain people write reviews so you can see current conditions some destinations we go to have their own sites like washington has the washington trails association which gives you reviews from people who live in washington and it's just sometimes more up to date and sometimes more detailed than all trails we also like to use instagram so if you are on instagram and you like search in like yosemite national park for example you can typically see you know recent stories and posts from people's people who have been and you can see more of the current conditions what things look like yeah it's more helpful like right before maybe a couple days before you're going to do like hikes and things like that so you can see if the trees are all dead or if it's icy or in like a city for example you can look up a place you want to go to and you can see oh it's all under construction so you're not surprised when you get there that's happened to us a few times and like an iconic thing has been under construction so sometimes instagram helps you see like the most up-to-date version of what things look like so after we've made a list of everything we want to see and do we start to look at google maps and we plug in all the places we want to go to we figure out you know what things make sense to group together so we're not trying to go all around town in one day we like to stick to certain areas so that's how we figure out like what our itinerary will look like and then we have this itinerary google sheet this sounds like such a long process it is a hard long process a lot of work months in advance yeah so we have a google sheet that we use to map out our our itinerary it's such a tongue twister i mean we're talking a lot already getting all tongue tied um so we have this google itinerary or google sheet itinerary we use we actually have it on our website you can download it and make a copy and start using it for all of your trips and it's maybe more detailed than some people would like but for us it's nice to kind of figure out you know what time we plan to get places how long they'll take how to get there anything you need to know like cash only so we keep track of all of that in a sheet and that just kind of becomes our like go-to doc when we're on that trip yeah and like we mentioned at the beginning anything we mention will be linked in the description below so you can see it and use it yourself how do you stay fit while traveling so we get this question a lot on our like specifically our food uh our food tour videos but outside of our videos we're eating healthy like five to six days out of the week like i would say at least 80% of our meals throughout the week are healthy and you guys only see the stuff that we really indulge in the barbecue the biscuits the gelato and stuff like that so outside of that we're eating well and we're we typically do like two meals a day yeah we have a rule that we don't eat out unless we're filming a vlog because that helps us save money and be healthier so the only times we eat out is when we're filming a vlog for you guys so you guys don't see like the boring meals we eat but i promise you we eat healthy but it's always funny when we post like a food stuffing our face vlog people are like how the heck are you eating all this all the time but we're not that's the trick yeah and we as far as working out we try to work out three to five times a week and so if you've seen our van tour video you've seen that we have these adjustable dumbbells to be honest we've only used them twice on the road but we'll use them more and we'll use them a lot during the quarantine obviously since we can't go to the gym but we have a planet fitness membership that we we use quite frequently because there's so many locations everywhere and it's nice and easy yeah and for workouts we like doing a lot of weight stuff so like weight training and like high intensity interval training hit training so we love weights we're not really big cardio people we're trying to learn to run during this time running has been the bane of my entire existence of my life but yeah so we love to work out we do eat healthy we promise and you guys get to see all the fun food and trust us when we finally get to have that fun food on the weekend we go ham so that's why it looks like we're crazy and we eat bad all the time which hawaiian island do you enjoy the most for food for beaches for hiking and activities we're really bad at favorite questions yeah it's tough we always say we love the islands equally but differently and trying to figure out what we were going to say for this question was very hard yeah but we can say all of them yeah yeah i mean you can get all this all this stuff on all the islands they're all just magical but for food we decided we we kind of agreed that oahu is kind of the best for food i think you just get them biggest variety and it's like the highest kind of quality yeah it's like there's a bigger city there so i feel like maybe the bar is pretty high and there's more restaurants to choose from so we're gonna go with oahu on that one but we've had great food on every island uh for beaches my favorite beach is this beach called i think it's like secret beach on maui so it might have another name too but it's just tiny it's this tiny little cove it's just so beautiful it's just what i think of when i think of a beautiful beach it has like rocks and palm trees and beautiful water so i'm gonna give the edge to maui just