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Family-Travel-by-Car-is-Vastly-Superior-to-All-Other-Options


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♪ Got to sort of tell 'em ♪ Two destinations, one loyalty card. Visit yamava.com/palms to discover more. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

Series of lifestyle shows coming at you in today's show and then the next couple. I'm going to share with you a goal that I have recently accomplished. It's a rather small goal, but I think it will be interesting and perhaps help you to have some practical application of Radical Personal Finance lifestyle hacks and travel hacks that you'll be able to use.

The goal that I have accomplished, or at least I'm 95% certain that I have accomplished, has been to buy, register, and insure a car-- or a van, properly said-- in Europe as an American tourist so that we can travel around Europe with our own set of wheels. I'm in the nation of Portugal right now, where I have, I believe, accomplished this feat.

The reason why I'm hedging my bets just a little bit is while I am in possession of a vehicle, for which I have keys and thus possession, for that vehicle I have a bill of sale, I have all of the government paperwork indicating that a transfer has been accomplished, I have an active insurance policy on it, I am still waiting for the final paperwork from the government with basically my title in my own name.

And so in theory there could be some hiccup. But this was something that took me a little bit of ingenuity to figure out how to do. It took quite a bit of research to figure out where and how to accomplish it. But I believe I've accomplished it, and I want to share a bit of that story.

And so I'm anticipating at the moment that this will be a three-series set of shows. In the first show, I'm going to share with you why I think it's worth it to consider buying a car, how this makes, in my opinion, a dramatic improvement in your travel experience, especially if you're traveling with children.

In the second series in this show, I will share with you how I actually shopped for the car, because the lesson there is, all right, you show up in a brand-new place, you need an affordable, reliable, comfortable, good enough set of wheels, and you need it fast. How do you do it?

I arrived in Portugal on Sunday afternoon. As I record this, it is Thursday morning, and I've done it in three days, two long days and one half-day worth of work. And while that's not an insubstantial amount of time, I consider it a pretty good example. And I believe that you could do this in, if not every city in the world, I believe you could do this in at least 80% of the cities in the world, and again, I think probably even higher, because I think these principles are principles that work in most places.

Flying into a country that I'm not a citizen of, right, I'm a tourist here, doing business in a language that I don't speak, in a currency I don't have, and yet able to use some modern tools to do it pretty quickly, and I think it'll work out, and I'll explain to you how I did it.

And then in the third show, I'll give you the details of how you could do this yourself in Portugal if a European vacation is on the horizon for you. So today I want to talk with you about why a car? Why do I think it's worth it for me to fly into a new continent and buy a vehicle when I don't actually know how long I'm gonna use it, may just be a couple of months, and how this can improve your lifestyle, because I believe that there's a major lifestyle improvement here.

So first, the backstory. At the moment, the Sheetz family is traveling. We are currently perpetual travelers. We've got a half a dozen suitcases, all of our stuff is in storage, and we're bouncing around the world. And our destinations are a little bit unplanned. I have a list of destinations.

Most of the destinations that I'm interested in are I'm interested in for your benefit, things that I'm checking out. I just spent several weeks in Malta, blockchain island, checking out the cryptocurrency scene there and blockchain and what's happening there. From there, I'm here in Portugal. Portugal is a very popular option for lifestyle reasons.

There are a couple of very popular early retirees who live here in Portugal. Portugal is quite interesting for tax planning options. They have their somewhat well-known non-habitual residence scheme that allows people to live in Portugal. In a fairly tax efficient way. Portugal is interesting from a residence and citizenship option.

They have a golden visa program offering a pathway to European citizenship in about five years through property acquisition. It's been quite popular. They're changing the rules on that as we speak. So I'm checking out Portugal as well. And then I've got a long list of other places that I would like to go.

We started our travels in Mexico. From Mexico, flew to Costa Rica. Costa Rica flew to the United States. United States flew to Portugal as an entree to the continent. And then direct to Malta. We've been in Malta. Now we're back on the continent in Portugal. The original plan was to do this entire trip using air travel and move quite a bit.

I had been intending to spend the summer in Europe and then the fall in... Summer in Western Europe, fall in Eastern Europe, and winter in Asia. But at the moment, due to the coronavirus restrictions, it seems that probably we're not going to be in Asia this winter. It's too closed down.

I can't get in most of the places that I want to get to. And so I don't think we're going to wind up in Asia at all this winter. And that's part of what has been the impetus for my reconsideration of having my own car and figuring out how to do that.

