2024-08-05_Tools_of_Adventure
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00:01:53.200 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight,
00:01:57.400 | and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now,
00:02:00.700 | while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.
00:02:03.900 | My name is Joshua Sheets, I'm your host, and today I'd like to share with you, consider this a little essay.
00:02:09.600 | Not a big, huge podcast episode, but just a little idea that I've had that I think will serve some of my listeners.
00:02:17.300 | The idea is basically, what are the tools of adventure, and how can you acquire them quickly?
00:02:25.400 | Let me give a couple minutes of context here.
00:02:27.900 | One of the things that I have observed is that a big reason why many people want to accumulate money
00:02:35.700 | and become financially independent, pursue early retirement, these goals,
00:02:41.500 | often has to do with a desire for a bit of adventure in life.
00:02:46.100 | I, myself, am an adventure-loving man.
00:02:49.000 | I've been very blessed to enjoy many great adventures, and I look forward to many more in the future.
00:02:54.900 | And as a financial planner, I've often thought about what is the interplay between those adventures and money.
00:03:02.600 | And I want to tell you today that frequently, if you want to have more adventure in your life,
00:03:11.700 | what is keeping that from being a reality is not usually lack of money.
00:03:18.200 | It's a couple of other things that I'm going to articulate for you.
00:03:21.500 | I want to help you get a few tools of adventure.
00:03:24.700 | Now, money helps. Don't get me wrong, money helps.
00:03:28.200 | It's necessary for some adventures, but it's more necessary, if you want to have adventure in your life,
00:03:34.000 | it's more necessary that you be prepared for that adventure than that you necessarily be rich.
00:03:40.000 | And a lot of the things that people do to become rich may themselves actually clash with your enjoying a lifestyle of adventure.
00:03:51.800 | You don't have to choose adventure.
00:03:53.500 | There's nothing wrong with kind of a straightforward, mundane lifestyle, totally fine.
00:03:57.600 | And what I find works well is to kind of take both of these lifestyles and go into one and then go into another,
00:04:03.600 | go into one, go into the other, and you can appreciate the beauty that exists in both of them.
00:04:07.900 | But in today's Audio Essay, in today's podcast, what else is a podcast except an Audio Essay?
00:04:15.000 | In today's podcast, I want to talk about how you can be prepared to enjoy adventure at a low cost.
00:04:25.000 | First, in order for you to be able to say yes to adventure and to have more adventure in your life,
00:04:34.200 | you have to be able to say yes to adventure when it comes your way.
00:04:43.000 | If you want more adventure in your life, a very high priority for you should be to be free of obligation,
00:04:54.100 | to be free of long-term commitments and long-term obligation.
00:04:59.800 | I'll be talking about this more when I continue in the specific series that I'm doing right now,
00:05:05.300 | of which this episode is not a part specifically, but it is kind of related to some of the content I've been sharing with you,
00:05:12.400 | and the idea is behind financial goals that everybody should set.
00:05:16.100 | And the next episode in that series is probably going to be setting a goal of being debt-free for life.
00:05:23.600 | And as I'll talk about in that separate podcast, one of the reasons to pursue debtlessness is so that you have options about your future.
00:05:34.000 | When you borrow money, you are necessarily saying, "In the future, I will repay the money,"
00:05:40.500 | and therefore you have fewer options available to you in the future than you would if you hadn't borrowed money.
00:05:46.900 | So if you want to be prepared to say yes for adventure, you have to live your life in such a way
00:05:51.600 | in which you can say yes to adventure,
00:05:54.700 | which means you have to be free from obligations and commitments that are going to keep that adventure from happening.
00:06:01.500 | Now, there are different levels to that game.
00:06:04.200 | Some people go hardcore and they say, "I'm going to be single all of my life.
00:06:08.100 | I'm going to avoid entangling relationships with anybody.
00:06:11.600 | I'm going to not own anything more than fits in a backpack.
00:06:14.800 | I'm going to have my passport ready and money in the bank, and I'm just going to live with what's in my backpack."
00:06:20.600 | That's an option.
00:06:22.400 | That's a life choice that is available to you on this amazing menu of life choices that we can choose from.
00:06:28.900 | And if you live in that way, maybe you earn your income from online,
00:06:34.500 | or you don't even earn much income because you just live super cheap and just have some clothes and a backpack,
00:06:39.400 | then you can have that choice.
00:06:42.200 | You can also dial it back, right?
00:06:43.600 | I'm not going to get rid of my wife and children just because I want more adventure in my life,
00:06:48.400 | but I make decisions and choices in my life that allow me to say yes to adventure when adventure comes.
00:06:54.100 | So the basic idea here is I want you to be aware that if you want more adventure in your life,
00:07:00.000 | there is a conscious avoidance of obligations that you should engage in.
00:07:05.800 | And some of that includes financial obligations.