because my favorite beach is there but i think we'd agree like maui has a ton of beaches i feel like anywhere all the beaches are really nice too yeah for sure uh on the island of hawaii there's different colored ones yeah more more than i mean you kind of have some on all the islands right but on maui yeah on the big island is where you'll get like green sand and stuff like that so depends on what you want if you want the like beautiful beach you can't go wrong with any but we're gonna pick maui because we have to pick one and for hiking we chose kawaii it's the island that's the most like untouched kind of and has kind of the most nature that's more abundant and easy to get to i guess there's there's a ton of a ton of hikes yeah there's the nepali coast yeah and there's waimea canyon so there's just unique hikes there and i don't know we've we're actually writing a kawaii guide right now that will be out it'll be out by the time this is posted and just reliving that trip that was not it was not vlogged so if you're looking for a kawaii vlog we'll have to go back and film one but we'll do the work for you man well darn we'll just go back to kawaii but yeah the hikes there are epic and then i guess the last one is activities yeah so we came we couldn't choose one so we we chose the big island and then also maui uh the big island there's a volcano you can snorkel with i mean you have waterfalls and all of them but there's just awesome ones there and then we also chose maui there's the road to hana which is a pretty unique thing and it's like it's fun classic fun thing to do it's an all day thing so if you're gonna do it be prepared but it's awesome there's also haleakala which that's the one where you go up and in the early in the morning you can get above the clouds just check out the sunrise and we've tried to do it twice and it hasn't worked out so great we're gonna go back and try to do it again one day and apparently maui is the best island for whale watching yeah we want whale watching there it was so fun we'll probably throw some clips up of our whale watching trip while we're talking to give you all a break from our faces but yeah we haven't vlogged maui either so we definitely need to go back to maui and kawaii to make some vlogs for you guys because our hawaii vlogs have probably been our most popular vlogs out of all the ones we've done so we'll go back we love it there how do we manage money and save money to travel i guess we'll start off and explain what we actually do for work so we're not full-time vloggers or bloggers we we wish we could be because we could film so many more vlogs but i have a full-time corporate job it's for a tech company that's 100 remote so everyone works from home i've been working this job over a year and a half now so even before we hit the road in the van and i'm an events manager so i travel a good amount for work going to different trade shows and conferences but i do have a full-time job which is nice because that gives us like one consistent salary as well as like health insurance 401k and all those other perks yep and right before we moved into the van i started a freelance web design business mana web design where i build websites for small businesses so as we're traveling it's easy for us when you're full-time traveling anyways it's easy for us to kind of get in that vacation mode where we go to a city and we just want to explore like we always do but we have to remember that we're not on vacation and we we kind of got to slow down and try to live as cheaply as we can yeah so we try to like we said earlier we cook a lot of meals we try not to eat out we try to work at places that are free like libraries even going to like a coffee shop and getting the cheapest thing that adds up a lot over time we try to sleep for free at night and we try to do like free activities so our like fun days are the days we vlog so on the weekends we try to actually explore the town and you know splurge a little bit i think we've been splurging a little bit too much to be honest so we're gonna try to cut back a bit on how much we're eating because we are trying to save money but our income went down like 35 percent when we hit the road in the van um we do make some money off of youtube and our blog so we have that income which is pretty inconsistent we have adam's income which is a freelancer it's more inconsistent and then we have my income which is the consistent one so although our expenses did go down a bit in the van our income also did too so we are on a budget we're trying really hard to save money for a few different things so yeah we can't pretend we're on vacation 24 7 yeah and as far as our finances or how we break it up i guess so we have a travel fund and then two other savings accounts and so for our travel fund is that's what we use for when we travel so if we go overseas like say we take a trip to london we have all this money set aside and budgeted out for what we plan for and so the trip is kind of already kind of paid for it's already taken out of of our other income basically yeah so when we get back from a trip like a flying trip we add up how much money we spent during that trip and then we just take that money out of the trip fund and just pay off the trip so we also have a few other things that we do to kind of save money to travel and while we're traveling we also have four travel credit cards and we know that credit cards can kind of be a controversial topic