Nate and Kara Buchanan left Nashville to travel full-time, starting daily vlogs in January 2016. They chased 100 countries using travel hacks and YouTube partnerships, finally reaching Fiji as their 100th country while hitting 1 million subscribers.
Chapters
As if life could not get any better. We are sitting in our hundredth country, and we just hit 1 million subscribers.
We've had the best four years.
Throw everything else out this. Honestly, we. I think I can speak for us both. Are living a life better than our wildest dreams.
Yeah.
Last month, we reached a goal that we have been pursuing for the last four years. One that when we said it felt more like a dream than a goal. And when we decided to pursue it, I don't think either one of us actually expected to accomplish it.
So now that we're back home in Nashville, Tennessee, with over a hundred stamps in our passports and over a million people following our journey on YouTube, it feels unreal. If you found our channel recently, this could look like an overnight success, something we were destined to do, or even something that came easy. But that is not the case at all.
We've told bits and pieces of this story along the way, but now that we're home with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 13.
There's actually a 14th one, but I can't find it.
14 old hard drives. We are going to attempt to tell a story from start to finish.
What we really want to do in this video is give you the real story of how this all got started. A lot of you followed our journey from the very beginning, and you've seen all of the fun stuff, but we want to pull the curtain back on some of the things that were happening behind the scenes along the way, as well as the backstory that led to the creation of this channel in the first place.
This is where we've had all of our stuff stored since we left, and I don't think we've opened this door in over two years, but there's something in here that I'm really hoping we can find.
I couldn't have even told you that this one was ours. Wow, look at all.
Gopreds. This feels so weird seeing all of our things that I'm so, like, detached from. Like, if I never saw any of this stuff again, I wouldn't even. I wouldn't. I wouldn't even miss it.
If you're ever gonna go travel for an extended period of time, don't put your stuff in storage. Just get rid of it. Get rid of all of it. You won't want any of it when you get back. The only thing I want in this storage unit is that bed. That's the most comfortable bed in the world, and I've missed it.
Maybe the hard drive that I can't find is on the Spree case. Ooh, Chapstick. No telling how old this is. Found your old business cards. Those are useless now. I think it's dusty in here. All right. No hard drive.
This was my hat from Oktoberfest. Ye.
There is. There is no telling where this is.
Remember, these guys couldn't even fit half our stuff in there now.
A hundred.
Boxes.
Wedding photo. Still can't find the wedding video though.
Stuff gets old when it sits around. Oh, I see. A dvd. I don't know if it's the wedding video though, because I can't get this box out of the way. This is a much bigger task than I thought it was gonna be.
Never did learn how to play.
That chair's so big.
Is there anything back there? I'm gonna break.
Go for it. Alright.
We have so many pillows. Pillows everywhere. This basket is where I used to have our disc with our wedding on it. I think there are more pillows in here. Every Christmas card we've ever received. This is like every picture of us we've ever taken together. This is a Taken Back Sunday concert. About 2008. I made us this scrapbook of our first year of marriage. This is us moving all of the junk that's in here into the apartment. This is when we got kicked off of the island a day early on our honeymoon. On accident. And we went to a lobster festival. And it was so much fun. This is actually our first real travel experience. And it was a total accident. And then we slept in the airport.
Things have not changed too much.
One more box.
Top of that last box. What if it's in here?
I was.
It's in here.
So close to giving up on this. I cannot believe with all the junk we have in here that we actually found it. I don't. I think we'll just give up on that original hard drive though. Yeah. We gotta go. We gotta get out of here.
Okay, bye. Stop.
Now we just need to find a DVD player. We don't have one. Do they even sell those anymore?
Question.
What? Do we have a dvd player?
No.
Let's see if this still works.
There it is.
Good natural sounds.
You're so tan.
We got married on June 15, 2013 in Gallatin, Tennessee. And a few days after our wedding, we went on our honeymoon in Belize. As cliche as it sounds, this is when we caught the travel bug. We didn't necessarily know it at the time and we didn't immediately decide we were going to pack up our stuff and leave to travel the world, but that trip planted a Seed that eventually led us to where we are today.
The trip itself was great, but it was really what happened before that ultimately ended up changing our lives. Kara was in charge of planning the wedding, and I was in charge of planning the honeymoon. And that's when I realized for the first time how expensive international travel was. I'm frugal now, but I was really cheap back then.
I was about to explain how cheap I was when I was younger.
It's impossible to explain.
You just had to be there.
When I was younger and I couldn't.
Drive and Nate could.
He wouldn't take me anywhere no matter how much I begged.
Gas was very expensive back then. He barely took Cara on any dates. That's what my whole family knew. I really like Cara's when I'd spend the gas money to drive to her house. Oh, that is so true. That's funny.
Johnny. It is so good.
All right. How long have we been friends? I remember a picture of us at your, I think, first grade birthday party. I was trying to explain in the video how cheap I was when we were growing up.
Oh, gosh.
When we were in high school, we would go eat at a restaurant and Nate would make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich before we went to get full so that at the restaurant he could only live on the rolls and drink the water and not pay a dime. That is actually the exact story that I thought you would tell us.
I've got more where that came from.
It was a problem.
I would tip more to the servers because I felt bad I had to pick up this cheap slack. So when I went to book our honeymoon and I realized how expensive it was going to be, I started looking for ways to save money. And to this day, I have no clue how I came across it. But I found this 30 minute documentary about frequent flyers. It was these guys who were earning frequent flyer miles in creative ways and redeeming them for free flights around the world. And that was my first glimpse into the world of travel hacking. And I was hooked, but also very skeptical. I consumed all the information that I could for weeks to learn how we could earn miles and points that would allow us to travel for free or cheap. And that's ultimately when I came across travel credit cards. I was reading all this stuff about how you could sign up for a credit card, meet a minimum spending requirement, and earn enough points points for a free flight. It's gotten a little out of hand at this point, but I started slow because I'd always been told that credit cards were bad you have a lot.
Of debt, you're misbehaving with money, and.
Then you come off as prideful and.
Arrogant about how you can handle your.