00:07:09.600 | You will live below your means.
00:07:11.400 | You'll avoid long-term contracts, long-term debt contracts, things like that.
00:07:16.200 | And some of it may involve certain career obligations.
00:07:19.800 | You may avoid certain types of work, certain types of businesses because they would restrict your ability to say yes to adventure.
00:07:27.400 | Over the years, I've been fascinated by explorers, Arctic explorers and mountain climbers and distant sailors and people.
00:07:37.800 | I've always been fascinated by the overland community.
00:07:40.600 | And so I've watched various overland expeditions where people load up a fancy car,
00:07:44.400 | a fancy four-by-four truck or something, and they go off adventuring across the world.
00:07:48.900 | And what I've always observed is it seems surprisingly difficult for many people who are organizing an expedition to get people to go with them.
00:08:01.200 | I myself have gone on various expeditions, long-distance road trips across multiple countries,
00:08:08.100 | and I'll toss out to a friend of mine, "Hey, would you like to come with me?"
00:08:11.400 | And basically, I'll cover all the costs. I've just got an extra seat in the vehicle, and I'll offer to friends,
00:08:16.000 | "Hey, would you like to go with me? Would you like to go with me?"
00:08:18.200 | And all they would have to do to go and have a multi-country adventure, an overland expedition, is say yes.
00:08:24.500 | But in many cases, they can't say yes because their lifestyle is not set up for them to be able to say yes to adventure.
00:08:32.900 | If somebody called you right now and said, "Hey, listen, I've got a sailboat,"
00:08:36.900 | and assume that you trust the person as a sailor, good emergency gear, good training, things like that,
00:08:41.900 | "I'm heading off for three or four months on a sailing expedition. Would you like to go with me?"
00:08:47.900 | Could you say yes? That's the question. Could you say yes?
00:08:52.900 | And if you couldn't say yes, then ask yourself, "What could I do so that I could say yes?"
00:08:57.400 | Because many times, people will pay for everything. They'll cover it.
00:09:00.200 | They just want friends to go on the adventure.
00:09:02.200 | And if you're one of the friends who is able to say yes to adventure, then you've got a good foundation to be able to say yes to adventure.
00:09:12.500 | Now, in addition to that, you are going to want to cultivate a reputation of being the kind of man or woman or young man or young woman that says yes to adventure.
00:09:24.900 | One of the things that I've observed over the years is that those of us like myself—let me just stop being so general.
00:09:33.200 | I don't offer interesting things to people anymore after I've been rejected a few times.
00:09:38.200 | I'm full of interesting ideas, of interesting places to go and things to see and things to do.
00:09:43.400 | But yet, there are some friends and some people who I've offered different ideas to,
00:09:47.900 | and they just say, "No, no, no," and I just scratch them down as, "These are not adventurous people."
00:09:52.600 | And that's fine. They don't want to be adventurous people.
00:09:55.500 | I'm not going to impose upon them the idea that they have to be adventurous.
00:09:59.100 | But there are other friends who you know are always in for a good time, who will always say yes, and they're ready to go.
00:10:04.500 | And those are the friends that I would invite to any new thing that I'm doing.
00:10:09.600 | And I hope it's always been my ambition to be one of those friends, to be one of the guys that, "Hey, I'm down for an adventure.
00:10:16.800 | I'm not going to whine. I'm not going to complain. You tell me there's an adventure on. I'm ready to go."
00:10:22.000 | And that attitude has worked well for me. I commend it to you. It's worked well for me.
00:10:27.800 | It's allowed me to have lived quite an interesting life, and I didn't need a lot of money to do it.
00:10:36.100 | I just needed to be able to say yes and to have the attitude to say yes.
00:10:41.100 | Now, before I move on to the tools of adventure, notice that if you think about what I'm saying here,
00:10:46.900 | there's a decent chance that the kind of person that would jump into your mind as the kind of friend who you would invite on an adventure,
00:10:55.800 | or the kind of friend who would have these characteristics that I'm describing to you, is probably not somebody who is rich.
00:11:02.600 | I have many good friends who I respect enormously.
00:11:06.600 | They've got great careers, wonderful families, very stable lives.
00:11:10.800 | They've got loads of money. Everything is good, and yet they don't have a lifestyle where they could say yes to a longer-term adventure.
00:11:20.500 | But the kind of guy who's used to hitchhiking his way across the country, sleeping out in a tent at the base of the cliff,
00:11:28.900 | that kind of guy is the kind of guy who usually says, "Yeah, absolutely. Man, I'll quit my job. I'm ready to go on Friday.
00:11:34.100 | We're going to go sail around the world. Absolutely. I've got $3,000 saved.
00:11:37.100 | I can cover myself for at least seven or eight months on that. If you give me a place to sleep and a little bit of food, I'll pitch in for the beer."