but we treat ours like debit cards so whatever we spend on them per month we pay it off in full every single month so it's like a debit card for us except we get way more benefits than a traditional debit card so we have the chase sapphire reserve which is our favorite one we have the amex platinum we have the alaska airlines credit card and the capital one venture card and when we've signed up for these we've gotten really nice sign-on bonuses or yearly perks that help us travel easier or cheaper we haven't really paid for a flight in a really long time one of our favorite perks of the travel credit cards are the lounges oh yeah so when at some airports they have lounges that we can get access to and that just saves us a ton of money at the airport yeah you don't have to buy the food that's in the main terminal and coffee and all that yeah so it comes with a lot of perks and it's just nice to have your own quiet space to be in the airport outlets are hard at airports sometimes so that's probably our favorite part yeah the biggest thing to remember with the travel cards though is make sure you pay them off every month so you're avoiding the large interest rate and then also making sure you're meeting the minimum spend amount in that first couple months to get that big reward point reward my brother just told us the other day he missed he missed the bonus by five dollars because he got confused and thought he hadn't met it and he didn't so it's painful oh my heart we also use airbnb credits to help us travel cheaper so in the description of every youtube video and then on pretty much every blog post that we create we have this link you can use so if it's your first time using airbnb and use our link to book your stay you get forty dollars usd off your airbnb your first airbnb and then we get a little bit as well it's like around twenty dollars or so and that's helped us we've had a lot of people who have watched our videos i guess use it yeah way more than we ever thought yeah pretty cool and we've been able to stay at airbnbs for free or for a pretty significant discount for a while so thank you to everyone who's used that link you're helping us out a lot yeah you're helping us and hopefully we're helping you and the cool thing about it though is anyone can use or have a link you don't have to be like a travel vlogger or vlogger so you can get your link on your profile on airbnb and refer it to your friends to family members anyone you know who has not used airbnb and you'll get money off your stay too we also have a blog post with all of these tips and a couple of others that will help you out on your next travel we probably should update it during this free time it's a little outdated so we'll work on that but for our next question we have a very special guest joining us kona's here she decided to join us for this part of the vlog she just played ball inside so she's very hyped up right now and the question is what is it like traveling with a dog and what do you do when you go to a place or a trail that doesn't allow dogs first of all we love having kona with us but she can be a bit stressful so just having a dog in general traveling in a van or however it's just like an extra thing you have to think about like temperature and where you're going and just making sure the dog's always safe yeah so we always have to make sure the temperature if it's not too hot outside too cold if it is too hot luckily the van it kind of stays a little bit cooler than a regular car because we have all the windows usually you know covered we have insulation in here and it's insulated in here so we keep an eye on that if it's too cold outside we have a heater so we keep the heater running and her crate is right by the heater so she's nice and comfy i don't know if you mentioned this but we have a temperature sensor with our simply safe so we can with our simply safe we can keep an eye on her with the camera but we also have a temperature sensor so we can see how hot it actually is in the van the simply safe is fun too because you get to just spy on i think you can talk through i haven't done it yet but she'd probably go crazy if we did but yeah we we don't like to get too far from the van like say we're in a coffee shop we want to park as close as we can so we can keep an eye on it things like that especially when she's in the van like we don't want to be far from her we come and check on her all the time every hour or so when we're working but if we're going on a hike that's a few hours long um we're like a national park or we have like a full day where we we definitely cannot have her with us yeah we'll get an airbnb so yeah so a lot of people would probably get a dog sitter but kona as we've said a few times in other vlogs like she had to go to a pretty intensive training she has a lot of behavioral issues and we've learned a lot of tools to help manage life with her better and help her not feel so scared of everything so teaching all that to a random sitter in a random town would just be way too hard yeah we can't expect someone brand new to be able to figure it out because it's it's a lot of things you got to keep in your mind like just in case something happens so yeah so for us it's just easier to get an airbnb and just spend that money and have like a safe air-conditioned comfy place for her to hang out but thankfully we don't have to do that too much one other thing that people ask kind of frequently is like oh where's