Because when you travel, either as an individual couple or especially when you travel as a family, having your own car, as long as you're content with the need to put in the miles to get where you want to go, having your own car is a major lifestyle upgrade. I have been interested in what's known as the overlanding movement for many, many years.

For context, I grew up taking road trips with my family. We were a road-tripping, summer vacation family. And we enjoyed it. We loved it. My parents had a 12-passenger van. My dad bought a cheap old $500 pop-up camper, and we dragged that thing across the United States for, in hindsight, mammoth drives.

But we dragged our pop-up camper from Florida as far north as Maine. On a separate trip, we dragged it from Florida to Colorado, one time up to Montana, almost to the Canadian border, lots of shorter trips in between, and we got our money's worth out of it. And I understand why my dad did it that way.

My parents were not wealthy. They had seven children, and they wanted to provide their children with the opportunity to see the country and get an understanding of what was out there, and that was the best way that they found to do it. And I loved that. Some of my favorite memories as a child come from those kinds of travels.

I've also always been intrigued by hitting the road and heading off on far-flung destinations. I have taken many trips myself. When I graduated college, I quit my job and loaded up my old car and headed across the United States and up to Canada. I forget the miles now. I'm getting a little bit blurry.

But I put in excess of 10,000 miles, I think, on the car in a few-month trip. And I loved it. I loved every second of it. So I enjoy driving, and I'm not the only one. There are a lot of people who really love the autonomy that comes from having your own vehicle.

The single biggest benefit of having your own vehicle to drive is autonomy. You can go where you want to go, when you want to go there. You can do what you want to do, and you can have the comfort and security of your own vehicle at all times. And that's really valuable.

I admire travelers who set off with nothing but a backpack, and especially budget travelers. I admire the budget travelers who stick out their thumb and hitchhike their way across continents. I think that's so cool. I admire travelers who take the local chicken bus from the big city where they land on the airplane out to their destination.

I think that is super cool. I have not generally enjoyed traveling that way myself, and I do not want to travel that way with my wife and children. It's just not fun. It's not fun at all to me. I would much rather myself be sitting in a suburban neighborhood, commuting every day in traffic with everyone else to a downtown office to work in a cubicle and have the joys of that lifestyle versus dragging my family on a chicken bus to some middle-of-nowhere destination in Nicaragua.

It's fine every now and then, but in terms of a style of travel, I don't enjoy it. It's not fun. It's not something that I enjoy. But you give me the same option and say, "Hey, Joshua, here's the keys for, I don't care, a cheap van, a cheap car, or whatever, and you can meander your way across Nicaragua as you like," I'm all game.

And even if the end result winds up being the same, I've had cars break down in the craziest of places, and you figure it out, right? You figure out how to solve your problem. Even if the result is the same, the fact that I started at least with control and with the ability to go where I wanted to go and live how I wanted to do it was a big, big deal.

And that's only become more important as my family has grown and as we have advanced. Let me articulate some of the reasons why, at least for family travel, vehicle-based travel is just better than virtually anything else. Obviously, vehicles can be a broad term. I guess if we were to group them, you've got planes, trains, automobiles, boats, and bikes, something like that.

Well, bikes are their own interesting scenario. You've got bicycles, quite interesting and popular. I love the people that go out and bike tour the world. I think that's a phenomenal way to travel if you're into that. It's not something that I'm into, at least not into at the moment, but I understand the appeal of it.

You've got motorcycles. I've always been interested in motorcycle travel, loved it. I grew up reading Peter and Kay Forwood's adventures of riding their Harley-Davidson systematically to every country in the world. I always thought that was the coolest, coolest adventure. And I remember when I first saw-- who was the guy from Star Wars, Ewan McGregor and his buddy, that made the long way around and they did their trip from London across Russia on their motorcycles.

I just thought that was the coolest thing. And I've done some motorcycle touring, but it's not appropriate for me at this phase of life either. And so I'll leave that to another forum. Boat touring, yacht touring, I think it's awesome, super cool. Lots of people do it. And I think that one of the things that I love about boating is it can be done in so many ways.

I am being kind of an adventurer at heart and a hardcore guy. I've always been attracted to becoming a yachtsman, crossing oceans on a sailboat. Maybe someday I will. At the moment, though, it just doesn't sound like any fun to me. It doesn't sound like anything that I want to do.