00:11:43.600 | And he's ready to go. He shows up at your house in an hour, quit his job, moved on.
00:11:48.100 | So I don't know that that's recommendable, meaning life choices have a way of leading in different places.
00:11:56.700 | I believe there's probably a balance that can be had. You can be responsible.
00:12:00.900 | You can be building something, but you can just keep some space in your life for adventure.
00:12:05.100 | You don't necessarily have to be a penniless dirtbag.
00:12:07.900 | But on the other hand, have the ability to hang out with a penniless dirtbag and be fine with it.
00:12:13.700 | All right, onward to the tools of adventure.
00:12:16.100 | So let's assume that you have succeeded in being free from obligations,
00:12:22.400 | and you have the attitude of being the kind of person who is willing to go on adventure when it's offered to you.
00:12:29.100 | What do you actually need for adventure? Now, the term "adventure" could mean many different things,
00:12:37.000 | but adventure is often going to involve something different than your daily life.
00:12:44.100 | It's going to involve usually some kind of travel, doesn't need to be long distance,
00:12:48.300 | doesn't need to be across the world or across the state.
00:12:51.700 | It just needs to be, "This weekend, we're going to go somewhere different."
00:12:55.900 | And so let's talk about what you actually need to maintain yourself.
00:12:59.600 | Let's assume that you were that friend of yours or that guy that you know who lives in a backpack.
00:13:04.800 | What do you basically need to keep going, to be alive?
00:13:08.500 | Well, generally, you need a little food to eat. You need a place to sleep.
00:13:14.100 | You need a means of getting around and something to do.
00:13:18.000 | That's basically what life involves. You need a little food to keep you going,
00:13:22.500 | place to sleep, a little ways to get around, and something to do.
00:13:27.500 | Now, most of these things, for an adventure-oriented person, don't have to cost a lot of money.
00:13:33.900 | And in kind of the model I'm trying to say is I'm trying to say that you're not necessarily the person
00:13:39.000 | who's going to fund the adventure, but you're going to be the person who's ready to go on the adventure.
00:13:43.400 | So let's set aside something to do, and let's assume that a friend of yours is going to offer the thing to do.
00:13:52.300 | Your friend is going to say, "Hey, this weekend, let's take the train to Chicago and let's watch our favorite band."
00:13:57.500 | Say yes. Say yes. You're going to remember the experience. Say yes when a friend of yours offers you that.
00:14:04.500 | Or, "Hey, let's take a week off and let's go to seven baseball games in seven different states." Say yes.
00:14:11.400 | Or, "Let's go to the Olympics." Say yes. Whenever someone offers something, just say yes.
00:14:18.000 | So the something to do will have its own costs depending on exactly what you're doing.
00:14:23.500 | But a lot of adventure can be done very inexpensively.
00:14:26.900 | And sometimes you may be the moneybags who's going to outfit the expedition yacht and provision it and have everything ready to go.
00:14:35.900 | Sometimes you might just be the buddy who says yes to your moneybags friend who has the yacht and is looking for a friend to go along.
00:14:42.700 | And I don't see why one of those is particularly better than the other.
00:14:46.400 | One of my favorite stories was a number of years ago, I read an essay by or about one of the DeVos family heirs,
00:14:54.400 | Richard DeVos, who started the Amway company.
00:14:57.900 | And one of his, I think it was grandsons, had outfitted a yacht and spent, I think, a couple of years sailing the world.
00:15:05.400 | And if memory is correct, he had a handful of buddies with him, two, three, four buddies that sailed the world with them.
00:15:11.300 | And they hired a captain who was also another young guy, and they had a great adventure.
00:15:16.800 | That wealthy heir to the Amway fortune didn't require all of his buddies to put in halfsies or quartersies on the costs of the adventure.
00:15:30.200 | I'm sure they had to contribute something, but they were just along for the ride.
00:15:33.800 | And yet they had the same adventure that the super wealthy heir had himself.
00:15:40.400 | So let's assume something to do is kind of just going to be taken care of by the specific expression of adventure.
00:15:49.400 | What are the other three things that you need?
00:15:50.800 | Well, in a verse, we said food to eat, a place to sleep, a means of getting around and something to do, something to do, taking care of it, a means of getting around.
00:15:58.600 | Ironically, a means of getting around is actually can be extremely low cost.
00:16:05.300 | You can hitchhike your way across and around the world quite literally.
00:16:09.700 | One of my favorite examples of this, a real world example, comes from the YouTube channel Canrush.
00:16:15.000 | I'll link to the video with the cost overview called How Much Does It Cost to Travel the World Detailed Expenses After Two and a Half Years.
00:16:21.900 | You can find that link in the show notes.
00:16:23.800 | But John and his wife, Ava, spent two and a half years traveling.
00:16:28.100 | They started in Russia.
00:16:30.400 | They hitchhiked their way across Russia, down through China, Southeast Asia, all the way from Southeast Asia into India, all the way down to the tip of India.