kona like why isn't she in the vlog and the answer is it's just too stressful to film and have her with us at the same time most of the time we just have to really with her training we have to focus on her like all of our attention has to be focused on her but we also want to focus on the vlog and make a good vlog and so we can't put our full focus on both yeah it's just too much because somebody's got to film stuff somebody's got to take pictures and make sure we're going in the right place things like that and so if no one's watching her and making sure that she's okay that's when she'll start barking at things and being crazy yeah i mean we've had her she's almost seven now right oh six and a half yeah yeah and so you'd think we'd have her figured out by now but she's a difficult one we we think she's going to react a certain way to something and sometimes she's cool with it and sometimes she goes off the rails so we just have to pay attention so for us it's less stressful to vlog without her but we're hoping to incorporate her in more vlogs in the future right kona oh yeah do you want to be in more vlogs say bye bye what are your recommendations of things to do in utah so our experience in utah has mainly been at the national park so zion and bryce canyon national park zion is one of our absolute favorite national parks and the big highlight for us one of them is the narrows and so that's you're basically hiking down this river with these giant cavern walls on the sides and the water's like knee deep and you get to rent these like ankle boots that they're like waterproof and so it gives you better grip on the water so much fun to do and you get to get a cane to walk down the river it was the best yeah but something to remember with that is it can flood oftentimes and so you want to make sure and look ahead and make sure it's not flooding before you go so you're not heartbroken when you get there you can't do it yeah and then our other highlight there oftentimes people think of angels landing about zion but we haven't done it just for a variety of reasons mainly the crowds and i it seems scary to me i don't like drop-offs it has a lot of drop-offs you have to like hold on to these chains or ropes to get to the top so it just didn't sound like something i would enjoy yeah and so our alternative to that and we think is a way better alternative is a hike called observation point it's you get a higher view it's not as sketchy to get to and there's way less people it's a bit more challenging of a hike probably i don't know if it's more challenging i think it's scary so it might be longer yeah but it's higher up so yeah you get a similar view but from above and you can see angels landing down below and it's a way better hike we so we haven't done angels landing but we went memorial day weekend so a busy time to go and it really wasn't that crowded at observation point but we had heard from others that there was a line on the chains portion of angels landing to get to the top so people are having to wait in line for like an hour to even get to the top of the hike no thanks yeah that doesn't sound fun so check out observation point it is awesome yeah and then bryce canyon so we did both of them in the same trip our biggest tip is bryce canyon is colder it's higher elevation than zion we for some reason thought that the temperature would be the same both it's all it's all utah right oh look at zion weather let's just pack for zion no big mistake i'm in shorts and it's freezing it was so cold and we slept in this tp thing on the ground and you know it had no heat or anything so yeah it was a little brutal so bring warmer clothes for bryce canyon but bryce was awesome it was way less busy than zion like hardly any people we did a sunrise point i believe for sunrise that was beautiful we did the fairyland um loop yeah i'm gonna cheat on our notes sorry we're cheating fairyland loop which is less busy than the main one which is like the navajo and queen's garden definitely do both but the fairyland loop we hardly saw any people the whole time and takes you through all the hoodoos and stuff that's fun yeah so we have a guide on both of these national parks we'll link to it below again um and another thing to note is we flew into las vegas when we came and then drove up but we passed through this town called saint george and there is a mexican taco spot that you have to stop i'm gonna cheat for the name la cocina mexican street food but it's in like an old sonic and so you drive up i think you walked in yeah you like sit in like this little outdoor patio but yeah you get these little street tacos they're so good like 20 they were amazing and then we've also been to moab moab super cool it's a van life mecca there's like more vans there than dogs it feels like but there's a place called moab garage co you can pick up your coffee there they have great breakfast you know burritos pancakes all that stuff yeah so we've been to moab a few times mostly driving through we did spend a few days there in november and we did not go to arches we have yet to go to arches just timing wise it didn't work out it wasn't in the cards for this year so hopefully we'll go sometime soon but we hear arches and the parks around are amazing but moab's a pretty cool little town too what creates the most tension for y'all when traveling oh we're getting into the juicy drama so you would think living in a small van moving all the time that we'd always