Kara and Nate have visited 95 countries since leaving in January 2016 with $35,000 and 2 million frequent-flyer miles. Their audience votes to choose the 100th country in a two-round public vote, with the results kept secret until they arrive. They're throwing a celebration party in Nashville.
Seriously, we want you to choose our hundredth country.
In case you're new here and you haven't seen all 692 of our videos, let us quickly catch you up on the last few years of our lives.
So excited about this. We're Kara and Nate. We were high school sweethearts, got married as soon as we graduated from college. I was a preschool teacher. Nate started a printing company. And long story short, we are two very normal people from Nashville, Tennessee, who really love to travel.
After two years of marriage, we seriously considered having kids.
But we decided to take a year off and go travel instead. Yes. So we put everything we owned in storage, saved up $35,000, and accumulated almost 2 million frequent flyer miles by signing up for way too many credit cards.
On January 10th of 2016, we left to travel the world for one year or until we ran out of money.
Yay.
And the next day, we uploaded our very first vlog to YouTube.
How you feeling?
After six months of travel and daily vlogging, we knew there was no way we were going to be able to just go back home and settle down into a normal routine after one year. Top three coolest days of my life. Everest base camp in the snow.
So that's when we set this goal of visiting 100 countries together, which at the time felt almost impossible.
We had no income, and our videos were average. When we set this goal, we had no idea if this was actually going to be something that we could achieve. But we have no clue what we're doing. We decided to put all of our energy into turning our YouTube channel into a business that could financially sustain our travels.
So for the last four years straight, we've literally devoted our lives to traveling to new countries and sharing our journey on this YouTube channel.
He's just jumping over.
Let's go to Iraq.
I don't know what I'm eating.
And here we are almost four years and 95 countries later. Whoa. Wow.
It feels almost surreal thinking back to where we were when we set this goal. If the 2016 version of Kara and Nate can see where we're sitting today and what we've accomplished, the best in.
Travel goes to Kara and Nate.
I think they would have a hard time believing that we actually did it.
Don't cry.
We have gotten to experience more in the last three and a half years than we ever thought we would in an entire lifetime. And we could not have done it without this community sharing.
Our travels started as just a fun hobby, but ultimately it turned into the thing that has enabled us to achieve this goal and we are just so thankful to each and every one of you who have supported us along the way.
Alright, we have six countries left before we hit our goal. And if all goes according to plan.
Which it won't because it never does, but we'll do our best.
The next five countries will be Norway, Israel, Ethiopia, the Seychelles and Bangladesh.
So since you have played such a big role in our journey, we felt like it was only fitting that you choose where we go for a hundred.
Catching it just seemed right and fun and we didn't know how to pick so we just pushed it off on you and we kind of feel like we owe it to you for all these reasons. It sounded like a great idea and we like surprises. Okay, here's how it's going to work. We're going to leave a link in the description below. There's going to be two rounds and you're going to get to vote in each one of them. The first round is going to consist of all the countries that we've never been to before. Then from there we'll narrow it down to the top 10. We'll open up a second round of voting and at the end of the second round, the country with the most votes is the country that we'll visit as our hundredth country.
To make things even more exciting, we we aren't going to see the results. Our friends Keith and Alyssa, who you may remember from past videos, are going to keep track of the voting and they're going to book our tickets to our hundredth country. So we won't even know where we're going until we get to the airport.
So that's the plan. How crazy does it feel that we're sitting down making this video right now?
I don't believe it.
Also, for those of you who haven't heard, we are going to be hosting a hundred country party in Nashville to celebrate. We'll be sending out all the details about that party via email. So if you're not already, you can get on our email list using the link in the description below.
It's gonna be so fun.
Seriously, like.
It'S just, it's crazy. But it doesn't feel crazy. Like, when we set this goal of visiting 100 countries, I thought like, wow, if we do that, we'll never have to do anything else with our lives.
To be cool again.
Like, we could just coast on that for the rest of our lives.
Do you feel like the coolest person ever?
No. But now that we're here, it feels so normal. I think it's just because, like, we've been slowly working towards it for so long. Like, the closer we get to it, the more normal it feels like. I think your reality feels normal. And so, because almost being there is our reality, like, it's just like, ah, it's been the craziest four years of our lives. It was like college on steroids. It feels so long. Like, when I think back to all the individual experiences, but at the same time, it feels like a blur.
Thank you for being a part of it. All of it. From the beginning. We couldn't have done it without you.
Especially everybody that's gone back and watched all of them from the beginning.
Oh, gosh.
When I get. When I get those comments, I'm like, oh, thank you. That's so nice. And I'm like, oh, what have they watched? It was rough in the beginning. Get to see the progression.
Yeah. Okay, Go vote on where we should go. We can't wait. We're excited that you get to help us.
Send us somewhere exciting, somewhere fun. I honestly don't have, like, one place that I'm hoping everybody votes for.
That was definitely part of our decision to do this because we put so much pressure on this hundredth country that we're like, which one should it be?
It could be like, or it could be like.
And I would be happy with either one.
You have one of those that you prefer, maybe.
