TRAVEL Q&A from Krakow, Poland!

Kara's been practicing her Polish words this morning. The Polish language is very hard to pronounce as an American.

The way it's spelled is not the way you sound it out.

It is 11am we just rolled out of bed since we didn't get to bed till like 3:30 last night. And now we're going to meet Charlie and Jill for breakfast since we're staying in separate Airbnbs this week.

Jewish. Oh, look at this.

Children's concert. How cool is it?

Is this like a bee festival? Yeah, the International Bee Festival.

I don't see any food yet.

Always concerned about the food.

I didn't know they did coffee this big in Europe.

This huge omelet is only $4 and it comes with this huge coffee and bread.

Are you gonna put pants on for the Q A?

No.

Okay.

We're sharing this very uncomfortable table as a chair right now so that the camera can rest on the windowsill.

There is also, if you hear like, waterworks going on in the background, it's not like a noisemaker or toilet won't stop running. So that's the. We've been meaning to do a Q and A since we were in Mauritius. We asked you all for questions then and we've had a long list of them that we've been meaning to answer. And somehow we haven't got to it till now, which is like a month later. Sorry, at least. But we're doing them today, so.

I'll.

Answer the first one. Jenny asked if you could only choose one place you've been thus far, including trips prior to this year, where would it be? That is such a hard question.

Mine is probably a tie between New Zealand and Vietnam because they're just so different. We were in Asia for a really long time and Vietnam was hands down our favorite place in Asia, specifically Hanoi. It was just really authentic, cheap. The food was so good.

Our favorite experience, though, I would have to say, would be Everest Base Camp. That was just like. It'll probably be the highlight of the year. I wouldn't say Nepal is our favorite country, but Everest Base Camp was one of our favorite experiences. How much data have you used on your phone? What phone plan are you using? So we use the T Mobile phone plan. You get an international data package and in like 140 countries. So the majority of countries that we go to, we have data through T Mobile. And it's super nice to be able to show up in a country and not have to worry about, like, getting one of those little SIM cards that may or May not fit into your phone. You just show up and then your phone works. In most countries, yeah.

The few that it didn't work, we just got by by using WI fi. We tried the SIM card thing once. Did it ever work?

Yeah, it went like, okay in Mauritius. I'm gonna take the next question as well. Is that okay? Miles asks, do you do any research prior to flying to a new destination? If you do any good sources you recommend, or do you just get there, go to the front desk and ask for suggestions? So we definitely do some research. Probably not.

We used to do way more.

Probably not as much as we should. We definitely don't go to the front desk and ask for recommendations because I feel like that's the way to get, like, led to the tourist traps. No, but I would say my favorite way to research new destinations is by reading travel blogs. Something about travel blogs as compared to, like, Trip Advisor is I feel like when reading a travel blog, you can kind of, like, get to know the author and kind of see if you're into the same things. And so that way, like, if you find somebody that you feel like you click with and if they've written a post about, like, 10 things to do, you know, you'll probably enjoy the majority of those things. As opposed to, like, TripAdvisor, where it's just like, everybody's giving their opinion. And TripAdvisor is always, like, the top things to do in the country. And so, like, that's where all the most tourists are going to be. And if you just search, like, what to do in Krakow blog, then blogs will pop up. And then maybe you can find some things that are kind of off the beaten path from people who spent more time here.

Julia asked, have you ever lost your footage? What do you do to a shirt?

And you purchased. So we have the Geo Blue. We have some.

There's a lot of people walking in the window behind us. And this is very awkward.

Hey, guys.

They haven't spotted us yet.

But he's still.

So we have health insurance through GeoBlue. I'm not exactly sure what the name of the plan is, but for both of us combined, it costs like a little over $160 a month. And basically we have a really high deductible. I think it's like $5,000 or something like that. If anything tragic happened to us while we were on the road, it would cover us, but we'd have to meet the $5,000 deductible first. We don't have travel insurance.

We did get a different version of it for Everest, though.

No.

Now we thought about it. Oh, we did. We didn't. They'd had, like.

I thought we had losers the whole time we were climbing.

We did.

I thought a helicopter was gonna be able to come get me.

We would have to pay $5,000, but it couldn't. Okay, Susan, ask. How do you decide where you will stay in a city or town?

That is, like, the thing that takes me the longest of planning our travel. So I do, like, 95% of the travel planning.

I just edit stuff.

Yeah. Cara edits all the vlogs, and I do the planning. And yes, deciding where to stay is what takes me the longest. I've gotten a little bit better. So now I'll kind of go on a map and look at some of the major points that we want to hit while we're in a city and then kind of see which part of the city is hopefully in walking distance of, like, a few of them. Because we like to avoid, like, having to take public transportation or a taxi or something like that. We don't mind walking a good ways. And then after I figure out what part of the city we want to be in based on what we want to see in the city, I'll go to agoda.com they're like a hotel booking website, and they have a great map searching feature. So I can, like, put, we want a hotel that's less than $50 a night, and then it'll only show those hotels on a map. And I can zoom into the area I want to be in, check out to see which of those hotels we want to stay in, and then book it. And now that we're in Europe, we started using Airbnb a ton, which we love. They also have a great feature for being able to search on map.