00:16:39.000 | From India, the southern India, they flew to Alexandria, Egypt.
00:16:42.400 | They hitchhiked their way all the way down across Africa, like eight countries in Africa.
00:16:47.500 | Then they flew to South America.
00:16:49.000 | They did the whole tour of South America, up through Central America, up to the United States.
00:16:54.300 | In the United States, they bought a car and they started traveling by car back and forth across the country a couple times, up across Canada, across Canada, and then back to Russia, where they were living at the time.
00:17:06.200 | And for their 752-day adventure, I'm not sure how many countries, I'm guessing 25, 30, who knows, but you can find that in a separate video.
00:17:16.300 | For their total adventure, 752 days, their total costs for a couple were $13,431.97.
00:17:27.800 | I repeat, $13,431.97 for a 752-day adventure for two people.
00:17:35.700 | This trip occurred in, I believe, 2015, so probably a little higher today with inflation, but 2015 was not that long ago.
00:17:45.600 | How did they do it?
00:17:47.000 | Well, the way they did it primarily was they hitchhiked.
00:17:52.500 | Their transportation was all provided by hitchhiking.
00:17:55.600 | For accommodation, they stayed in couchsurfing, staying for free, and so their expenses were very much focused on just the bare minimums.
00:18:06.100 | In fact, their cost per day across the entire trip, their cost per day for the whole trip was $17.86.
00:18:14.900 | Now, that was skewed significantly by their purchase of a car, and they had some big problems with their car.
00:18:22.600 | For most of the trip, they were targeting $5 a day at the time, and if we look at their costs, I'll just go through over a 752-day trip.
00:18:30.800 | Their biggest expense was a car, $3,221.
00:18:34.800 | Flights, they spent $2,331 on flights.
00:18:37.900 | Groceries, $1,736 on groceries.
00:18:41.300 | Gas for the car, $1,352.
00:18:44.100 | Visas, $1,189.
00:18:46.800 | Restaurants, $844.
00:18:48.800 | Transportation, $783, and then from there, just some small numbers down below.
00:18:54.100 | So, two-person couple, two and a half years of travel, $13,431, or depending on how you calculate it, between $12 and $17 a day, depending on whether you want to include the car in the costs or not.
00:19:09.000 | Again, what was the secret?
00:19:10.500 | Hitchhiking.
00:19:12.100 | Hitchhiking.
00:19:12.700 | So, a means of getting around can be done pretty inexpensively.
00:19:16.200 | You can hitchhike your way around the world.
00:19:18.200 | You can walk your way around the world.
00:19:19.800 | You can ride a bicycle around the world.
00:19:21.400 | You can use public transit all around the world, as I did in the show a couple months ago when I talked about a folding bicycle.
00:19:27.400 | I think the ideal solution is a folding bicycle because it allows you to do all three.
00:19:32.600 | Folding bicycle allows you to ride whenever that's convenient.
00:19:36.500 | A folding bicycle allows you to stick out your thumb and hitchhike, and you can fit the bicycle into a trunk.
00:19:41.800 | Folding bicycle allows you to use buses and local public transit whenever you need to, and so you can conveniently get yourself around the world without having an expensive vehicle for yourself.
00:19:54.000 | Now, what then, so we've talked food to eat, place to sleep, means of getting around, something to do.
00:19:58.800 | Something to do, I said, well, usually not too expensive, but it's there for you.
00:20:02.300 | Means of getting around can be pretty cheap.
00:20:04.600 | What's that next one?
00:20:05.600 | A place to sleep.
00:20:07.300 | This was the main focus, actually what inspired this entire show today, is if I could go back and I could be 15 again, and I could do one thing different.
00:20:19.700 | I mean, there's a number of things different I would do, but here's one thing of the things I would do differently.
00:20:25.900 | One of the things that I would do differently is I would always have a bed ready to go.
00:20:32.500 | I would always have some shelter ready to go.
00:20:36.400 | The basic idea is this.
00:20:38.100 | When you think about adventure, much of the cost of adventure comes with accommodation.
00:20:45.900 | It comes with renting hotel rooms for the night.
00:20:48.700 | It comes with renting houses.
00:20:51.200 | That's where a lot of the cost of travel and adventure comes in, but you don't have to do that.
00:20:57.500 | You get to a certain point in your financial life, and a lot of times because of our kind of namby-pamby weakness, we say, well, I'd rather stay in the Holiday Inn than sleep on the dirt.
00:21:08.400 | But I'd rather sleep on the dirt than not go adventuring.
00:21:12.300 | And so if you can't comfortably stay at the Holiday Inn every night, then get something that allows you to sleep on the dirt.
00:21:19.200 | From time immemorial, the idea of just going out and sleeping wherever you happen to be has been pretty normal.