be bumping into each other and getting frustrated like that but we actually love the van it's the perfect size no regrets there it's it's perfect the biggest stressor is all the work we have so catherine she has her regular nine to five that's 40 hours a week that she works hard at but then we also have the blog and vlog and everything that comes with that which is 40 hours or more every week that she just works her absolute tail off and i take my hat off to her she's a workaholic and it's not a good thing i'm trying to get better yeah so we've got that stressor but then also my life is obviously completely different i was a teacher and we lived in an apartment so have unstable at home environment moving around all the time and then my day-to-day nine to five you know is completely different and just trying to grow your business yeah i'm doing web design and it's it's i'm getting the hang of it but it's still new to me so and i'm learning how to run my own business and be my own boss and all that so that just yeah so we'll both get like stressed out about our own work and then we just get frustrated and kind of let it out on each other so we're trying to get better at this by doing something fun every day we we hardly ever take breaks like even filming a vlog is a lot of work like we're you know trying to plan out what we're going to do have facts and important things we want to make sure we say you know we go into a coffee shop and instead of just sitting there and drinking it we like film everything and you know it's just a lot of work like yeah we have like a piece of pizza or something we got to take pictures of it then we've got to talk about where we are and what it is and then it's getting cold and then when we finally bite and tell you how it is it's probably cold probably like not the same as if we sat down and took a bite how it's supposed to be and then we're talking to the camera and the lady at the table next to us is like staring at us so we feel awkward what are you doing so yeah vlogging is a lot of work in itself so i mean if we're working 15 hour days five days a week and then we're vlogging two days a week we really don't get like a break to just breathe so it's been really important for us to do something fun every day even if it's just like 10 to 10 minutes or an hour and we're not trying to say like vlogging isn't fun we have so much fun it's just more work than it might let on so for us you know going on a walk with kona or just getting a break from our computers you know every day during the week puts us in just a better headspace to be able to film vlogs on the weekend and have a lot of fun we also are trying to not force ourselves to film anything or do anything if we're not like excited about it or if we're too burnt out or tired but on the other side of that it can cause its own stress because like you said we only have one or two days to vlog every week and if we don't do it one week we're kind of out of content video content for that week we don't get too far ahead just because of the limited time we have so if we don't film a vlog we're kind of out of luck on youtube for a week yeah but we're trying to like be okay with that because our mental health and taking breaks that's more important than publishing a vlog as much as we love doing it so we're just trying to really listen to how we feel and if we don't feel like we're in the mood to go out and do anything big that day we'll just lay low and relax and sleep and and that's okay so that's really helping us kind of overcome any tension in our relationship because i mean if we're stressed at the max every day like the vlog's not going to be good anyways yeah there's many vlogs y'all haven't seen because they haven't gone well so we stopped filming it sucks but we'll go back around and we'll head up those places again what is our favorite places we have ever visited and why as we said we're really bad at favorite questions because we love everything maybe we're just too easy to please but we just get excited and love everything we do but i'd have to say italy as a whole was my favorite trip we've ever been on because it was a mix of city beaches mountains small towns awesome food gelato it was just the perfect combination of everything we love um specifically though the dolomites was my favorite part of that trip it was just crazy beautiful we had the best airbnb hosts the towns were super cool it was just amazing and then i also loved matera so that was that small cave town we visited and it was just really unique and different and we had a local named silvio shout out to silvio we still talk to him on instagram he's the best um he took us around and that just having a local experience was just amazing yeah that's something we want to look into more in the future but yeah this is a really hard question we've been to a lot of places but i mean on the grand scheme of things we haven't been anywhere really but so i've kind of recently decided that if someone really asked me what my favorite city was i'm gonna say vancouver british columbia it's just it has like an awesome city vibe you get out of the city there's tons of nature there's even nature in the city with stanley park and it's just absolutely beautiful but then like there's the sea to sky highway that takes you up northwest it's just unreal the food is so good yeah the mountains the lakes waterfalls everything is just awesome but then i've always wanted to go to europe