It’s only three short months until we embark on our RTW adventure, so we thought it was about time we put down all the things we want to see and, maybe more importantly, do on paper.  OK, so we didn’t actually put this list on paper.  We typed it out.  But  I’m not sure what the digital equivalent of this expression is… encode in binary on a hard drive, maybe?

The result… our bucket list.  A list of things we want to do before we kick the bucket.  A starting point for an itinerary and an ever-growing work in progress.  We cheated a bit and retroactively filled it with things we’ve done in our past travels – they were on our previously unwritten bucket list, so we felt like they should be included here.

Check out our list and let us know if there’s any amazing experiences we may be missing out on.

Update March 29th, 2011 – First off, we would like to thank everyone for the advice they gave.  We received plenty of emails, tweets, and face to face comments in addition to all the wonderful comments on this blog.

We seem to be in the enviable position of having to make a decision where either outcome will likely be good.

Last night, Ashley and I decided that we would continue trying to sell the house for the month of April.  If we have the opportunity to sell at a good price, we probably will (Ashley is still hesitant, so it will have to be a good price).  If we have not sold by the beginning of May, we will pursue a rental agreement.

Thanks again for all your comments.

Up until recently, Ashley and I have been 100% certain that we wanted to sell as much of our “stuff” as possible before embarking on our RTW trip.  In our minds, that’s always included the house.  Now, that certainty has come into question and we need to decide if selling our house is still the best option for us.

Why Sell?

To avoid worrying; to be free.  With a house, there are all sorts of things that could come up.  Most of our fears revolve around things breaking or problems with renters.  We didn’t want to be in the position of having to hire someone to touch up the roofing, change out the flooring, and replace the fridge, all while trying to find a new renter from halfway across the world.

Even if we never have a single problem with the house or renter, we would always have a lingering fear that any day something could go wrong.  How much that would bother us, I’m not sure, but it would be there.

We also like to make the argument that we wouldn’t want to move back into our house again, so why should we hang onto it?  Our preference would probably be to move into a bigger house somewhere closer to the mountains when/if we decide to settle down.

Why Rent Out the Place?

Right off the hop, I should mention a few things to help set the stage.  First, we owe almost nothing on our mortgage and will have the place paid off within a year.  The housing market in Saskatchewan is going strong, and there is a shortage of rental properties, especially in Qu’Appelle.

Despite what I just wrote, we are not having much luck selling.  Since the house has been on the market, there has been very little interest.  I’m starting to think that the house won’t sell before our departure date, and that’s causing me to worry.  I’d hate to be stuck paying utility bills and taxes for the first part of our trip.

Then there’s the fact that even though the house is not available for rent we’ve been propositioned by two people in the last week who are both willing to rent on a long term basis.  It looks like finding renters won’t be a problem.

I took the time to calculate an appropriate rental rate, and I think we’ll get it.  In theory, we should turn enough of a profit renting to equal investment income we would otherwise make on the proceeds from selling.  At least renting won’t cost us any money, unless the housing market crashes.

If down the road, we decide to sell the house, we won’t necessarily have to return home to do so.  We have family in and around Qu’Appelle that we could probably lean on to sell the house on our behalf if it came to it.

Plus we’ll have the advantage of owning a house in Saskatchewan.  There’s probably no better place to return to if we find that we’ve spent all our money and want to save up again for a second round of travel.  Living in a house we own will help us save up cash a lot faster than paying rent, and good paying jobs are easy enough to find… now anyways.

I posed this same question on twitter earlier today with only 140 characters.  So far respondents are 5 to 1 in favour of selling.  What do you think?  Do you have some horror stories to share about the time you rented out your house?  Did you sell your house before your RTW?

June 30th, 2011 is effectively “T” minus 0.  The last day of work for both Ashley and I.  It’ll be a big day.  For the first time since high school, I will be without work or classes.  We’ll both receive our last paycheck, marking the full height of our travel funds.

It probably won’t be the day we leave on our RTW trip, but it may be.

Oh, and it’s 99 days from today.

Happy Pi Day everyone! There’s no better way to celebrate Pi Day then a nice slice of pie.  So if you want to stop reading and go get yourself one, I’ll wait.

Pi Pie

Got your pie?  With a little “mode” I hope?  Great!  Let’s continue…

In case you didn’t know, Pi Day is a holiday commemorating the mathematical constant, pi, and is celebrated each year on March 14 (3/14 in month/day format).  It’s a big day in the math world and, since I am a self-declared math geek and a math teacher, it’s an important day in my world.

It also happens to be our cat’s birthday.  And she just happens to be named Pi (short for Pythagoras).  No, I’m not kidding about this… I really am such a big math geek that I named my cat after a famous mathematician.

Our Cat, Pythagoras (a.k.a. Pi)

Pi Day seems like the perfect opportunity to talk about one of our biggest obstacles in planning our trip – finding a good home for Pi while we are away.  We’ve had her since the summer we were married (nearly four years now) and she’s truly become part of the family.  As soon as we started debating the possibility of this trip, we started brainstorming people that might want to look after Pi.   The Humane Society was not an option we wanted to entertain.  If we wanted to do this thing, we needed to find a good home for her.