00:21:25.500 | And it's really only in, say, the last 70 years or so for most of us in which the idea of just lying down and going to sleep is kind of unthinkable to us.
00:21:35.000 | And I think that if we could change our mentality around this and recognize, no, we can pretty well sleep just about anywhere and be just fine, then it opens up the horizons of adventure to us in a very real way.
00:21:50.600 | I didn't really realize this when I was younger.
00:21:52.600 | When I was younger, I was raised in kind of the soft generation.
00:21:56.000 | I'm a millennial, and so we're kind of just soft and coddled.
00:21:59.900 | And so the idea of being at a friend's house and just lying down on the floor and going to sleep isn't something I ever did or ever really would do.
00:22:08.900 | It wasn't until after college, when I went and traveled for some time in Asia doing some mission work, where for the first time in my life, I started sleeping on the floor.
00:22:19.800 | And by sleeping on the floor, I mean sleeping on the floor.
00:22:25.600 | And by sleeping on the floor, I just mean lying down and going to sleep on the floor.
00:22:30.200 | And let me tell you, the first couple of nights, I did not sleep well.
00:22:34.700 | But after a couple nights, I started to acclimate to it.
00:22:37.900 | And by the end of the week of sleeping on the floor, it wasn't that big of a deal.
00:22:43.400 | I was happy to get home and happy to get into my soft bed.
00:22:46.200 | But that experience really changed me because it made me realize I'm actually tougher than I thought I was.
00:22:52.700 | If I need to go to lie down and go to sleep somewhere, I can just sleep on the floor.
00:22:57.000 | And so if I could go back and be a teenager over or go back into my 20s, one of the things I would always have ready is I would always have a basic bedroll.
00:23:05.800 | Now, the concept of a bedroll conjures up, for me anyway, the idea of a cowboy's bedroll.
00:23:13.700 | If you think of some Western movie you've seen, you would see the cowboy riding his horse.
00:23:18.900 | And on the back of his saddle tied on, you would see some kind of bedroll, basically a blanket, usually a piece of canvas, that he would lie down on and pull over him to protect him from the damp.
00:23:29.900 | And if you were a cowboy riding the range and it were time to sleep, you would just take that small little bedroll down, lay it out on the ground, lie down and go to sleep.
00:23:39.800 | That was entirely normal.
00:23:42.400 | Today, about the only people who consistently do that are long distance backpackers, ultralight backpackers and lightweight backpackers who carry everything on their backs for multiple days at a time, for multiple days of hiking.
00:23:57.100 | They're about the only people among us who are accustomed to that kind of lifestyle.
00:24:01.300 | And I think you should learn from them.
00:24:04.200 | If you incorporate for yourself a bedroll and just have it ready to go at all times, it will dramatically open up your horizons of where you can go.
00:24:16.500 | Incidentally, you can do the same thing whether you're hiking across the world, hitchhiking across the world, whether you're just staying at a friend's house, staying over at a friend's house or going over the night before.
00:24:28.400 | Or whether you're traveling around the world using low cost airlines and other forms of public transportation.
00:24:35.400 | If you have the ability to get to the airport the night before and just put out a little pad and grab your sleeping bag liner or put a sheet or a blanket over you and get a good night's sleep,
00:24:46.200 | then you're going to be able to go much farther on way less money than if you have to be going to the hotel where you're going to spend $130 for a night's, you know, five hours of sleep before your flight.
00:25:00.400 | To be clear, the hotel is a great option if you have the money.
00:25:04.300 | But if you don't have the money, recognize you can still go.
00:25:08.200 | All you got to do is take your bed with you.
00:25:11.600 | So prepare for yourself if you're interested in adventure, prepare for yourself the tools of adventure and the tools of adventure.
00:25:18.700 | In this case, the most important one is quite literally simply a place to sleep.
00:25:22.900 | A couple of practical suggestions.
00:25:24.700 | Number one, this can just be a blanket and you don't even need a pillow.
00:25:28.800 | You can always use a jacket or whatever you happen to find.
00:25:31.200 | But a blanket, I think a small foam pad, one of the hikers foam pads tossed in a bag is a great idea if you have a car and you're young and you're interested in adventure or you're old and you're interested in adventure, whatever it happens to be.
00:25:43.600 | Always have the ability to lie down and sleep wherever you happen to be.
00:25:47.000 | I think that if you have some weatherproofing for your overall bed roll, that's even better.
00:25:53.800 | Now, how could you do that?
00:25:55.200 | Well, first is you could just have a simple tent.
00:25:57.600 | If you have a simple tent and you have a bed that you can sleep in, even if it's low cost and that's in the back of your car, most places you can just pull over and sleep.
00:26:10.100 | Walk 10 paces back in the woods, no one will ever see you.
00:26:13.000 | Set up your tent, sleep for the night, get back in your car and continue the next day.