And because my children are quite young, they are not generally an asset in that environment. They're more of a liability and add a lot more work to it. And so maybe the day will come when my children will be a little bit older and they can be helpful, in which case we might buy a yacht and head out across the world.

But at this point, it's not something that I'm interested in. There are other interesting styles of travel. I've always thought doing the Great Loop in the United States is just a really cool way to travel. Protected waterways, inland, much of the distance, but yet really neat nautical experience cruising around the backwaters of the United States.

In Europe, some people do similar things. You have the canal boat culture, whether it's narrow boating in England or crossing the canals across France. There's just some neat opportunities there. But for right now, it's been a little bit slower than I'd want to be involved in. And so boating is out for me at the moment.

Not to say forever it won't be, but I think it's out for me at the moment. Which leaves us with planes, trains, and automobiles. So planes, there's no question that if you want to cross distances, planes are awesome. I want to say and repeat, even now, that we are living in a golden age of travel, especially air travel.

And it's easier, faster, cheaper, safer to cross the world today than it's ever been at any point in human history. And that's exciting. I love the fact that any ordinary, normal person can save up a little bit of money and get themselves to an airport, walk on an airplane, and wake up on the other side of the world.

That is awesome. I love living in this globalized culture that we live in. But there are a lot of downsides for plane travel, especially with children. I'm not opposed to it. We've been on a bunch of airplanes. And our trip originally, as I sketched out the idea, was going to involve quite a lot of airplane travel.

But airplane travel adds a lot of challenges to family travel. Let me articulate some of those so that you can understand, whether it's for preparation, perhaps you're looking forward someday to traveling with your own children, trying to figure out what to do, or just simply to articulate them so you can have some understanding.

First of all, plane travel in and of itself is often quite unpleasant. The simple exigencies of be at the airport two hours early, it's quite humiliating to take those you love to the airport and see their person touched in ways that you would prefer they not be touched. It's quite humiliating to have your things gone through with a fine-tooth comb and to be reduced to 100-milliliter bottles of stuff in a quart-sized bag.

These things are just not particularly fun. But even just the logistics of it, it often gets stretched out. For years, I've felt like, "Hey, if it's less than 500 miles, I'll just drive." A thousand miles, frequently, if it's been under a thousand miles, I've often just rather drive. Even though it often takes longer, by my calculation, sometimes it doesn't.

If you take an airplane trip and say, "Okay, let's say I'm traveling to a destination that it should be a couple of miles away. Sorry, a couple of hours away." Well, okay, a couple of hours of actual plane flight. But remember that in addition to the actual plane flight, there is the plane on the tarmac time.

Then there's being at the airport two hours early. Then there's leaving earlier to be at the airport two hours early. I don't like to miss flights. In fact, I get super stressed if I'm in any way late, so I often will add three hours instead of two hours just so I don't have to have any sensation of feeling stressed.

And by the time you get down to it, a two-hour flight is very easily a six- or seven-hour day with no delays. Six or seven hours at 70 miles an hour, you can get there pretty quickly when you're doing that. So I don't deny that plane travel is faster, but there's actually a lot of time involved with plane travel.

And then in addition, you often have uncontrolled delays. When your flights are canceled and you have nothing that you can do about it, you're kind of out of control. You don't have a lot to do. So I don't deny that airplane travel is generally faster, but it's not, in my opinion, as much faster as we often think it is.

It's a little closer of a race. I don't want to overstate the case, but it's a little bit closer than I think a lot of people would recognize. What's more difficult to me about airplane travel is the fact that airplane travel by its very nature means that you're dependent on the systems of others.

If I'm traveling in an airplane and the airplane is delayed, I can't do anything except wait or try to go book another flight. I can't solve my problem. Unlike with a car where I can just go when I want to go, I can't do that. When I'm in an airplane, I'm in a controlled environment.

I can't have--I have a limited amount of luggage space, as I recently articulated to you. We don't have a lot of luggage. And so one of the things that we have sacrificed on is we don't travel with a lot of snacks. We try to travel with a little bit, but we're not traveling with a suitcase full of snacks.

So then when it comes time for me to feed my family, a lot of times I don't have as much food available, and then I have to go and choose what's available in the airport. Well, it's a controlled environment. And so the prices are half again as much as what you pay out in the street.

I don't fault anybody for it, but that gets--those numbers add up pretty quickly. What I also find difficult is, all right, once you fly somewhere, then what do you do? Well, you can rent a car. But if you don't have a rental car, then how do you get from here to there?