and so we finally did we've been twice you know the uk and italy but the italy trip yeah i'm on the same boat as that like all the history that's all around you just don't have that in the united states and the food the gelato the hikes the mountains all the i said the history already but it's just it just made me want to go back even more we're dying to go back to europe what are your thoughts on settling down someday so this is a hard question for us to answer and we talk about this all the time but i guess the short answer is we have no idea like two years ago we had no idea we'd be traveling full-time in a van we were trying to maybe buy a house in seattle and even before we moved to seattle we were trying to build a house in austin so our our interests and like our life goals they've just changed a lot since we've been married yeah it's kind of scary but exciting at the same time you know you take it all the way back to our beginning in austin we wanted a house kids then we moved to seattle wanted a house and all that and then it just changed year to year and so it's kind of scary and exciting like i said that what are we going to want in a year we have no idea like what's next yeah like two and a half years ago if you said we were in a van like no way i don't know about that we built it ourself we'd be like okay definitely no way then so but i mean i'm sure one day we'll want to have a steady home base and we still regardless of what we end up doing from like a living situation we want to travel as much as we can for the rest of our lives but we see ourselves doing this for at least a few more years like we are not sick of it yet there's so many places we want to visit we always say like the best is yet to come and we truly believe that like we're just getting started on this adventure and if we decide to have kids someday we hope that we can travel as a family and do stuff with our kids we don't ever see travel not being a part of our life but yeah we have no idea what we're even doing tomorrow at this point so it's hard for us to say yeah we're absolutely loving our situation right now i can't wait to get back out there once every everybody's healthy and all that and but the kind of the big thing with it's a big question with kids is our running joke even when we first got married was oh when are you gonna have kids and we've always said in three years and well that was almost six years yeah we still say that in about three years so yeah i don't know if any of you are curious if we're having kids that's sure we probably will but we still have some time that's the answer you're gonna get kona's enough of a child for us right now where do you want to go next so we were supposed to be going to peru and we'd be there like two months from now we were partnering with a company and doing this two-week trip doing cities a five-day trek to machu picchu we were going to do so many cool things we are very it's still on for now it's on for now but we're not very confident it's not trending in the right yeah we don't think we're going to get to go so if we could pick anywhere to go next it would be there um we're hoping that we can reschedule the trip and maybe just do it on our own in the fall we just really want to go there we got so excited about going yeah i mean right now though best worst case scenario kind of thing like if we can get on the road this year hopefully i mean i think our next place we're gonna go is back up northwest and see washington oregon idaho montana and all that canada some of canada um you know we love it up there and we want to there's so much more we want to see that was kind of our plan for the summer so we're like three months hoping to still get up there but after that we were thinking about doing like wintertime uh euro euro trip europe trip with the christmas markets and all that that's that's still in the idea building stage right now but we're hopeful that we can yeah we're hopeful we'll get to do one of those three things maybe find a way to do all three we really don't know but we really want to go to south america we want to go back to europe we'd love to go to asia we just don't have enough time off to go there right now because we want to go for a longer period of time so it's all up in the air there's a long list of stuff we want to do but we might find a place we've never even thought of going that might be where we go next so who even knows never know we really hope you guys enjoyed our first ever q a and found something in there that was helpful to you because that's our ultimate goal is to help you guys travel so even though none of us can travel right now we're hoping that we can still create helpful videos during this time to help you guys plan a trip or to help you guys travel when we can all actually travel again so our next q a video we'll probably have some other videos before this one but our next q a video will be a van life q a so we've already had quite a few questions we've also had some random questions just about us so we might just do a random question about us q a so if you have any van life questions or want to know anything about us whatever yeah anything random stuff it's it's fun um please comment below and let us know but yeah we hope you guys enjoyed this sorry if we talked a lot this was yeah we try to keep it short but we're we get excited and we just we like talking about it so yeah so yeah we will see y'all next time stay healthy wash your hands