00:26:17.200 | Ask your buddy if you can set up your tent in the backyard and boom, you're good to go.
00:26:21.700 | And so having a tent and a bed is a really powerful tool for long-term adventure.
00:26:28.800 | If you have a family, one of the things that you can do, because it's often really difficult for people to, ask me how I know, to figure out how to accommodate large families or even any families in their home.
00:26:43.400 | But most of that is due to our basic mindset rather than reality.
00:26:48.300 | Let's say that you are hosting a family of four and you're kind of a wealthy person.
00:26:53.300 | Well, you think, well, we've got one guest room with a queen size bed.
00:26:57.300 | Where are we going to put everyone?
00:26:59.000 | Well, with a family of four, then we quickly go to the couch.
00:27:01.500 | Well, we can put them on the couch and that works fine and that's what you should do.
00:27:04.800 | Now, how much easier is it if maybe you don't have a guest room and you only have one couch, but you have some people who are going to be passing through for the night and they say, well, listen, all we need is a corner of the living room.
00:27:15.600 | We all have our own bedrolls.
00:27:17.600 | We all have our own sleeping bags and our own foam pads that we lie down on.
00:27:20.700 | We're going to be totally fine.
00:27:22.200 | Well, it's not that hard now to host a family of four people or seven people, whatever happens to be, if everyone has their own sleeping roll.
00:27:31.000 | It's not that hard to host a friend of yours overnight if your friend comes equipped with his own bed.
00:27:36.600 | And that's the point I want to make for you.
00:27:39.000 | So, a bedroll, a tent is a really good idea.
00:27:42.400 | I think probably a really great option, my favorite option, because it retains a lot of the convenience of a bedroll, but increases the comfort factor significantly, is to get something of what the Australians call a swag.
00:27:55.800 | The idea of a swag is basically some form of bivy sack that zips up around your bedding and is a self-contained bedroll, but it's more substantial than just a blanket and a lightweight foam pad.
00:28:09.800 | The brand that's available in the United States that's probably the highest end brand is a company called Canvas Cutter.
00:28:17.400 | That's a company that I've enjoyed their stuff.
00:28:19.400 | And so, if you go to canvascutter.com, I'll link them in the show notes, but you can see an example of a canvas bedroll.
00:28:26.400 | And it's built upon the classic idea of the cowboy's piece of canvas bedroll.
00:28:32.800 | But they take a big piece of canvas, they set it up with zippers, but it's so big that into it you can put a several inch thick foam pad, you can put blankets, you can put sleeping bags, and it's basically weatherproof in and of itself.
00:28:46.800 | And so, a lot of guys will use these if they're going horseback camping.
00:28:50.800 | It gives you a comfortable place to sleep where you're not in discomfort.
00:28:55.800 | If you're going to be at the hunting stand early in the morning, well, you can drive there the night before, roll this thing out on the bed of your pickup truck, have a comfortable night's sleep, but not have to deal with all the hassle of setting up a tent, and then be done.
00:29:07.800 | I think it's kind of the ideal scenario.
00:29:09.800 | It's too big for any kind of backpacking.
00:29:12.800 | It's too big for traveling on an airplane, but for keeping in the trunk of your car or for being ready to go at a moment's notice, it's a pretty cool luxury-ish option that gives you the benefits of being flexible.
00:29:24.800 | But it's going to provide you with a better night's sleep than just the hard ground.
00:29:29.800 | You figure out what expression of it to set up.
00:29:33.800 | At the very least, go get yourself a $30 sleeping bag and a quick foam pad from Walmart and keep that in the bed of your car.
00:29:42.800 | Make up a little bag of some toiletries, a toothbrush, keep that with you, and then you'll be ready to go to say yes to adventure.
00:29:50.800 | If you have a quick and simple little go bag in the trunk of your car that has a sleep system in it, has a spare toothbrush and some toothpaste, whatever you need for an extra set of contact lenses or deodorant or whatever kind of other personal grooming items you need.
00:30:08.800 | Let's say one quick change of clothes and an extra charger for your phone, then when somebody offers you adventure, you can pretty much say, "Yes, I'm ready," and you can go at a moment's notice.
00:30:21.800 | And the key to that whole system is the place to sleep.
00:30:25.800 | I feel so dumb recording this because it's such an obvious thing to a lot of other people, but it wasn't obvious to me.
00:30:31.800 | If I had had that ready to go when I was younger so that I could more easily stay at friends' houses, so I could more easily roll out a sleeping bag on the front porch because, "Hey, all the beds are full, but we're still happy to have you."
00:30:43.800 | If I had been more self-contained, I would have had even more adventures, and that would have been way better.
00:30:50.800 | The final thing is just, what do you need?
00:30:52.800 | You need some food to eat.
00:30:54.800 | I don't have a ton to say here. I've done other podcasts and did podcasts on how to travel and cook in a hotel room and things like that.