Credit cards because you pay them off every month when 78% don't. And even those that do overspend, especially those of you with airline miles. It's the biggest scam in freaking history. But curiosity ended up getting the best of me, and I applied for my first travel credit card, the Delta sky miles card. Right before we got married, we put all of our wedding expenses on this card to meet the minimum spending requirements so that we could earn the sign up bonus. We ended up using these points to fly to Florida to go on a cheap cruise that I had found. I vividly remember sitting on that flight, looking around at all the people thinking, wow, everyone else here paid hundreds of dollars to be on this flight and we're sitting here for practically free. That was the moment that I was hooked on travel hacking. And from then on, it bec became a slight obsession. I think we signed up for 22 credit cards before we left to go travel.
So fast forward about one year. We found this in our storage unit this morning. We had been signing up for as many credit cards to collect miles and points as we responsibly could. I had just quit my job as a preschool teacher to become a full time nanny. And Nate was starting a printing company from our apartment.
So he had a super flexible schedule. And anytime I had time off work, we would use our points to go travel. We didn't have a ton of money at the time, but we were using our points that we earned from the credit cards to go all over the world. We traveled to the Bahamas, Costa Rica, Colorado, Las Vegas, Milan, Prague, Vienna, Bangkok, China and South Africa. So usually for these trips, we would book our flights with our miles and points, and then once we got to our destination, we would travel as cheaply as possible, which meant we were staying at all of these hostels and guest houses and. And we would meet these travelers from all over the world. And it seemed like everybody was either traveling for months at a time, taking a gap year, or traveling indefinitely. And we felt like they weren't that different than us. And if they could do it, why can't we? I specifically remember being in Thailand for one week, and it was the most incredible place we had ever been. And we met this couple who had been there for two years, teaching English and traveling around Southeast Asia, and that sounded like a dream. And then we met this other guy in Costa Rica who was playing poker online and learning how to surf in his spare time. These interactions are what opened our eyes to the world of full time travel. And we started having all of these dreamy conversations about how awesome it would be to do that one day.
So at this point, it's January 2015 and we came on a date to Dairy Queen, which was a regular thing for us because we were a part of the DQ Q Blizzard fan club, which is an actual thing they send you emails with buy one, get one free coupons, but only in the winter.
So here we were in January in the freezing cold, eating our blizzards. And.
At this point we've been talking about this idea of full time travel for probably about a year. But I think every time we talked about it, it had never been very serious. Then the conversation came up again on that date night.
One of us had an epiphany that night. I don't remember which one it was, but we realized we didn't have kids, we didn't have pets, we lived in an apartment, we didn't have career building jobs. And if we were ever actually going to travel long term, it had to be right now.
There was at least never going to be an easier point in life to do it. And I think that's what shifted the conversation from dreaming to let's make this a reality.
And then they got this grin. He gets the sneaky look on his face when he's really excited about something. And he said, if we're going to do this, we need to set a date and we need to start telling people, oh.
I'm so going to eat it.
So that night we decided to give ourselves one year to get everything in order before we left on our big trip. But we knew if we didn't start telling people and we didn't have that social accountability, we'd always find some excuse for why it wasn't the right time to leave.
Cheers. Cheers.
And that is the story of how we made a life changing decision at Dairy Queen.
We spent that whole next year saving every penny that we could and every mile and point that we could. But there was one more decision we made that year that ended up changing the course of our lives. We bought a camera. This camera. We figured since we were traveling for a whole year, we needed a proper camera to capture it with instead of just the cell phones that we've.
So, something that you should know about me. I may be cheap, but I also don't do things halfway. So I spent a month researching what camera we should get and Ended up spending way too much money on that one. You see, because I'd spent all that money, I made a very poor decision.
We're back and we need to talk to your wife.
All right, she is here.
So, Julianne, question. Okay. Do you remember that time you were a wedding planner? I do, yes. Do you remember that time you asked us to film a wedding for a bride who had a really tiny budget and couldn't afford one? I do remember that. Remember when we told you we would only do it if you told her that we had never done it before and we had no idea what we were doing and then you didn't. Yes. Sorry, guys. I knew you guys would do a fantastic job. I had four. You had way too much confidence in it. So I've been in weddings and I know what they're like. And I was not about to film a stranger's wedding when I didn't even know how to use our camera yet, much less edit a wedding video.
I thought we just spent way too much money on the camera and this would be a good opportunity to make some of it back. The night before the wedding, I realized that was a massive mistake.
Literally. We were in the car on the way to the wedding watching YouTube videos on how to film a wedding.
Long story short, we kept the camera rolling all night and Kara, with the help of one of our good friends, spent the summer learning how to edit.
A video the entire summer. And by some miracle, we pulled it off. The bride cried. She loved it. And we ended up doing a couple more weddings for friends.
And that is how videography entered our life. All thanks to Julie. Great behind the scenes audience. See y'.
All.
See ya.
Bye.
This is where we lived before we left.
This feels so weird.
Is that one that top left apartment?
We haven't been back here in four years and nothing has changed.
So this is the apartment where we were when we watched this documentary made by our friends Heath and alyssa when they RV to all 50 states. And it gave us this idea.
We have been filming all these wedding videos and at the same time trying to figure out how we were going to capture our one year trip around the world. And we decided we'll just make a documentary.
How hard could it be?
Shortly after that, I found round trip business class flights from Sao Paulo to Hong kong for only $700. I booked three of them and plan to spend two weeks living on airplanes and in airports to earn the miles in status. And I thought this would be a great time to film our first mini documentary on this Interesting trip. So I picked up our big camera, carried it with me around the world, and shot some footage that now is very painful to watch. This is video diary day. And we're up. This was really my first time ever putting myself in front of the camera and being behind the camera and being in front of the camera are two totally separate things. And I was feeling kind of blah from just sitting there all day. So I did some push ups in the middle of the airport. It was also an exercise in not caring so much about what people think about me. Carrying this camera around and doing this vlog is also an exercise in not caring so much about what people think about me. Because everywhere you walk with the camera, everybody looks at you. Thankfully, something serendipitous happened. I was telling a friend about my plans to go on this trip and attempt to document it, and he said, hey, you should check out this guy called Casey Neistat. He makes videos flying on airplanes. So with all my free time that I had on airplanes in airport lounges, pretty much living in airports, I ended up watching about 50 of his videos. Honestly, at this point, I didn't even know that YouTube was a website that people went to every day. The only thing I knew about YouTube is it was the website that hosted the funny viral videos that people would send me on occasion. I definitely didn't know that there were people making a living uploading videos to YouTube. By the time I got home, I had watched so many of his videos that I practically felt like we were best friends. And I was excited to share his channel with Kara.