Kai asked, what is your favorite food that each of you have eaten since being on your travels?

We should have taken time to think about this.

Gosh, I love everything.

I really need to think.

I know.

Asian food was, like, the best thing ever. We love street food. Anywhere that has street food, I feel like all we did was eat.

I can't stop thinking about that gelato that we had in Lisbon.

The gelatos nanarellos in Lisbon might be number one on both of our lists. I would say khao soi is up there for both of them. That's my favorite in Chiang Mai, Thailand. That's kind of the northern Thailand dish is khao soi. It's like a coconut curry, broth. And it either has chicken or beef.

Some crunchy noodles on top or crunchy onions on top. Some noodles.

I would definitely know what else is in there, especially if you take away sweets from me. Khao soi is for sure my favorite food that we've had while I've been on the road. Yeah.

Just to name a few others. Sushi in Japan, unbeatable. I would go back to Japan, just eat more sushi. Fried dumplings in Asia. Oh, my gosh. I couldn't get enough dumplings. Anything with noodles. Pho pho and pho sau, which is like fried noodle pho.

Those are all really good.

Those are all the highlights.

Have they all been Indonesia? Have we had anything good since then?

No.

7 might have the best food. I've, like, really enjoyed everything we've had in Europe, but it just hasn't been, like. I guess it hasn't been like. What am I trying to say? It hasn't been, like, a crazy experience where, like, most things in Asia we had, they were just, like, completely different than anything else we had. Like, most things in Europe, I've had either that or, like, a similar version of it before. So I'm not, like, just completely blown away.

Okay, let's think really hard. Are we leaving something really good out? Dumplings, Pho cow soy.

Sushi.

Mango sticky rice.

We almost forgot one with mango sticky rice. Okay, moving on. Kai also asks which airline has been your favorite, including seat, lounge, service, etc.

No doubt.

I'm just making sure we're on the same page. Qatar.

Val's gonna go with lounges first.

Oh, did it say lounge?

Seat, lounge, etc. Favorite lounge?

The wing.

Cafe Pacific.

Yeah. So Cathay Pacific has two amazing lounges in Hong Kong. One is the wing and the other one is the pier.

I don't even think we've ever actually flown with Cathay Pacific. Nate just had. Oh, Nate has one world emerald status, which got us into the first class lounge. We even went out of our way a second time just to go back to the lounge.

We flew through Hong Kong on purpose.

Qatar also had a really awesome lounge. And the service on the planes and the planes themselves, they're just the best.

All right, we could go on and on about this. This segment needs to end. Which one? Emily's. What made each of y'. All. She must be from the south too. Want to start traveling? Like, was there a moment in your childhood that you look back upon and think, that's why I want to start to travel? No.

Before either One of us got married. Neither one of us had traveled a lot internationally. Like, I'd been to a few countries. We went to Haiti together on a mission trip. But we. It's not like, yeah, both of us grew up, like, really.

Our honeymoon really sparked our travel bug.

Oh, yeah. Should we tell that story?

I think we did in the last Q and A.

It was something that we both really enjoyed once we got married. And it was, like, these experiences that we had a lot of fun doing together, and we were making great memories together. And then the more we did it, the more we wanted to continue doing it, and the more places we went, the more places we wanted to see.

So one day we were at Dairy Queen eating a blizzard, and we just said, when else in life are we going to be able to just drop everything and travel? Let's just say we're gonna do it next year.

And we had originally planned for it to be from January through December.

Now I think it might keep going.

Rebecca asked, is Nate the only one videoing, or is Kara doing it as well? Does Kara take photos? And if so, where are they?

That's funny. Nate does majority of the videoing. We learned early on that I get really distracted when I video.

I just start looking at real life. Like, I don't. I stop looking at the camera, and I just start looking at what's actually happening. And Nate did not like that.

The videos get really shaky.

So I also enjoy being on the camera a lot more than Nate did. So we found out rolls really quickly. Nate's the camera guy, I'm the editor, so it works out that way. She also asked, what do you feel is the very best equipment that you have for your trip? The thing you're most likely to say, I'm so glad we have this.

I got it.

Nate has an answer. Oh, this is probably our most recent thing that we're really excited about and don't know what we did without it.

It's the CamelBak all clear bottle. So you can just, like, fill it up with any water, and then you put the top on, and it purifies the water with UV light. So you just hold down this button, and then the light shines in it, and you, like, do this for 60 seconds, and then the water is clean and you can drink it. We've used this in five. More than five countries in Africa where the tap water definitely would have made us sick. And you got sick, like, towards the end. But I don't know that it was the water. I haven't gotten sick yet, and I've been drinking water out of this since we left in June. It's fantastic not to have to run to the store to buy water bottles.

Whoopsie, the memory card filled up. We're going to take that as a sign that we've been talking too long and just end the Q and A here.

The last time we did a Q and A was February in Thailand. We'll try not to make it as long before our next Q and A.