We asked several family members and friends, but no one wanted another cat.  Finally, one of my coworkers offered to take her in.  Thanks, Lana!  Pi will have lots of adjustments to make though – she will be moving from our quiet little house to one with three kids, two dogs, and another cat.  But she should be happy there.  The family loves animals and will treat her well.

Finding someone to take care of your pets while you are away on a lengthy trip is a big deal.  It is a decision that is worth a lot of time and thought, and it is an essential factor to consider when deciding whether or not you can make an RTW trip work.

In an effort to be as prepared as possible for our big RTW, we decided to book ourselves a pre-RTW vacation in Las Vegas. I know what your thinking, “What? Did I read that right, you’re going on a pre-RTW trip? Who does that? Can’t you handle 4 more months of work? You should really be working on those travel funds!”

Unfortunately for you, you’re wrong. Now is the perfect time to spend some of those travel funds. No, not because we really need a vacation, but because our friends Scott and Tamara, pictured below, are getting married. Congratulations guys! Being the good friends we are, we booked flights and hotels and are all set to meet up with them on their special day… plus a few days before.

As the title of this post suggests, booking this trip allowed us to practice buying tickets the way we would for our actual trip. Well, maybe we won’t be booking return flights. And, maybe we would have more flexibility in our schedule on the big trip. Otherwise, it’s pretty much the same idea.

Starting out, we knew that the wedding was on the 7th of June, a Tuesday. We also knew that Ashley was only entitled to 3 days vacation and, to make the most of it, we would want to leave sometime on the weekend before.

Flights

I searched the web long and hard looking for the cheapest flights. I could rattle off a half dozen websites that we used, but I’m not going to. I’m just going to give you what we found to be the best. http://www.farecompare.com/

Here’s why it’s the best:

My dates are flexible
Selecting this option will allow you to quickly search different departure dates. When we first started into this, we were looking to leave on Sunday June 5th and return Wednesday June 8th. After a quick look at the price calendar, we discovered that we could save $40 ($20 each) by leaving 1 day earlier. That was enough to pay for our hotel room that night, effectively giving us a free extra day on our pre-RTW vacation.  If we had more flexibility, we could have saved a bit more by travelling later in the week, or a bunch more by taking off a month prior.

FareCompare My dates are flexible

FareCompare Flexible Dates Calendar

Taxes are included in all quotes
I don’t know about you, but I prefer to compare apples to apples. Sorting all flights by prices that include all fees and taxes sure beats the heck out the way most sites do it: hiding the extra fees until you click to book.

The prices it found were the cheapest
I could find the same price on other websites, but I couldn’t find anything cheaper including the airline’s website.

They have this awesome map
I like this map. It shows you how much flights cost from your location to anywhere else. This is going to be a great tool for planning out several legs of a longer multi-city trip. You’re right, we didn’t use it to book this trip, but it is still cool.

FareCompare Travel Map

The bad:

There’s always a catch. When you make your first search, FareCompare forces you to open up 3 additional browsers to view the same search on other travel sites like Oribtz and Expedia. No matter how you slice it, you are going to have 5 open browsers when you use this website.  Not the end of the world, but certainly an annoyance.

I assume this is how FareCompare makes its money, by advertising and referring you to the other major travel search engines. Fortunately I found this could be avoided. First, click the When-to-Fly link at the top of the page, then click the Search Flights link. Or, simply click here.

TD Travel Rewards

I should point out  that despite the long rave review above, we did not use farecompare.com to actually book our tickets. Once we found the cheapest flight on the day we wanted, we headed over to our VISA’s website to make the actual booking. Why? Because we earn points that can be redeemed to offset future travel at a rate of 4.5% when we book directly through the TD Travel Rewards website.  Booking through FareCompare would only get us the standard rate of 1.5%. In case you are wondering, we are using the TD Travel VISA we told you about earlier in our banking post.

This process went smoothly. We were able to find the same flight at the same price FareCompare had. We were even able to cash in $100 worth of points we had already saved reducing the cost of our booking.

I’m glad we made this practice run now.  At the end of the booking process there was a small note indicating that we would receive our booking confirmation with 48 hours. We didn’t have to wait that long, but we did wait a full 24 hours before we received the first bit of email correspondence.

Because of this rather long wait for any sort of confirmation, I did some more research and found this statement:

“Advance booking times are dependent on a number of factors including what you book. We recommend that you book at least 14 days in advance. However, we can usually accommodate bookings within 48 hours of your departure time.”

Yikes, 14 days! I’m sure glad I found this out now. I would hate to have learned that lesson the hard way; sitting in the airport as our plane flies off wondering “why the heck didn’t they send out our booking, it’s been 12 hours?”

So there you have it, our flight finding/booking process. We’d love to hear any suggestions on how you find cheap flights. The cheaper we can find the better.

P.S. Please don’t post way cheaper flight deals to Las Vegas from Regina.  Our tickets are non-refundable, and it will make us feel bad.  Thanks.