Meet the Ingenious Traveler
I’m Christine and I’ve been traveling my whole life. First criss-crossing the U.S. visiting family, then traveling internationally on a shoe string budget. Lately I’ve traveled with kids as a single mom, taken girlfriend trips fairly locally or gone on bigger adventures with my husband. For me, planning my next trip is as natural as doing my weekly meal plan. I do not travel full time as my job but am busy with my career as a Realtor at C Tucker & Co. I spend a lot of time with my teenagers, Ethan, and twins Faith and Jackson. As a Watkinsville City Council member, I am active in my community. My husband and I also run four Airbnbs, two of which are a cottage in Watkinsville and a house near downtown Athens. We still manage to take several international trips a year plus numerous smaller trips around the United States. I know that ANYONE can travel and that it doesn’t have to be overwhelming or expensive.
As I plan my own trips, I look at a lot of travel blogs and guide books with specifics on where to stay and what to do in different locations. What I don’t see though is someone helping people figure out HOW to travel in a way that makes sense for their values, stage of life, and budget. I want to give you practical tips that will help your trip be stress-free*. I will occasionally have some specific recommendations on things to do or places to stay but my experience is that information changes so regularly that it quickly becomes outdated. Also, what’s important to me about where I stay or what I do, might be very different from what is important to you. I’ll soon be introducing something similar to House Hunter International but with 3 Airbnb choices everywhere we stay. This will give you a feel for how I go about picking my airbnbs so that you can translate that to Your needs.
This should be a practical guide to help you get where you want to go, do the things you want to do, and even help you figure out where you do want to travel to in the first place. I will be sharing actual experiences – the good, the bad, and the ugly – so you can learn from some of my successes and mistakes. So far the most horrific thing I’ve encountered was losing two of my children, one at a time, on our first day in Paris. Because we had some rules in place, we found them fairly quickly but it was still pretty scary and we now pay for international plans on everyone’s phone. I will also be breaking down how I managed to travel a week in Madrid with my daughter for only $1000 including our airfare and Airbnb or a 10 day trip to Peru with my husband for $1200 a person including EVERYTHING. Read Why Peru? to find out more. I want to help you travel on a budget, as stress-free as possible with lots of practical tips.
You can plan a trip for yourself, your family, or with friends and have a wonderful time on any budget. Let me show you how.
*Stress-free is a relative term. As we all know there is no such thing as a completely stress-free trip. You and your family will have grumpy days. You will encounter unavoidable delays that are 100% outside your control. It may rain on the day you were planning to spend at the beach. But, if you take the time to plan, if you don’t reinvent the wheel but learn from others (me!), then it should make your trip much, much less stressful.