Nomad Life
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Backpacking with a friend: how to avoid fights
Do you think we fight a lot? The most common question people ask us is:“But girls, you’ve been traveling together for all this time. Don’t you get sick of each other? ’ As crazy as it may seem, our answer is no! We don’t fight and, so far, we haven’t gotten sick of each other. (But we don’t mind it when there are two rooms available… haha) When we started planning ‘30 on the road’ we knew we would spend lots of time together, but we couldn’t have imagined then that it would be THAT MUCH. Even though we have different sleeping habits—Ana is an early bird while Josie is…
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Hot air balloons and childhood dreams
Ana here. There is a book that, if you haven’t read yet, I strongly recommend you: ‘The Last Lecture‘, by Randy Pausch. Among other ideas, it says we should put lots of effort to make our childhood dreams come true, even the silliest ones. According to the author, that’s where our inner wishes live.That’s why this picture—besides capturing one of our favorite places in Boston—also symbolizes one of these silly dreams coming true. And how happy could a few balloons make us? When I was a child, hot air balloons were totally out of reach. Besides being uncommon in Brazil, they were out of the budget for a family that…
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Backpacking: 25 facts in 50 days of travel
We are turning our 50th day on the road and our list of anecdotes only grows. Since this is what makes our trip unique, we decided to write them down so we don’t miss any details. On these 50 days we’ve already: Lost a cellphone in a theater and found it the next day. Intact. Lost a pair of gloves, an outlet adapter, and a portable drink heater. We almost lost the second one. Stayed in a luxury apartment. We shared bathrooms in a hostel. Celebrated a birthday in Times Square. And other, at home. A dog peed in our suitcases. And others jumped on our laps to say ‘hi’.…
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5 reasons why you should take a gap year in your 30s
We’re completing one month of ’30 on the road’ and to celebrate this milestone, we decided to talk about the advantages we saw in taking a gap year when we turned our three decades of life! 1. Being able to make choices: At this age, we are definitely adults. This is the perfect time to rethink some choices we made in the last few years. Most of them, while we were still teenagers. 2. Background: In 30 years, we already went through lots of moments. We’ve had jobs with lots of responsibility. We’ve learned how to handle different types of situations, how to deal with people in general, how to…
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Cold weather and cell phone batteries: the adventures of two backpackers
A paper map (that we weren’t sure we could understand) and some basic notions of Geography. It was all we had in a country that wasn’t ours, in a city we were visiting for the first time, and to top it all, our cell phones were dead and we didn’t have a watch. Only after spending a good time trying to take pictures with an old digital camera (that has been saving our lives since the cold has been shutting our cell phones off randomly), that we realized the only thing we knew about how to go back to Niagara Falls after visiting Buffalo was that we had to walk…