And I thought it was super weird that Nate had just watched all of these videos from this random guy. I had no idea what vlogging was. I thought the word vlog was super weird. But somehow Nate convinced me to watch a few of his videos, and before I knew it, it had become our routine to watch Casey Neistat's new vlog in bed every single night before going to sleep. We just really enjoyed his casual style of filmmaking. It seemed like he just picked up the camera and filmed whatever he did that day. Plus, it seemed a lot less intimidating than the documentary we were planning on filming. So we bought our first point and shoot camera. This camera.
Are we recording? Maybe we're both looking at the screen.
Our first video on our new camera.
Our travel camera.
Vloggers for life.
I think we're gonna be good at this.
My arm's getting tired. As we packed up our apartment and put everything we owned in storage, we attempted to use our new Camera to document the process. Yes.
Phase one, moving out of the apartment.
It's almost empty.
Christmas tree. Staying up till Christmas though. Scrooge over here wants to take it down. Here's the first truckload of stuff leaving our apartment.
I feel weird looking at the camera, but I almost feel weirder looking at you. Cuz you're. It looks good both ways. Really?
We got to each other.
I like this better. Yeah, just look at the screen. No, not the screen. Just look at the mouth. Yeah. I don't want you to just like say everything in one sentence. I think that sounds really bland. Maybe like you say something and then I'll say something.
Our stuff is in the black hole behind us. Let's go. Maybe it'll auto focus.
There it is.
Oh. Oh, yeah. Look at that. All of our stuff. How you feeling?
Feels weird.
Yeah.
That is so painful to watch. We were so awkward, but we thought it would just be easy to pick up the camera and film what we were doing. We obviously had a lot to learn.
We continued to play with the camera for the week leading up to the trip, but the first day we ever filmed an actual video was this day.
Travel vibes.
What were we thinking?
We had decided we're just gonna use the same song every time we travel and that's just gonna like set the mood, you know, Karen Nader on the road. If you hear that song instead.
I think we scared people enough.
People commented, please never play this song again.
I still like it.
Oh, man. January 10, 2016. The day we boarded our one way flight to Japan and started this crazy journey.
We were filled with a mixture of emotions. Excitement for the adventure that lay ahead, but also sadness because we just said goodbye to our closest friends and family and we were attempting to film our first vlog. We don't know how to get out of the subway. Kind of like our first wedding video. We just kept the camera rolling for the entire day. And that night when we got to Japan, we sat down to edit our first vlog.
How you feeling?
So Casey Neistat is the one who inspired us to film in this format and he published a video every single day. So naturally that's what we decided to do.
We went from zero to daily vlogging, plus learning how to live full time on the road all in the the same week. It was a lot to take on, but I'm so glad that we did because now we have all of these really funny videos to look back on.
What were we thinking?
How hard can it be? I feel like that's become a theme in this story that I hadn't really realized in our lives.
I don't think I had either.
We're like, oh, how hard can it be? And then we dive straight into something and we learn real quick. I mean, we captured the whole process and you can really see, see just how far we've come.
Yep.
Even though I've been tempted to take some of these videos off of the Internet so nobody can go back and watch them now, the contest to see who can squat deeper.
At this point, it may seem like, wow, you found your calling, you started making YouTube videos, and the rest is history. Kara, it's 12:30. How are you feeling?
Tired and killed.
But the reality is it wasn't easy, especially not in the beginning.
After spending a week traveling around Japan, we flew to the Philippines, where some poor planning led to things not going as smoothly as we had hoped.
We're currently at the two hour mark of waiting in line. She's legit asleep.
How does she do that? It was only our second week of travel. We were still getting the hang of things, and it just felt like things were already starting to fall apart.
Hour one into the bus ride, Kara threw up.
Not only was our travel not going as planned, but making videos was hard. I'm tired and there's no coffee here.
I specifically remember one night when Kara spent a few hours editing a video and it wasn't turning out anything like she wanted it to and she felt like she needed to start all over and she literally broke down in tears. We are sitting in the Philippines at the start of our one year trip around the world and Cara is crying. And at that point we felt like we really needed to reevaluate how we were spending our time. We didn't want to look back at the end of this one year trip around the world and then regret all the time that we had spent sitting behind our computers Instead of being out.
Traveling, we decided to just close the computer that night and sleep on it and take the next day off. And then we made this video explaining why we decided to keep going. So when we knew we were gonna travel this year, we knew we wanted to capture it somehow. We had been watching some vloggers on YouTube and decided that we would try that out. So we started making vlogs and we didn't know if anybody would watch them or care, but they took a lot of time and still take a lot of time to put together. If nobody watched them, we would probably just stop. But so many people have reached out and encouraged us and texted us.
We feel like when we're not vlogging that we're missing out on capturing days of the trip that we might not remember otherwise. Even if this may not sound like a big deal, but this was a very pivotal moment. We weren't fully committed to making videos and we could have easily stopped and never made another one. The amount of nice things that people have said about the vlog has meant so much to us.
It really has been the people who watched our videos who have kept us going, especially in the beginning. I remember getting messages from people who we hadn't talked to in years saying that they were loving following our journey around the world and that just blew our minds. And then people who we didn't even know started commenting on our videos, which was really crazy.