How do you actually--what do you do at the hotel? You get to the hotel, and if you don't have food-- you need food, but if you don't have a car, it's hard to go to the grocery store and stock up on food there, and so you wind up eating out a lot.

And so you wind up with a whole lot of, you know, $150 days of feeding your family with breakfast, lunch, dinner, a lot of it purchased out, and those numbers add up pretty quickly. And so there's certainly the financial ramifications and the lifestyle ramifications. When you have your own car, on the other hand, everything can be simpler.

No question, you can have your own mechanical problems just like an airplane can have. But when those mechanical problems happen, you're probably in a pretty decent situation, right? You've got a comfortable seat to sit in. You've got a safe place out of the rain, out of the sun, out of the cold, and so it's not so terrible while you solve your problem.

More importantly, though, you get to one town, you like it, you want to stay longer, you stay longer. You don't like it, you don't stay as long. You can be much more flexible, and I love the flexibility of having your own vehicle. You can stay the places you want to stay longer, and you don't have to feel like you have to commit.

You're not worried about prices changing on you all the time like you are with airplanes. When should I buy the ticket? How long do we want to stay here? You just stay as long as you want, and you leave when you want. In addition, you don't like this hotel?

No big deal, let's just go a few miles down the road and look for the competition. That's harder to do, especially with a lot of children along. That's harder to do when you don't have your own set of wheels. And, you know, there's a lot more too, right? When you travel with children, a lot of times your days, your touring days, look different.

What generally works for us, as when we're on vacation mode, we get up in the morning, have breakfast, go out and do some kind of sightseeing tour. Go back to our accommodations at about noon, rest, have a little snack, have nap time. 3.30, 4 o'clock, naps are over, get up and go out again for two, three hours, then come back, go to bed.

And so those are pretty short days because of the needs of children. It's not a problem to do that when you've got your own wheels. You want to go and see a museum. You drive there, you see the museum, and you drive home. But with other people, it's harder to arrange a tour guide for a one-hour tour.

It's more expensive and harder to deal with the transportation. Even the cost winds up being substantial. One of the things that we learned when we arrived in Lisbon for the first time a month ago is that right now Portugal has these restrictions on Uber and on taxis, where they're not permitting Uber drivers to carry more than three passengers.

So even if I order an Uber XL, and that Uber XL has seats for seven, meaning it's an SUV usually or a van, and it has seats for seven, eight, or nine people, so our family of six can fit in the seats. We are one social bubble. The drivers will not take us.

They had multiple ones refuse us. And so the car won't take three. It's quite frustrating, right? Because the vast majority of the COVID stuff is just theater, just like any security apparatus. It's all theater. None of it does any good. It's just theater. It makes people feel good. But there we are, right?

So then we're stuck having to get two Uber XLs to get somewhere. Well, now Uber XLs are 12 euros each, then 12 euros to get there, 12 euros to get back, you're at 24 euros. Same thing, even bus transportation, things that are cheaper by the time you buy six bus tickets, six train tickets, et cetera, there's no question that the cost is a lot better for having your own vehicle.

So if you're going to travel from China to the United States, most likely you're not going to drive. You're going to buy an airplane ticket. But if you're going to travel from Portugal to Spain and you're traveling as a family of six, driving looks a lot better, if you can drive in some reasonable way.

So how do you get a vehicle? Well, obviously rental is the way to go. The challenge is once you get over five people, we're six, five people you can still fit into an economy car, a standard car, et cetera, car, and have room for your luggage. When you get to six, though, you move into either seven-passenger SUV land, which those vehicles only sometimes have enough space for your luggage as well, or a van.

And now your rental rates often go from $150 a week in many places for an economy car to often $600, $700, frequently $850 to $1,000 a week for a seven-seat SUV or for a minivan or large van of some kind. $1,000 a week, the numbers start to add up pretty quickly.

And so thus renting a car doesn't really become an economical option. So what do you do? Well, my answer is if possible, you think about buying a car. And here the numbers can make all the sense in the world if you can arrange the details. You can buy a car.

I'll use U.S. American numbers. If you want to tour the United States, there's no better way to tour the United States than by car. The United States has a car-based culture, a car-based landscape. It's a wonderful place to do road trips, just fabulous place to do road trips. So tourists from all around the world can and frequently do go to the United States.

