We left the US for our Honey(many)moon at the end of April with the hope of spending a couple months exploring, learning, meeting, eating, drinking, learning and generally enjoying the crap out of each other’s company for 6-9 months. After about 7.5 in Southeast Asia, we have spent (with very few short exceptions) the last 5,472 hours together. We have travelled with two shared backpacks, sleeping in the same room, going on the same outings and daytime adventures, sitting at the same tables enjoying each other’s company for the same evenings enjoying all the food and also some drinks. This has been an amazing trip that I couldn’t imagine doing with anyone else in the world. There were wonderful and ridiculous experiences that will stick with us for the rest of our lives; ask Liz about the dangers of Corn in Hanoi. There were of 
course one or two arguments, I no longer remember what started them, but they were finished quickly and without hard feelings and I’m pretty sure we enjoyed food after each one. There were nights out feeling like the royalty and nights suffering through atrocious sleeper busses and food poisoning (thankfully not at the same time). This trip was a long time in the planning and was made all the more special because of the marriage that led into it and the gifts from so many loved-ones that helped make it even more special. We can’t wait to see everyone back home.
Tracking our costs, keeping it real
One of the things every couple goes through at some point is talking about finances. A big part of our planning involved saving and budgeting, once we began travelling we decided that instead of casually keeping an eye on our spending and how close it matched our budgeting, we would keep detailed notes on what we spent and where. By the time we were a few months into our travel we had a fairly large dataset of numbers in different currencies being sliced and diced on different summary spreadsheets tracking for daily spending, spending by city, spending by country, spending by category, etc. We had detailed spending forecasts that tracked with budgets varied by cost of living for different locations. We spent less than we budgeted and will treasure the memories from every cent.
Liz and I are so excited to get back home, spend time with friends and loved-ones, have a kitchen to cook in and enjoy being a little more stable. Over the last 7.5 months, we have averaged 3 nights per place that we slept. Really looking forward to knowing which direction to go in the middle of the night to get to the bathroom.
Sometimes the journey really is less important than the destination.