Part 3 - Traveling around the world without missing a day of work

Thank you to Grace Cheng for contributing this post to GoGirlfriend. We’re a community-based travel blog and we welcome submissions from everyone. Whether you’re a budget-baller or a first class only kinda traveler, we’d love to hear from you. Visit our Writer’s Guidelines and learn how you can share your travel advice, stories and adventures!

Grace and Pedro are living their travel dreams, withoutCourtesy Worldiki.com missing a day of work.

If you're curious how they came up with the idea, read Part 1, and if you can't figure out how they're finding time for work, read Part 2.

GoGirlfriend: When did you leave? How long are you gone for?

Grace: We started traveling about 3 months ago, but so far these have been trips of around 10-14 days each and then we return to our base. We plan to start a non-stop round-the-world trip for around a year early in 2008.

GG: What's the biggest challenge you've faced so far?  

Grace: Finding the time to plan what to see and where to go!

Sometimes we get so caught up with the traveling andCourtesy Worldiki.com working that we find it's hard to pull away and go do the "boring," but necessary, planning. One of the most tedious parts of planning is finding and comparing hotels in the places we are going.

To help with this, we set up a tool that we can use to search over 30 online booking sites for hotels and compare the rates each gives. Thank goodness Pedro's a bona fide geek!

Since we found this useful for us, we decided to release it to the world so that everyone can use it! You can see it at Worldiki.com.

GG: What's the most ridiculous/stupid challenge you've faced so far?

Grace: We were staying at a boutique hotel in Thailand and it was 11pm and the Internet stopped working. I was in the middle of monitoring a trade, and I needed to get it back online ASAP.

We called the reception desk at there wasn't anyone who knew what to do, so I asked if Pedro could go down and have a look. He ended up resetting most of their routers and switches but in the end I was able to get back online!

It's always good to travel with a geek, especially when the Internet is so essential :)

GG: Have you had any challenges that you just couldn't overcome? Courtesy Worldiki.com

Grace: In some cases we wanted to visit a certain country but found that we needed visas and that it would take too long to get them so we just decided to go somewhere else or reschedule our trip. Basically if there's something we can't change, we work around it.

GG: If one of our readers wanted to do this, what would you tell them to help them get started planning?

Grace: You have a means to support yourself while traveling. In most cases this means that whatever work you're doing, you have to be able to do it over the Internet.

Because of this, professions such as IT, or in my case, trading, are well suited for this lifestyle as they can be done from anywhere. It's also important to remember that living in a place is always cheaper than visiting it, so calculate expenses beforehand.

Got a question for Grace or Pedro? Post your questions here and they'll answer them in a future post.

Talk Back, Girlfriend and rate this post!