It seemed like every time we got like frustrated or down and we were ready to go quit, we would get the perfect message or just hear from the perfect person. And it motivated us to keep going. And over the next few months, we became much better travelers and slightly better filmmakers as we traveled around Southeast Asia. Thankfully, after the Philippines, we went to Singapore where we stuffed ourselves with some of the world's best street food. From there we flew to Hong Kong mainly so we could use our status to go to the incredible first class lounges and in the airport. Wow. Celebrated Chinese New Year in Taiwan and tried what is still our least favorite food in the world, stinky tofu.
I think I have cat pee in my mouth.
We actually tried it again to make sure it was still as bad as we remember. And it's still bad. We saw the iconic Petronas Towers in Malaysia and got surrounded by monkeys at the Batu Caves. Jumped on a cheap flight to Cambodia and spent a few days exploring the English incredible temples of Angkor Wat. It was also in Cambodia where we had our first taste of bugs. And we did not start small. Oh, gross. From there, we jumped on a bus to the south of Thailand that took us about halfway before it dropped us off in the middle of nowhere. Somewhere around 2am we're on another bus. Eventually we did make it to the islands where we got our advanced scuba certification.
During our certification, we were we paired up with this other couple who is traveling the world and making money by writing blogs about their adventures. And we learned that they were getting their certification for free by featuring the diversort on their blog.
We had heard the word influencer before, but we figured we'd. Oh, your breath.
Sorry.
We figured we'd have to have tens of thousands of followers before anybody would give us something for free. But we ended up comparing numbers, and our YouTube channel was getting more views than their website site was. And so we figured if they could get stuff for free, maybe we could too.
Why can't we? How hard could it be?
How hard can it be? The thing you have to remember is that at that time, any money that we could save meant we could stay on the road for longer. So next we headed to Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand, which required a 14 hour overnight train ride on a wooden bench.
Nate had a hard time sleeping last night.
This was his position every time I woke up.
To this day, I still remember that as one of the longest nights of my entire life. Once we arrived in Chiang Mai and got a little sleep, I reached out to three businesses about partnering together. A zipline company, an elephant sanctuary, and a cooking school. And to our surprise, all three of them said yes, kind of. The Thai secret Cooking school is the first company that we ever worked with. It required me getting on the phone and practically begging for us to be able to do it for free.
We'll do anything. We'll give you anything that you need.
We'll post a million Instagram.
We know exactly what we're doing.
And they gave us one spot, not two, one spot. Cara got to do it for free. I filmed it, and I got to nibble off the scraps that she cooked. At least that's how I remember.
But we were pumped.
Yes, we were. We were so grateful to have that one free spot because that cooking school was willing to take a chance on us, which we are so grateful for. That opened the door for us to work with companies down the road, which has led to so many unique experiences over the past few years.
From Thailand, we cruised down the Mekong river into Laos, where we watched this really beautiful tradition that was kind of ruined by tourists, then climbed to the top of a really cool waterfall. Our last country in Southeast Asia for the year was Vietnam, where we fell in love with the food and cruised through the stunningly beautiful Ha Long Bay. From there, we traveled to Australia, where we felt like we were spending every penny that we had. We saw the iconic opera house and drove the great ocean road. We met up with our friends Jordan and Julianne in New Zealand for a camper van trip around the south island.
Oh, my God.
Then they went home. So we got a van that we could afford by ourselves, ourselves and spent a week driving around the north island. From there, we made our way to Nepal, where we landed at one of the most dangerous airports in the world. Before trekking to Everest base camp.
After we finished the trek, we did something that we had been putting off for six months. It was a really big deal. We made a video about turning ads on our channel.
Felt like we should put it in the wall. There's this monetization tab in YouTube and I think all I have to do is click this enable button and ads will be on our video.
OMG.
We felt like we needed to spend like 10 minutes justifying why we were turning ads on or we were gonna lose the few hundred subscribers that we had at that point.
We were terrified that people were gonna stop watching our videos because they were gonna think that we were only doing it for the money.
We still don't have the annoying pop up ads because I still don't like those.
You're welcome. Those are the worst.
But to be fair, this was the point when I think we actually had started thinking about extending our trip past that first year. Honestly, when we left to go travel, we didn't know if we would like it.
We've never done it before.
We've never spent 24 hours a day together, seven days a week. We could have hated each other. We could have hated travel, or it just.
We could have missed home too much.
It could have sounded like a much dreamier idea than it actually was.
But we loved it. We loved it so much.
And if we could help it, we didn't want it to end after the first year, or at least like that was starting to become our thought process at this point. From Nepal, we used points to fly home for my brother's wedding.
I literally went from not having showered in 13 days to the fanciest business class, lounge, and flight of my life.
This was like, kind of the deal. Kara really wasn't into this idea of trekking to Everest base camp for two weeks. And I said, how about we use our points to book business class? If you do that with me.
The contrast was hilarious.
Just imagine two kids living off $75 a day being invited into that kind of lecture.
We took full advantage.
More food. Yes. More drinks. Yes. Can we put some in our backpacks?
I literally wore the jammies that they gave us on the plane to the Dallas airport.
Good times.
After the wedding, we flew to Kenya with my mom to help with medical clinics, went on safari, and then flew to South Africa where we went cage diving with great white sharks. Oh, my gosh.
Our time in South Africa was another very defining moment for us, because that's the first time that we started talking about this goal of visiting 100 countries, we knew we didn't want this trip to end after just one year, but we also didn't want to just like that's traveling with no direction.
I think I didn't know what you were trying to say.
We wanted a goal. So I sat down and I made a spreadsheet of all the countries that sounded remotely interesting to us. And it came out to about a hundred. And we went on this hike up Table Mountain and I remember having this really serious conversation about whether we were both actually willing to devote the next few years of our lives to chasing.
This goal is crazy.
It sounds like it should have been an easy decision at the time, but one of the biggest things for us were just the sacrifices that we knew would have to be made if we were going to continue, like not being home for friends and family and events going on here. Like we had missed a lot.
As romantic as full time travel sounds, there are sacrifices that have to, to be made in order to do it. I mean, this has been our life for the last four years, filming and editing these videos. There's. There's very little that goes on outside of that.
We have zero hobbies.