You can fly in. You can buy a car. The United States has a huge supply of high-quality used cars. You can for $3,000, $4,000, $5,000, something like that, you can get yourself a good set of reliable, comfortable, safe wheels that will work for you to put 10,000 miles on it.

As long as you have an address that you can use to get your title. And I don't know if it's all states, but it's not difficult. There's no rules in the United States that tourists can't come in and buy and register a vehicle. You just need an address. So you can fly in.

You can buy a car. You can do what I did. You fly in. You buy a car very quickly. You register it, insure it, boom, you're on the road. Grab a car for $5,000. Use it for a couple of months, month, whatever you got. Turn around on the other side, you can probably sell it for $5,000.

Vehicles in that price range don't often depreciate all that much with regard to mileage. Most of your costs will often be the cost of registration and sales tax on the purchase of the vehicle. So you're out. But even if you sell it for $1,000 less and sell it quickly, $1,000 amortized out over a month-long trip, now it's very reasonable for you to have purchased a vehicle.

I don't know that I would love to do it for a month. It's a little short. It seems like the weight there is probably still on renting. But if you've got a couple of months to travel with, three months, then now buying a vehicle makes a lot of sense, even if you scrap it at the end.

Similar things can happen in many other parts of the world. And so that's what we did here in Europe. Once I decided that, you know what, we're probably not going to be in Asia, I grew really frustrated with not having my own wheels, my own transportation. I don't enjoy family travel nearly as much if I don't have my own car as I do when I have my own car.

It's not one big thing. Rather, it's a whole bunch of little things. I'll give you some examples. If I have my own car, I feel like I have great liberty in the places that I choose to stay, and I can choose places that are going to be genuinely comfortable for my family.

Most hotel rooms are not nice for families. They're great for individual travelers, business travelers, couples, etc., adults. Any kind of adults, hotel rooms are great. For children, there's just not a lot to do, and you've got everyone in a room or two. There's nothing to do except watch TV.

Your children are allowed. You're trying to keep them quiet, to not annoy people. But at the end of the day, children need somewhere to run. Where do they run? Where do they go? There's no space. And so I will--I'll look on Airbnb, and I'll find a great house that's outside of the main town-- big backyard, pool, woods in the back, someplace where the children can get outside, be a little bit loud, etc., and not bother anyone.

But the problem is those places are usually hard to access if you don't have your own wheels. The taxi fees are 50 euros to get there. There's no bus lines that go there. So if you have your own wheels, it's easy. But if you don't, that's just not open to you.

And I enjoy much more renting a house, even if the house is not great. Give me a not-great house any day of the week that has a backyard, someplace where the children can stretch out, be a little bit louder without bothering our neighbors, and I'll take that versus a nice hotel room any day of the week.

But you need your own vehicle to be able to get there in a reliable and efficient way. So other things, right? I enjoy traveling with my children. I don't enjoy eating three meals out. I don't enjoy having a 40-euro breakfast by the time I feed them breakfast. Then, shockingly, 2 1/2 hours later, they're hungry.

Well, then it's more eating out food. And then you get to the evening time, then it's more eating out food. So what do you do? Well, most of the time, you solve that by doing groceries, right? You go to the grocery store, and you get some food that you can make yourself.

But if you don't have a car to carry the food in, are you going to trot around with a backpack with a picnic lunch in it every day? Some parents are dedicated enough to do it. I'm not. I probably should flex my muscles and grow a little bit there, but I don't do that.

And so if I've got a car, you can keep snacks. You can keep food. It's easy to say, "Okay, it's dinner time. Let's go off and say, 'Look, there's a park.'" Tell my wife, "Take the children to the park. Let them get their wiggles out. I'll go to the grocery store, grab a rotisserie chicken, grab some salami, whatever meat is ready to go, a hunk of cheese, a couple loaves of bread, a tub of butter, boom, we're in business.

You've got food, and $10, $15, you're out the door, you're done versus $60 if you go to just any ordinary restaurant." And so there's a lot of cost savings involved with car transportation. I think I would be willing to pay more to have my own car because it just makes a better situation.

I'm more relaxed as a father when I don't feel like I've got to fit into bus schedules. Everything is just more relaxing to me as a father when traveling. And so I'm willing to pay more in order to get that. However, the nice thing is you don't have to pay more.

In fact, you actually save money by having your own wheels, your own transportation. Talk about trains for a moment. Trains are fun, but now we get into, again, the same thing, the issues of ticketing. The classic way to see Europe, for example, is by rail. There's whole guidebooks on it.

