On the Road Again, and Again, and Again

The first entry on this blog has been inspired by my friend John Randolph (http://jcrandolph.blogspot.com/). He and his wife travel a lot, but he made the comment that we (Bonnie, Lydia, me) travel more than they do. So this has raised a couple questions, “how much do we travel in a year and how much should we travel in a year?”.

I guess the fact that I started this blog 3 months ago and this is the first entry (and possibly the only entry) is evidence that we do travel a bit, eh? And a side note, the reason this blog was created was for the same reason anyone creates a blog, because it is the thing to do these days. It is like watching A.I. or talking about communism, or even like wearing big white-frame sunglasses to match your big white SUV. Everyone does it and that is all there is to it.

Back to this entry, so how much should a person travel in a year? There are many variables to this question for the sake of argument we are limiting it to pleasure trips, beach, see family, see another country, see a national amusement etc...(no business trips allowed). One blogger blogged her trip around the world in six months and she estimated her budget to be about $3,000 US per person/per month of their travels. (http://www.gonomad.com/traveldesk/0710/how-to-spend.html) So traveling can cost a ton of money. But besides budgets, how should a person decide how much he or she should travel in a year?

One factor that I have “felt” over the past year of traveling is the physical and mental exhaustion (P.M.E. for short) that comes from traveling. I find myself sleeping more, feeling queasy from unfamiliar foods, and feeling physically out of shape. The P.M.E Index, I think, can be a constant and consistent factor in helping a person determine how much he or she should travel in a year. To answer a possible rebuttal, “doesn’t this seem rather subjective?” Yes. But so is determining how much to travel in a year. Some years may require more travel than others, but through a Travel Log Book I think a person can learn how to curb the travel pains over time. Which, this is what I have kept since the very first trip Bonnie and I ever took.

As a pilot, I was trained in keeping a log book (http://www.sportys.com/acb/showdetl.cfm?DID=19&CATID=176&Product_ID=1550&count=1&Pcount=23 about $10 plus s/h), so for fun I bought an extra pilot’s log book and began entering our travels in the log book. I renamed several of the columns to include new titles such as: automobile, train, and races (we run marathons). Then the mode of travel was logged under the proper column and now I can keep a running tally of how many hours we spent in the car, airplane, train etc... Looking at the travels over the past year I have been able to come to some good conclusions about how much we traveled before the P.M.E. kicked in.

Just for numbers sake, Bonnie and I were gone 36 days last year (from July 08-July 09), we spent 13 hours in a plane and 93.5 hours in a car over those days traveling. Not to mention that we had guests stay at our house 83 days over the same course of time, (when we were actually home). This means we were gone 10% of the year and we had visitors 23% of the year, that’s 33% of the year we either had visitors or we were visiting someone.

So, what is our P.M.E. Index? After thinking through this and looking at the numbers I think I can conclude that it takes 2 weeks to fully recover for every 1 week of entertaining visitors and 3 weeks to fully recover for every 1 week of traveling. If we didn’t have responsibilities of work, church, keeping a routine for Lydia, schoolwork, etc... we could travel every few weeks. But, since we have all these responsibilities nothing would get done if we were gone all the time. So, I think 5 weeks a year of traveling is our absolute limit, and 6 weeks a year of entertaining guests is our absolute limit (12 weeks entertaining guests last year was a little too much). This means 11 weeks of the year are either spent traveling or entertaining guests, and at this rate you would have on average 3.7 weeks in between each trip/guests week to recover, which would be sufficient for us based on previous observations. I think that could be a sustainable pace for us.

What is your P.M.E Index? This might be something fun to think through and log how much you really travel and then compare it to us. Do you travel more than the Brown’s (especially you Mr. Randolph)? I would like to know if you do.

For fun and in case you wondered: since we began our traveling in November of 2004, we have spent 634 total hours traveling. This means that we have traveled around the world TWICE by plane and we are a quarter of the way around the earth on our second lap by car. I will let you know when we have traveled to the moon, we are 33% of the way there with only 159,675 miles to go...

Returning from our Virginia trip for Lydia's first Birthday Party.