00:31:02.800 | I don't want to say too much here other than to say that for most individual people, food is pretty simple and easy to come by.
00:31:09.800 | However, what you should know is just have some basic skills of how to do well and eat good food that is inexpensive.
00:31:17.800 | If you think back to John and Ava's story with their traveling the world for two and a half years for a $13,000 budget, they were buying groceries, and they were buying the same basic groceries all over again and again and again.
00:31:30.800 | The whole world exists on peasant food, and you can get peasant food.
00:31:33.800 | It's not that hard to do it.
00:31:35.800 | At some point in a man's life or a woman's life, it would be a really valuable exercise for you to know, "Hey, I can easily live on $100 or $150 a month of groceries."
00:31:48.800 | Knowing that you can stay alive and be perfectly fine on $100 a month of groceries gives you an enormous amount of confidence that you can't get if you think, "I can only do it on $500 per person."
00:32:01.800 | So try it sometime as an experiment.
00:32:03.800 | I myself don't eat like that on a regular basis, but I'm really happy to know that I could do that, and I think it's a really valuable thing to know and to have confidence in.
00:32:14.800 | Having some ability to cook, having some knowledge of how to do that, and having some ability to make basic, inexpensive ingredients that you can find everywhere in the world, sustaining, fulfilling, and nutritious.
00:32:27.800 | So, in conclusion, do you need money to have an adventure?
00:32:30.800 | Sure you do.
00:32:31.800 | Sure you do.
00:32:32.800 | John and Ava, they saved, I think they started their trip with like $12,000 that they had saved, and some friends and family member gave them some gifts, and that was what allowed them to finish their trip.
00:32:43.800 | They saved that in about eight months of working.
00:32:46.800 | They were both living in Moscow, Russia, working, saving money.
00:32:49.800 | And so you need to have some money and have a little bit of money saved to start with, obviously.
00:32:55.800 | But they were able to stretch that for two and a half years.
00:32:59.800 | Most people couldn't do that.
00:33:02.800 | So you do need some money.
00:33:03.800 | Most of all, though, you need some flexibility.
00:33:05.800 | Even John and Ava is, again, a really cool example story of what's possible from just an unassuming couple that went and did it, is that they weren't scared to run out of money.
00:33:15.800 | They figured, "Well, we'll run out of money, and if we're in Kenya or wherever, then we'll just get a job and make some more money until we have enough money to go."
00:33:22.800 | And if you've ever traveled around the world and stayed in hostels, you've met dozens of these kinds of people who are out adventuring around the world, and they just figure, "Well, I'll run out of money, but something will happen, and I'll find a way to make a little bit more money.
00:33:33.800 | And if my daily budget is $5 or $10, I can probably panhandle that pretty easily if needed."
00:33:40.800 | So it gives people confidence.
00:33:42.800 | So if you're going to go on an adventure, do you need some money?
00:33:45.800 | Sure.
00:33:46.800 | But mostly, you need to be free from obligations and be able to say yes.
00:33:50.800 | You need to not have a bunch of heavy payments over your head that you have to make when your friend has planned the round-the-world two-year driving trip, and all he needs is you to come along and help him navigate, and he's covering everything else.
00:34:04.800 | You need to be able to say yes.
00:34:06.800 | If you want more adventure in your life, cultivate being the kind of person who says yes to adventure.
00:34:11.800 | Because most things that other people like to do are probably actually fun for you once you get into it.
00:34:17.800 | It might not sound super fun to you in the first place, but be the kind of person who says yes and give it a fair shake before you reject it, and then you'll be invited to more and more places.
00:34:27.800 | And then as far as the tools of adventure, tools of adventure is food to eat, place to sleep, means of getting around, and something to do.
00:34:34.800 | Of those, the one that I think is the biggest game-changer for a lot of people is just having prepared a place to sleep.
00:34:42.800 | Grab yourself a little hiking manual and put together a little hiking kit.
00:34:47.800 | Simple foam pad, a useful sleeping bag, maybe a little camp pillow of some kind that breaks down.
00:34:55.800 | Put it in a little sack, stick it in your trunk, or have it ready to go at a moment's notice.
00:34:59.800 | Even if you're not going to go and hike overnight yourself, just having it ready to go will help you.
00:35:03.800 | If you want to go one more step, add a little tent and practice setting it up once or twice so that you can just pull the car over on the side of the road, duck back into the woods, set up your tent, and have a good night's sleep.
00:35:16.800 | If you want to add to that and get yourself a swag, a bedroll of some kind, something fancier, go for it.
00:35:24.800 | But do this, and do this even for your family members.
00:35:27.800 | If, again, you're going to be traveling with children and you don't have a lot of money but want to be able to say yes to adventure, then just put together a simple bedroll system for each member of your family.
