Oh Improvisor...you do like to ramble. However, showing your age and a lack of recent travel experience with these "tips". Savvy travelers, who care about their own safety and that of their companions, don't flit into town, hit the local pub and mooche a place to sleep on someone's sofa.

As for budget, the RTW tickets alone will run about $5000 each, that's $10,000 out of the OPs budget before leaving the ground. So now they are down to $50,000 for 18 months -- about $700 per week for lodging, food, entertainment, additional travel and <i>all those pub drinks they have to buy to cozy up to someone who will let them flop on their living room floor.</i>

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog...-plane-ticket/

As I said in one of your other ranting posts, its a very good way to end up dead or missing -- <u>but you already know that.</u> I think this whole contrary posting you're having fun with since discovering us in June is just a summer game for a bored armchair traveler. Maybe a new hobby is in order before someone thinks you're serious.

TC, YOUR definition of a 'savvy traveller' is not everyone's definition. Nor are you stating facts when you write, "who care about their own safety". Do you actually think there is anyone who doesn't care about their safety? Illogical. What there are are people who do not appear to YOU to care about their safety. But I can assure you they definitely do. Survival is instinctive TC.

There are lots of young women who travel alone, do not have fixed plans or pre-booked rooms everywhere and yes even ask bartender's where to find a room. Amazing as it may seem the vast majority of them do so without ending up "dead or missing". Those who do so successfully, consider themselves 'savvy travellers' and in fact are. They have developed the skills/intuition to tell them when to back off and when to go ahead. But I am not suggesting that everyone do that am I. That YOU are not comfortable doing that is your business. So let's not get sidetracked down that road.

I'd guess (and acknowledge it is a guess) that you travel once or twice a year for a couple of weeks at a time. I have probably spent almost as much time travelling in my life as not travelling.

As for being an armchair traveller, you'll notice a lack of responses for me beginning at the end of next month. My wife and I will be off on an indefinite road trip in the US southwest. We are big desert lovers and hikers. It will be perhaps my 25th or 35th trip to the area, I've lost count. I could say the same of many other areas in the world. The reason you see me posting here in the last month is because I am BETWEEN travels.

I have been fortunate enough to find earning money a relatively easy thing to do since I was a teenager and I have always loved to travel. I've never thought anything of working for a while and then quitting to hit the road for an extended period of time. In my early-30s I decided I didn't want to keep doing that forever and so put nose to the grindstone for 7 years and then retired, financially independent.

Since then you might as well say I have 'travelled' ever since. I have based myself in some places for longer periods of time than others but I have yet to say, this is where I stop. When I was staying in one particular place (where a lot of expats were to be found) I would meet people who would ask, 'what made you decide to stay here?' To which I would honestly answer that I never decided to stay, I just hadn't decided to leave yet. I may decide to 'leave' where I am staying now, tomorrow. My life is not constrained by a need to earn a living or any other factor.

I get it that most regulars who post here travel in pretty conventional and conservative ways. So what? Not everyone does and this forum is not limited to just those who do is it?

The OP in this case has given no indication whatsover as to what they are prepared to do or not do. Why would you assume they travel like you do?

So let's go back to their 60K and what it could buy them in terms of travel and let's NOT assume they travel as you do. What I am stating as a FACT is that some people could travel on that amount of money for several years AT LEAST.

If the OP posted this same question on the Lonely Planet Forum for example, most responses would say their funds are more than enough for 18 months. They'd even get people saying they could leave home and not return for years starting out with 60K and supplementing their funds along the way with casual work etc. They would find people in that Forum who left home with far less and still haven't returned home after 2,5,10 years. If you don't believe me, go have a look in that Forum for yourself. YOU might not want to travel in the same way but YOU are not the one making the trip and the OP has not told us how THEY plan to travel.

One more small observation. If you read the OP again, I just noticed it myself, they do not say 60k for 18 months. They actually say 60k/year!

I have a suggestion for you TC. Go to the Lonely Planet Thorntree Forum. Register and then post on the Gap Year & RTW branch. Post this question or your version of it. 'How long has anyone travelled for and with what amount of money did they start out?' Try an experiment just to see what responses you get back. It will cost you nothing and might be an eye opener.

Oh good grief {shaking my head}.