When I tell people about my adventures, they (understandably) have a lot of questions. Here are a few of the ones I hear time and again – and a few of my answers.

Did you take your Around the World trip alone?

Yes and no. Yes, I am the only one who traveled for 11 months. And yes, I planned it myself – without an organization or a partner. But I was hardly alone. Because of years of school and amazingly awesome friends, I am lucky to know people all over the world.

Beyond my rocking internationally-based friends, several of my people here at home jumped at the chance to explore with me as well. A number of friends from the US spent portions of their vacations meeting me on the journey to travel with me.

Finally, I’m all about friends of friends. I leveraged every drop of social capital I have to make connections around the globe. Because how much better is it to stay with a new friend than to sit in a hotel room alone?

How did you plan this thing? 

Short answer: with a lot of time and effort.

Long answer: I’m a type-A crazy who loved every minute of research and booking and googling and pinteresting and planning. For me, making the plans to travel the world have been almost as exciting as the prospect of the traveling itself.

I am not the first person to do a RTW trip, so other travelers’ blogs have been a huge help – providing me great tips on how to pack, where to go, and how to deal with the complicated, un-fun details like insurance, phones, travel agents, money, etc.

Also, I highly recommend Pinterest as a search engine. It has been a huge help (and been a GREAT way to spend my commute over the past 6 months).

How did you choose where to go? 

There wasn’t a whole lot of strategy toward choosing my route. At any given moment, I have a list of places in my mind (or on paper) that I would like to visit someday. When I began thinking about RTW travel, I simply wrote down every place that fascinated me and used that as the backbone for where I might like to go.

Once I had the key stops (my top ten list), I filled in the spaces between by looking at flights, geographic proximity and the best way to get from one place to another. Plus, I thought about people I wanted to visit and added a few extra stops that way, too.

What place are you most excited to see? 

I’m excited for the whole thing! So much of the fun of this journey is that it is crazy and huge and diverse.

But if I had to choose a couple places that are really exciting me at the moment, I’d go with New Zealand, Australia and Scandinavia.

Have another question? Let me know! I’d love to share what I’ve learned about RTW travel planning and my trip so far!