00:35:38.800 | Have a tent or two, have the ability to go to a relative's house or go to a friend's house, and everybody bunk down in the living room.
00:35:45.800 | You're going to have a great time, and your horizon for adventure is going to be much more expanded.
00:35:51.800 | The truth is that some of us, perhaps many of us, are living lives of quiet desperation, primarily because we're just so fat and coddled and soft and lazy that we can't go out and say yes to living an interesting life, which is really sad.
00:36:10.800 | But we think, "Oh, if I'm going to go somewhere, I have to be able to fly there, directly there. I'm too scared to put out my thumb and hitchhike. After all, I might be uncomfortable and stuck in the back of somebody's pickup truck and get a sunburn."
00:36:25.800 | Or, "I have to stay at a certain class of hotel. I just can't. I just couldn't stay in a place like that."
00:36:32.800 | Okay, that's fine. It just means you're probably going to have a pretty mundane and boring life. You're not going to be able to enjoy a lot of the adventures that those people who toughen themselves up a little bit are able to enjoy.
00:36:43.800 | This kind of living, to me, seems pretty abnormal. Maybe it's just my culture. Maybe I'm just in kind of the soft, whiny pants culture and I'm getting it wrong. But it just seems as though, in today's world, the ways of doing things of 50 years ago or 75 years ago or 100 years ago has just disappeared.
00:37:04.800 | It's just not normal. And that's a good thing, probably, in the sense that it doesn't have to be normal to go and sleep on the dirt. I like a nice bed. I enjoy staying in a nice hotel and having a beautiful buffet in the morning. But I don't want to be a prisoner of that life. I don't want to not be able to live an interesting life, an adventurous life, because I have to have things so much.
00:37:27.800 | So read a little history. A couple of stories, just in closing, that seemed to me – I remember years ago when I read – what was it? Run, Baby, Run? Or the David Wilkerson story. Maybe it was The Cross and the Switchblade. And David Wilkerson was a pastor who was going to the local – I guess it was New York City – and he was going to go and try to do some evangelistic outreach to some of the hardcore gangs in New York City.
00:37:53.800 | And the story that opens one of those books – I forget which one – is a story where he goes in and he arrives late at night. So, of course, he just crawls into the backseat of his car and goes to sleep. And he wakes up in the morning and he looks out the window and I think either they were in the act of stealing or his tires were stolen off of his car while he was sleeping in the car at night.
00:38:14.800 | And the point is that here's a pastor who considered it relatively normal to just drive and then crawl in the backseat and go to sleep. I remember in my own family lore, my grandparents are from California, they moved to Colorado, and they would go back and forth from Colorado to California to visit family. And this was before the days of the interstate system were developed.
00:38:35.800 | And so they would drive down the road. When it became late and time to sleep, they would pull the car over to the side of the road. The men would get out, would go lay down a blanket and a bedroll in the sand and the dirt and sleep in the dirt. My grandmother would stretch out in the backseat of the car. She got the soft, cushy backseat of the car. They would sleep, then they would get up the next day, and they would go.
00:38:55.800 | I've been thinking about cowboy culture as I slowly read my way through the Ralph Moody series, Father and I Were Ranchers, the first one. Great series. There's cowboy culture in the United States back in the early 20th century. And it's so fascinating because again and again, you see the same thing. Cowboy's out doing his work, lies down on the ground, goes to sleep. It was a totally normal thing for people back then.
00:39:19.800 | And if you go back through our history, you again see more and more. You can go back to the Bible, and Jacob is journeying away, fleeing from his brother Esau, and he lies down to sleep. What does he do? He sets up a rock for a pillow. That'll probably be the next big trend.
00:39:37.800 | One of the current health trends online is everyone's ditching their mattresses and everyone's lying on the ground on either a futon or a thin mattress or in some cases a tatami mat or something like that. It's all the rage for back health to sleep on the floor. So maybe the next thing in 2029 is going to be we're all going to be sleeping on rocks instead of pillows for our good health.
00:40:01.800 | Point is, this has been normal. And when I reflect back on my life, man, I spent a lot of money. I wish I hadn't on luxury that kept me on shorter trips and on fewer adventures than I otherwise would have.
00:40:16.800 | And if all I'd done was recognize that and committed to keeping myself free and footloose and able to say yes to things, if I'd set up a little bedroll and had a little go bag with a stick of deodorant in it and a fresh toothbrush and had that at all times, I would have been prepared to say yes when more adventure offered its way.
00:40:35.800 | I said yes to many of them, and I'm grateful for every one that I did. So if you want a life of more adventure, recognize you don't need millions of dollars. You need to be free to say yes to adventure and a few tools of adventure.
00:40:47.800 | That's it. That's the show. Thanks for listening. I hope you've enjoyed it. Just kind of a fun goofball topic. Probably won't serve most people, but I hope it'll serve someone and that someone might be you. Thanks for listening.