We also have zero regrets. I could not be happier with, with where we are. It's been worth it, but. But not easy. I guess that's what we're trying to say. So that week in South Africa is really when we set this goal to visit 100 countries. Although watching those videos, you would have no idea, because I think it was something that we were too embarrassed to say out loud. It felt, it felt too crazy to put out into the world at that point. How were we as two 20 something year olds with a tiny YouTube channel and really like no income? Because when we did turn on those ads back in Nepal, it was like $15 a day. How are we going to accomplish 100 customers? I didn't want to publicly give up, I'll say that.
Yeah.
And I didn't know at that time if we were both willing to make the sacrifices necessary to do it.
From South Africa, we flew to Victoria.
And then to Mauritius, where we rode in a submarine. In Zanzibar, we got lost in the alleys of Stone Town. And after leaving Africa, we headed to Europe, where we met up with Kayla and Vera in Portugal. In Spain, we saw the Sagrada Familia, drove a Ferrari and went to the world's largest tomato fight with our crazy Australian friends.
We continued our European summer in Poland, where we Went on our first food tour. Somehow we had traveled for eight months straight and had never heard of food tours before.
Took a bus to Bratislava, then a train to Budapest. Another bus to Munich, where we celebrated October and jumped on yet another bus to Slovenia where we visited the beautiful lake bled. Flew to Croatia where we saw some really cool waterfalls. Rented a car and drove through Bosnia and Herzegovina. Herzegovina, Herzegovina. On our way to Montenegro, where we rented a boat that didn't actually go anywhere. Then we paraglided and fed donkeys in Cyprus, met back up with Jordan and Julianne in Athens, and stayed in an incredible Airbnb in Santorini. From there we flew north to the Netherlands where we learned you should never try to drive a car into Amsterdam. I see why everybody rides bikes around here. Then to London for the world travel market, where we pitched ourselves to every company under the roof of that building to let us come and do something for free. We were doing whatever it took. We've come a long way.
We ended the year with an epic trip to to Morocco where we experienced our first hammam and spent the night in the Sahara desert.
Our first year of travel was officially complete. So we flew back home where we had a really hard decision to make.
Over the holidays, we spent time in spare bedrooms here at Kara's parents house and my parents house. At this point, our year of travel was supposed to be over. We didn't want it to be, but we were running out of money and it seemed like the responsible thing to do was to come home and get real jobs. To make that even more tempting, I got a job offer that was supposed to pay me over $100,000 a year. And after living off $75 a day for an entire year and feeling super poor, that $100,000 was very tempting. And it was also scary to keep going, not knowing where the money would come from. But it's scary and. And as tempting as it was, we made the decision to leave for a second year because we knew in the back of our minds that we would always ask ourselves, what if? If we didn't try. Enjoy life. We'll see you in six months.
It's a video. We refer to 2017 as our year of free stuff because we didn't actually have enough money to keep traveling. So we reached out to as many businesses as possible to do as much free stuff as we could.
And that is how we ended up as broke 20 somethings traveling South America in luxury. We started the year in Argentina where we learned how to play polo. That was so Much fun, and then traveled to Uruguay because, well, it was close, cheap, and a short ferry ride away.
We spent the next couple of months traveling around South America on epic luxury tours, including an incredible trip to Patagonia, where we trekked on a glacier and hung out with gauchos, spent the day.
Playing on the largest mirror in the world, and had dinner as we watched the sunset over the Bolivian salt flats. Met back up with Jordan and Julianne.
On the equator.
Stayed in the middle of the Amazon rainforest in Peru, and then cruised down the river in a luxurious suite before flying to Cusco to meet Nathan parents and tried to Machu.
Picchu, which we barely saw. But that was okay because the highlight of the trip ended up being staying in glass pods that were hooked to the side of a mountain overlooking the Sacred valley. After filming what we thought were some of our best videos ever in South America, we learned an important lesson. And that's that just because we could get companies to give us a bunch of free trips didn't necessarily mean that that's what other people wanted to watch.
People seem to be much more interested in our videos where something went wrong instead of when we were doing really awesome but unrelatable stuff.
Just look at this. Here's a good example. I stumped my toe in Santiago. 144,000 views. Oh, here we go. This video we got out of a taxi. 134,000 views. Penguin island in Patagonia. EPIC Penguin Island. 50,55,000 views. Like the best day of our lives in the Galapagos, swimming with sea lions. This is the greatest moment of my entire life. 40,000 views. So we learned a lot about relatability this year. We still do luxurious things here and there, but we try to strike a balance. And when we do, we make sure we're telling the story that we want to tell. And we also try to infuse as much of our personality as possible into the videos. Back then, we felt like because these companies were working with us, we needed to pretty much be shooting commercials for them. So while we were in South America, we basically shot a couple months worth of ads, lost a lot of loyal viewers, understandably so. But we learned from our mistakes.
After a summer spend at home with friends and family, we flew to Italy, did all the touristy things, visited the smallest country in the world, before meeting some very special people for the first time who took us to another microstate located inside of Italy.
We spent the rest of the summer knocking a lot more European countries off our bucket list, starting with Belgium. Where we ate our weight in chocolate. We took a day trip to Luxembourg, then traveled to Paris and had a magical picnic dinner in front of the Eiffel tower and rode a Vespa around every corner of the city.
We took a road trip around Ireland and had incredible weather. On the day we visited the jaw dropping cliffs of mohair.
We flew to Iceland to meet back up with Kayla and Barrett. Experienced nature at its finest. Ate a ton of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to save money because the.
Chicken sandwich from the gas station was.
$16 and swam between the North American and Eurasian continental plates. That was before I lost a bet and had to eat a sheep's eyeball.
He rolled a tube.
Oh yeah, I saw my son. It's in his mouth.
Next it was on to the Baltics. Starting with bobsledding in Latvia, Visiting a hill with over a hundred thousand crosses in Lithuania and locking ourselves out of our apartment in Estonia.
Then in Korea, we got naked with strangers in a traditional spa called a jimjilbang. So we just spent the last two hours naked and separated a octopus that was still wiggling.
And step foot in North Korea at the demilitarized zone between the north and the south.