That's a classic way to see it. And I think that's a phenomenal way to see Europe. But that works a lot better for a couple of college-age backpackers than it does for a family with children. Why? Well, the cost is one factor. When you multiply train tickets times six, it's almost always cheaper to just go ahead and rent a car.

Go ahead and rent a car than to pay train tickets. If you're actually moving frequently, you take an ordinary ticket, whatever the cost is, multiply it by six, and then compare that against getting a car and just very frequently renting a car, paying for fuel, etc., winds up being a better solution.

Other things that are challenging, though, is the same thing about logistics. Children can't walk as far. Their legs are not as strong. As a parent, you wind up carrying a lot of the bags. And so if my wife and I were backpacking around Europe, riding trains, flying on easy jet, etc., it's no problem to be dumped off in the middle of the town and you arrive and you walk two or three miles to your hostel.

It is a problem when, as a parent, you have to carry bags for six people and you have to carry two of your children, etc. And so having your own car just really makes sense. I'm pretty confident that it's going to be a great move. The biggest challenge for me was can I actually get it done.

I didn't want to ship a car from the United States, although you can do that. Obviously not a good plan for a short term, but you can do that if you're going to be there for a while. And I figured I would probably do it in the EU, but because of visa restrictions, I can only stay in the EU for 90 out of every 180 days.

And so I need a car that I can come in and then also take it across outside of the Schengen zone so that I don't violate the terms of my visa. So I believe that we've succeeded in that, and I'm happy to report that. We'll see in the coming days.

I've got to work it out to make sure that we're good. But at this point, I feel like the world has opened up, especially in a time of COVID. I think that was the last factor that I haven't talked about. It's extra stressful right now to try to figure out travel right now with COVID because everything was changing.

I did well in choosing my dates to get into Europe, but then what happened is I'm sitting in Malta, and I bought one-way tickets, and I was like, "OK, we'll go. We'll check it out for a time. I'm not going to stay there forever." But I'm sitting in Malta, and I'm watching things start to shut down.

When we got into Malta, we were able to get in with no quarantine requirements. Everything was simple, right? Just had a negative COVID test. Everything was simple. Then a few days after we arrived, they instituted all of these new precautions of how to get into the country and a bunch of new restrictions.

And so I felt fortunate that we were able to get in when we got in, but then without quarantine. I have no interest whatsoever in quarantining, sitting in a hotel room for 14 days or 10 days or whatever with children. That sounds like misery to me, absolute misery. And so I got nervous, "OK, we got to get out of here, but then where are we going to go next?" And certainly, I, on a weekly basis, reconsider, "Maybe we just go back to the United States.

Maybe it's just too hard to travel right now. Maybe it's not worth it." I've been to the United States where everything is simple, everything is open, maybe. But I haven't chosen to do that yet, and having a car was a good option because now I feel like now that I have the car, I can go where the borders are open and I can adjust due to the weather.

We'll go farther north as it gets cold when it gets-- excuse me, then as it gets cold, then we can go south. And then I can go places where I don't mind being locked down. I can go places that are freer. I'm probably going to get out of Western Europe as quickly as I can and get back into Eastern Europe because I don't love living in the restricted society where everything is just shut down like it is largely here in Western Europe.

And so I just feel like we can pivot, we can adjust, we can react, et cetera. So in conclusion for this particular part of the saga, I love having a car to travel in. I love to road trip. You've got to be sure that you actually like covering the miles.

From a business perspective, I don't try to get a lot of work done in terms of road tripping. Maybe when I was younger I could, but it certainly harms it. There was a time--there hasn't been a time--maybe there will be a time in the future when I do just the normal business travel stuff where you fly in, you do your business, and you fly out.

But with family travel, road tripping is a way better way to do it. Children are tired, there's a hotel, let's just stop. There's a park, let's stop, stretch your legs. As a father, one of my major goals--I don't do it perfectly-- one of my major goals is to not be a stressed out dad.

And I get stressed sometimes, there's no question about that, but I don't want to be that. And so I try really hard to not push myself into a situation where my back's going to be up against the wall and I'm going to be stressed out. And so having my own car makes a big, big difference.

So in the next episode, tune in and I'll share with you how I flew into a country where I don't speak the language and turned around, and a couple days later I have succeeded in owning a car. I'll share that story with you next time. When you're in winter's favorite town, the snow-covered mountains surround you.

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