K&A’s General Travel Philosophy
Travel makes you better. You get better at travel with practice. Practice can occur anywhere and everywhere.
Being out of your comfort zone is a vital part of travel!
Traveling can be practiced anywhere including in your home city/town/state.
Center travel around personal/partner passions. This means coffee, beer, food, walking, biking, and local art for us. The better we get at pursuing these passions in our everyday life the better we get at them in our travel life and vice versa.
Passions allow you to utilize a universal language and therefore connect with people no matter the languages you speak. Following our passions has led us to some of our best travel memories/experiences. You might be surprised how much communication occurs wihtout a sharing a similar language when similar passion.
Speaking of language- absolutely go places and surround yourself with people who don’t speak the same language(s) as you or your partner. Surround yourself with people that speak the language you know a little or want to learn. Practice and ask questions. We have had some of our best language lessons sitting at a bar. I’m extremely lucky because my partner has a gift for languages. I highly recommend figuring out who that is in your partnership/group. Once that person is found the other people can figure out what skills they have to offer. For example, I’m certainly horrible at languages but excellent at context clues, charades and deciphering what words are being attempted :). Everyone has something to offer.
Getting lost isn’t a bad thing. It is an opportunity. This is where practice, team work, and overall confidence (actual or faked) turns a commonly viewed bad experience into an adventure. This perspective can and should be carried over to many commonly viewed bad experiences in travel i.e. delays, detours, closures, schedule changes, mistranslations, etc..
Don’t miss an opportunity to see something brand new or learn something brand new because you were too busy being upset about the change in plans. Easier said than done? Perhaps, but this is absolutely easier to do with practice.
Live like you travel and travel like you live. This statement flows in all directions and any positive step in one direction will result in a positive step in all directions.
Eat local, drink local. We are spoiled in Philly and practice this a lot. Finding local products helps connect you to locals and locals will guide you to the best their city has to offer. We have lived in Philly for almost 12 years and we are still finding new things via this method.
Our general outline for our travel day is super basic and flexible. In general we aim to do one(maybe two) “touristy” things and then the rest of the day is for exploring/wandering. We meander through various parts of the city for coffee, beer, snacks, etc. We are always open to a detour and constantly get to intersections and pick a random direction.
I love doing tons (TONS) of research before our trip. This includes lots of map reading. My goal is to have enough general knowledge about a city and its layout so that we don’t spend our entire time walking around with our nose in our phone or a map.