I'm standing in North Korea right now. We flew back to Italy to harvest grapes with our new friends Bob and Gina before flying to Moscow to board the Trans Siberian railway and spent over 140 hours riding a train across Russia.
Little did we know, us being cooped up in a train car for days on end eating ramen noodles and consuming way too much instant coffee would be very entertaining to the Internet.
Our Trans Siberian series were really the first videos that we'd uploaded to our channel that really took off and we had our first video hit 1 million views.
Honestly, if it wasn't for that series doing well, we probably wouldn't have been able to continue because we had made this deal with each other that when our bank account got to $15,000, that's when it was was time to go home. We figured that was enough money to give us a few months to get back on our feet. And after barely breaking even all year, we were dangerously close. But at the end of quarter four, we had made $10,000, which felt like so much money at the time, and it gave us the confidence to keep going. Also, for those of you who have never been to our website before, we've been writing income and expense reports documenting our financial journey for the the last three years. So that's what we're referencing here. Just to step back and put this into perspective. It took us two years of uploading a video almost every single day before we made any real money from YouTube.
If we would have set out in the beginning to create a successful YouTube channel, we wouldn't have done it. We would have been disappointed with how long it was taking and we would have given up. But we were just happy that we were still traveling. Like travel was the priority, not YouTube. And looking back, I think that's why it worked. It was our passion for travel that kept us going.
Thank you. This is the year things really took off. Shortly after the start of the year, we found ourselves in Oman, where we we hit 100,000 subscribers, which was a.
Massive milestone for us. After Oman, we jumped on a cruise that took us to the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Qatar. We ended our trip in Dubai, where we skied inside of a mall. Good luck, I love you. Don't hurt yourself. And jumped in an aquarium full of giant sharks.
Then we made our way to Aruba for a friend's wedding that just happened to be the same week as Carnival.
Next there was India.
Colorful, crowded, chaotic and delicious India.
After almost a month in this crazy country, we needed some downtime. So we flew to Bangkok for our first workation. This is where we've been majority of the week. Up until this point, we'd either been on the road, traveling, going 100% full speed, or back home with friends and family. And this trip to Bangkok is the first time that we realized that we could take time off while on the road. And we came up with a word for it. Workationing.
Taking a vacation from travel to get work done. As weird as it sounds, these breaks are what have enabled us to keep going for the last four years without getting burnout. When you're on the road, you're constantly moving, you're in new environments and you're just on. And even though during these breaks we probably spending eight to 10 hours behind our computers, it just, it feels restful. But by the end of a week or two of that, we're sick of being on our computers and we're ready to get out and go again. And this has become our routine for the last two or three years. We'll go really hard for a few weeks traveling and filming videos, and then it's time for a workation where we can sit down, Cara can edit, and we can push content out.
Most importantly, we don't have to repack our stuff for like two weeks. Just one place.
I will say this. After four years of being on the road, Packing is not any easier.
Packing is always terrible.
It never gets better.
After our first vacation, we flew to Myanmar, where we spent nine days cruising up the Irrawaddy river, visiting riverside villages and meeting tons of friendly locals.
From there, it was on to Bali, which we thought was going to be super overrated, but we quickly learned why it's on everyone's bucket list.
And then there were the Shorty Awards, which is basically the Grammys for Internet creators.
We look the part, but we have no clue what we're doing.
We flew to New York, and that started one of the best weeks of our lives. Our moms met us there, and to our utter surprise, we actually won it. And the Shorty Award for best in travel goes to. Kara and Nate.
This is incredible. Who would have thought we liked to go travel? And now we're standing on the stage. Thank you.
Then we had the opportunity to fly business class to my dream destination. I'm gonna cry.
I don't know where to start.
I can't believe we're here. And we got to stay in the most expensive place that we stayed in all 100 countries. It was all so good that it felt like life had to be all downhill from there, but it wasn't.
We traveled to Egypt, where we saw the pyramids and sailed down the Nile River. In Turkey, we soared over Cappadocia in hot air balloons, stared in wonder at the ruins of Ephesus.
Mind blowing. Mind blowing. Why are you going here? This is amazing.
And got stranded in a rainstorm, and we're lost.
Get me out of here. That was so awful.
Help. Looking back, it wasn't a big deal at the time.
I'm so scared.
Then we took a quick business trip to Sweden and stayed in a 747 airplane that was converted into a hotel. From there, it was back to Italy, where we hosted our first ever tour for 40 people who were crazy enough to let two YouTubers plan their vacation.
We ate tons of pasta, drank delicious wine.
And crashed a lot of espas.
We learned a lot by hosting those first few trips, but looking back, we wouldn't change a thing. It was one of the most rewarding weeks of the entire year. We got to meet a lot of cool people.
It was awesome and terrifying.
I was way too responsible for people's lives.
Everyone's fine. From Italy, we traveled to the Caucasus, where we met back up with our friend Charlie, who always seems to get us in trouble.
Hope he doesn't get himself arrested in Bosnia.
We road tripped through Georgia, in Armenia, explored an Underground City. Stayed with the best Airbnb host in the world. Ready? Uh huh.
And rode in rusty Soviet cable cars.
We said goodbye to Charlie and jumped on a train to azerbaijan. Had a 24 hour layover in Kazakhstan on the way to Kyrgyzstan, where we were invited to cover the world Nomad Games. As press, we got these really cool vests that said press on them. We got to film whatever we wanted.
Flew back to the us, Spoke at our first conference, met back up with our friends Heath and Alyssa in Canada for an epic road trip from Vancouver to Ban. And then headed to one of our favorite cities in the world, Chiang Mai, Thailand. Where we took the longest break that we've taken in the last four years. We spent six weeks there catching up on videos and also going to the awesome Lantern festivals. There's fireballs falling out of the sky.
I'm so scared. This guy is gonna catch a fight.
Oh, gosh, I'm stressing out now. During our time in Chiang Mai, we had our first truly viral video that hit 1 million views within a week.
Do you agree with Armenia?
And he said, once again, on a train.
People love trains.
And over the last couple months, the year, our channel grew to over half a million subscribers.
