The tale of a girl and boy who fel in love with each other and the world.
Conclusion:
We both quit our serious jobs and sold our beautiful home in Amsterdam to go travel and feed our wanderlust!

Quit the job & sold the house for what?
As of September 1st 2015 my boyfriend and I will  step into a plane in Amsterdam The Netherlands to travel the world starting with 6 months in Southeast Asia and our first stop: Bali. After that we’re heading towards: Lombok, Komodo, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and everything in between. We haven’t completely determined our route yet, so who knows maybe we’ll end up on Christmas Island smack in the middle of the red crab migration. We’re going to track and trace all our travel journeys on this blog so people can follow our stroll through the wilderness and the great outdoors plus get insider tips and tricks.

Why pick up and leave?
We were so tired of constantly creating new excuses and reasons why NOT to go, that we decided it’s time to just say what the hell Hé Ho Let’s Go!

What will I write about while traveling?
I’m going to try and write at least once a week to give an insider scoop of things that I think are worth sharing. My boyfriend and I are going to explore the wilderness (Must See), get really fat by eating yummy food (Must Eat), test our limits with sports (Must Do), sleep in awesome places (Must Sleep), and search for hidden gems (Must Find)!

Where to start?
-Buy some gear-
Start buying the things you need and just go with the flow. The one thing that really made the deal real was when we had Indonesian Rupiah in our hand. Somehow the distance that that money had traveled to end up in my hand made me feel one step closer to being there. Read all about how we prepared and what we bought for the big journey, in my post Checklist of Top 41 Travel Products and Essentials to Pack and Prepare for Asia.

-Pump up your muscles-
I’m really NOT a fan of going to the gym, but boy am I glad that we started going before we started the big trip. I can definitely recommend this to anyone going traveling. You have to be able to carry your (15-18 kg) backpack long distances and if you want to go surfing, canoeing, climbing, diving you don’t want to quit after 3 times trying because you’re coughing your lungs out. I started going to the gym 2 months before we left, for 1 hour Body Pump 3 times a week and it really helped me get in shape.

-Clean up your act-
As we had to really pack up and leave because we were also selling our house we needed to thin out the mess… yup… mess… tons and tons and tons of it! I think I threw out 30+ garbage bags of useless junk, clothing and stuff.
I would recommend to read the book of Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying: The Japanese Art, even if you’re not selling your home but, just so you don’t come back to a house full of shitty useless stuff. New York Times bestseller and now number one book is a must when it comes to starting over, seriously people waiting in line at the grocery store are even talking about the book. Here’s just a small glimpse of what was lying on my floor, I could barely stand in the room anymore.
But, we still had a lot of stuff to move and some of it was a bit too big to fit in the shed that we wanted to stall our stuff in, while we’d travel for 6 months. That’s why halfway through the move we had to be creative and throw the couch on the back of an old Jeep and go to location B (good thing that we went to the gym before… HOLLY MOLLY… we tested our muscles with this one).
Why? It’s important to keep your stuff in a dry and warm place otherwise you’ll come back from traveling and discover a moldy, half eaten by mice, dirty bed or couch. You don’t want to buy those stuff when you’ve spent everything on your trip.

-Talk with people-
We also started collecting as many tips and tricks from our surroundings, like the best places to sleep and eat, or the best diving areas, temples and mountains to climb. That’s when we started making our own Google Maps and adding pins that we thought would be interesting. Here’s our Google Maps below or click here to open the map in a new window: Asia Travel Adventures by LittleBrookRoad. It’s still a work in progress so a lot of regions are still empty, ALL tips are welcome! Let me know bellow in the comment section.

-Extra preps-
As I’m planning on writing this blog while being out and about in Southeast Asia, I thought that It’d be funny to leave a breadcrumb sticker trail of where I’ve been and also to spread the word of LBR. That’s why I ordered stickers with a call to action for people to let me know where they found my sticker. Found one? Tell me where and share on Social Media with the hashtag #HeHoLetsGo.

#HeHoLetsGo