Exhaustion Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

The blog post below was written when I was in a much different state of mind... Blogger was down for a couple of days so I could not post this post from the 4th day of our travels. Now this post seems obsolete as we are living in a beach town dream with perfect weather and beaches in Lindos, Greece, but I think that our blog show describe all of our emotions and so am posting anyways... Enjoy.


After all of the highs and the lows and the packing and the momentous time/goodbyes with our families in Michigan, we embarked on the first leg of our journey. Four days ago, after a 3 hour car ride, 3 flights, 7 hours in airports, and a 1 hour bus ride we showed up to our hotel in Bodrum, Turkey on the Aegean Sea, exhausted. I mean the kind of exhaustion that makes a person see things and say things and could easily be used as a way to extract information from even the most dangerous criminals. It is in time s like this that made me step back and ask the question "what the hell did we do, what the hell are we doing?"

That folks is how our first 24 hours went. Yes, Bodrum is super cool and our hotel was clean and budget friendly with a tasty breakfast, but the weather was awful and the shop owners were super in your face all the time which was really annoying on very little sleep. I don't mind being jet lagged because staying up until 4:00 o'clock in the morning with Jason is a lot of fun, but we still had to assess our situation. I have to say, I am lucky to have married a most amazing man. We both were at our worst and still we were able to see the beauty in Bodrum and more importantly the beauty in each other.

We did conclude that budget travel is really difficult. The thing is we eat a lot more than the normal human being and the first couple of nights we went to sleep hungry just so that we could stay within our daily budget. It was in Bodrum that we decided to shorten our travels to 6-7 months to be able to stay in better hotels and eat more food than travel 8 months in hostels miserable. We like our food, we like clean beds, we like our beer and wine and coffee. 

Living life at our home in Lindos

But, since landing in Turkey and determining how we do not want to travel, we have re-grouped and are a solid team. We both are on the same page for our travels and are happy with our modified plans (including full bellies before bed) to travel through Greece. The thing is, when you travel for long periods of time, you need to figure out what you enjoy and tailor the trip towards those aspects. The road is long and what you truly enjoy needs to be evaluated. You need to find those things on your trip and enjoy the on the road, and if that increases your budget and shortens your trip, so be it. So today we took the ferry from Bodrum, Turkey to Kos, Greece and then on to Rhodes, Greece. The day was good and so is our outlook on our travels.