Up until this point, we always figured that after we reached 100 countries, we would have to go home, get real jobs, and do responsible things like save for retirement. That's why our original goal was to hit 100 countries by my 30th birthday. That just seemed like the right time to become a responsible adult. However, now that our YouTube channel was growing faster than either one of us ever at school expect it. We were making more money than we would have if we would have moved back to Nashville and gotten real jobs. And I think this was the first time that either one of us ever looked at our channel as something more than two kids irresponsibly chasing a crazy dream. That's when we decided to push back our goal, and we started looking at our YouTube channel as more of a career. Moving into 2019.
Honestly facing your entire livelihood predominantly on one platform that we ultimately have zero control over is scary. And we are fully aware that all YouTube has to do is make a few quick changes, and everything we've worked for the last four years could be taken away.
So we've always tried to approach any success that we've had on YouTube with gratefulness in the current moment, but no expectation that it's going to continue into the future. So we went into 2019 thinking there was no way things could get Any better.
But it was our best year yet. We started in Cuba where we had an eye opening experience.
Flew to St. Martin to take off a major bucket list item, then landed on the shortest commercial Runway in the world.
Cruised around the Caribbean and through the Panama Canal.
Went scuba diving in underground caves in Mexico.
Flew to the Middle east where we floated in the Dead Sea and saw one of the seven wonders of the world.
Enjoy. Someone ate lamb testicles in Lebanon.
Here we go. Actually, we both did, but I went first.
Traveled to a country that we never thought we'd visit and experienced incredible hospitality from the Kurdish people in Iraq. We have no clue what's happening, but everybody seems to be having a lot of fun. A snowball fight in the mountains of Kurdistan is not what I ever thought I would be doing.
Then Tesla invited us to Finland to drift cars on the world's only sea ice track.
We also slept in a house made of ice.
He just dumped it on my face.
Drove snowmobiles with dog sledding and experience our first Finnish sauna.
Finland was epic.
In Denmark, we rode in a hot tub boat.
Then we traveled to Mexico to meet up with our friends and family and learn how to surf.
After a nice break on the beach, we flew on Cathay Pacific's business class and met some friends on the flight who invited us to their birthday party in first class.
Once we landed in Vietnam, we got in our first car accident.
From there we went on the most intense but most epic dive of our life on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Then flew home for a wedding and to celebrate my grandparents 60th wedding anniversary.
That summer we headed back to Europe where we met up with Kayla and Vera in Italy.
Then we hopped on a train to Switzerland where we crossed a glacier. Stayed in some epic accommodations and rode the Glacier Express.
Went to a party in a castle in Liechtenstein where I met the prince.
Who talked about rice. Unfortunately, I cannot.
In Ukraine, we spent two days exploring the abandoned, yet still radioactive town of Chernobyl.
Wow.
Flew back to Vietnam to surprise my dad with a trip to his number one bucket list destination.
Then it was back to Europe to stay in some unique accommodations in Norway.
From there we flew to Israel where we wandered around the most holy city city in the world.
Travel to Myanmar to host our second tour where we spent a week cruising up the Irrawadi with 36 new friends.
After wrapping up the tour, we headed to the neighboring country of Bangladesh where we explored the beautiful countryside as well as the chaotic streets of Dhaka.
I somehow talked Cara into Flying into one of the most dangerous airports in the world. And the captain invited us into the cockpit for the landing.
After safely touching down in our 98th country, we spent our week in Bhutan, immersing ourselves in local culture and taking in the breathtaking scenery.
From there we made the long journey to our 99th country. The remote South Pacific island of Vanuatu where we stayed in an incredible treehouse and climbed to the top of an active volcano.
So now that you're all caught up, you'll have a much better appreciation for why today's three hour flight is such a big deal. This is our last vlog.
We're going to our hundreds country.
We are currently in our 99th country of Vanuatu where we flew to the small island of Tanna to climb to the top of an active volcano.
And this morning we are leaving the incredible treehouse that we've called home for the last three nights to fly to our 100th country.
Thank you very much.
See you Tom.
But first and very important, bumpy and wet two hour truck ride to the airport.
Thank you. Made it to the Dana airport.
This isn't the flight that's taking us to our hundredth country. This is just taking us to the international airport.
I love this sign.
Thank you very much.
I think this is the first time ever we've had a handwritten boarding pass.
I love it.
All right. Just a 30 minute flight to vlog. We are literally booking our accommodations for our 100th country right now on the plane.
Talk about last minute.
This is in true Karen made fashion.
This is not the first time we've done this.
I try to do this before the flight attendant tells me to put my phone away.
You would think in our hundredth country we would have it together by now. Nope.
I'm doing it. I'm pressing the button. It's probably the most money we've ever spent to go anywhere. Going out with a bang. Thank you. Your reservation has been confirmed. We are looking forward to your visit tomorrow. We were not expecting you but now we have to get ready for you.
Unfortunately, short flight 35 minutes so we won't be able to make up any time once you get underway. We'll check see our takeoff towards the south east. Right turn after takeoff. Climbing to our cruise altitude 14,000ft. First Officer Stephanie will be handling the flight so she'll come back to you during the flying. Update of the weather and our expected arrival time in 2 4.
Now we have three hours at the international airport until our next flight takes off to our 100th country. It just kind of hit me on that plane ride that we're kind of making the last travel day vlog.
This is package time.
So the closer we've gotten to reaching our goal, the more reflecting we've done lately, which we don't do very often, mostly because we're usually traveling so quickly and always looking forward to the next place. But the one thing that we know for sure is that there is no way that we would be here today if it weren't for this incredible YouTube community.
If it wasn't for you watching our videos, we would have had to pack up and call it quits a long time ago. And we're not just saying this to, like, make you feel like part of the team. It is 100% true.
If you looked at all of our numbers when we made this goal that first year, we had no reason to think that we could actually achieve it.
I think at that point it was like more of a dream. Like, not something we thought we would actually do, but, like something just to shoot for.
I guess we figured what could go.
Wrong, like, if worse came to worse, we. We went home and we had traveled a little bit longer. But now we're here, about to check.
In for our hundredth country fl.
Okay, it's honestly hard to like. Like, I'm trying to soak it in and take it in that, like, this is what we've been working for for the past four years, and we're about to step on the flight that's going to take us there. And unless, like, something bad happens on the flight we we're doing, we've done it.
We're obviously still reflecting, trying to process.
Well, we spoke too soon. Turns out our flight is three hours delayed, which gives us plenty of time to explain how we chose our honey.
Since y' all have been such a huge part of our journey, we wanted you to pick 100th country. And I'm super indecisive, and I never could have chosen it anyways. So we listed out all the countries that we haven't been to yet and put it up for a vote. Over a hundred and fifty thousand votes were cast, and there was a clear top three. But there can only be one country 100.
Try number two.
It's official.
We have our boarding passes and we are in our last lounge before country number 100.
Cheers.
Here we go. We are boarding our flight to country number 100.
Please give us your full attention as we demonstrate the safety equipment and procedures of this aircraft. Your seatbelt should be done up tightly whenever you are seated. You should also note your emergency brace position. It is clearly shown on your safety information card. In an emergency, follow the instructions of your crew exactly. There are four emergency exits on this aircraft.
Ladies and gentlemen.
It is a safety requirement that while.
You are seated, make sure that your seatbelt is securely fastened at all times. So it may look like we booked ourselves in business class to celebrate 100 countries, but in reality, when we booked these flights last night.
This was the only thing available.
You'd think we'd be more on top of things by now.
The more you travel, the more you learn things just like work out. So you tend to do things more and more last minute.
Honestly, I can't help but just think about our very first flight of this entire journey from Nashville to Tokyo and just how we had no idea what was in store for us the next four years.
Thank you so much.
It honestly makes me tear up a little bit.
Just trying to soak it all in.
So jealous about in the moment.
You can.
I don't know if it's a blessing or a curse. I'm very happy.
This won't hit me for weeks and when it does, I won't do this.
Enjoy your food.
9:44Pm for those of you who are here for the first time, Nisamola Binaka to you and for those of you who are returning home, we welcome you home.
Here we go.
Thank you.
Country number.
100.
I can't believe it.
We have stepped off so many planes in the last four years and like.
Here we are, country number one on.
Welcome to fiji.
Thank you so, so much to everyone who voted, especially those of you who voted for Fiji, because we are so excited that this is our hundredth country.
A lot of you who voted for Fiji told us that you did so because you wanted us to have a proper vacation and just relax. And apparently we've really taken that to.
Heart going to the island.
The morning after we arrived, we jumped on a ferry and headed north to a small island.
How are you this morning?
And for the last three days we have just been hanging out at this.
Beautiful resort and doing a lot of nothing. Most of our time has been spent underwater in our pool, eating delicious food, playing chess, playing in the sunshine.
We've even been exercising. We've basically just been here reminiscing about the last four years of our life. It's been so nice just to actually have a minute to slow down and think through all of the incredible experiences that we've had over the last four years.
We Love your vlog. We want to travel the world like you. I can't believe how many people. How many people? You are so nice. As fun as it has been reminiscing about all of our good times, it has seriously been just as fun thinking about all the things that haven't gone to plan. I think those are the things that have come up the most in all of our conversations this week.
This has definitely been the most interesting night of our trip. Kara might have lost her subway ticket. It's very pleasant. Are you enjoying the view, Kara? I asked you, you before we left, should I bring my rain jacket? Should I bring the rain cover for the camera? And you're like, no, it's beautiful outside.
I think this is home for the night.
This is not good. I'm pretty sure that I just ran the drone into a rock.
Home point is updated.
So we've had a few roadblocks along the way, but we have been so fortunate with how everything has worked out the last four years.
It's actually incredible if you think about it. As many flights as we've been on, we've had one canceled flight and one lost bag, which we got back. Outside of, like, a few small bouts of food poisoning, our health has stayed pretty good. And somehow, after four years of full time travel, we have yet to go to the hospital.
I mean, there's been some close calls. That's pretty incredible.
Maybe we're just not adventurous enough. Maybe we need to, like, do more stuff.
Oh. Oh.
Thank you.
The menu even says our names.
So as if life could not get any better at the current moment, we are sitting in our hundredth country, a goal that we have, like, devoted our life to for the past four years. And we just hit 1 million subscribers.
A million subscribers in our 100th country exactly halfway through our week here. The timing is impossible.
We achieved the goal that we've been working towards forever, and we hit what's probably the biggest milestone that will ever hit in our YouTube career in the same week.
What in the world?
This is, like, stuff you write a movie about.
It doesn't feel real. Like, there's no way it worked out this perfectly.
It's. It's like somebody at YouTube had their, like, hand on the throttle and they were like, no, they're not there yet. We can't give it to them. And then as soon as we got here, it was just like, boom, here we go to a million.
There's so much to celebrate right now. Like, I was. I was still, like, getting used to the Fact that we made it to a hundred countries and now this.
The timing honestly feels impossible. Like, YouTube is just like. It's this beast that's just totally out of your control. You do your the best you possibly can to put out the best videos that you think people will like and that, like, you hope people will subscribe to. But I think hitting hitting 100 countries felt much more in our control than hitting a million subscribers on YouTube.
I honestly never in a million years thought we would be here having this conversation right now. Especially.
Four years ago when we started this channel.
It took us two years to hit 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. And when we hit that and we got the silver play button, I thought this is the only play button we'll ever get. And I'm so happy with it.
What in the world? We're in Fiji with a million subscribers and we're together.
Couldn't have done it without you.
Couldn't have done it without each other. Thank you. And I just got to travel the world with my wife for the last four years.
On top of everything else, we've had the best for you.
Throw everything else out this. Honestly, we. I think I can speak for us both. Are living a life better than our wildest dreams.
Yeah.
Just look at where we're standing right now. Just look.
This is our life.
What?
This is our house. This is where we're living this week. Like, can you even believe it? I can't. And I'm standing here.
I think what we're trying to say is thank you. We're so grateful for all of it.
Sam.
