How to Travel Every Weekend
Have a full time job but love to travel? How will you ever find the time to explore all the places that you want to see? How will you do all the activities that you’ve always planned to do? Do you find that your vacation days are never enough every year? Fear not, for we have a solution: we’ll focus on how to travel every weekend to explore more places while you’re maintaining a full time job.
Of course, the best way to travel longer is to become financially independent, where your earnings from businesses or your investments are enough to survive on. Alternatively, you could take a sabbatical from your job if they offer it. Another way to get rid of the weekend getaway would be through mini-breaks or a mini-retirement where you will have to quit your job to travel then come back from the mini break and look for full time employment.
Also see how we fund and afford our travels and why we bought a house even though we travel a lot.
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Note: a lot of our ideas and tips below involve a lot of scheduling your time. So you will need to do an exercise where you monitor how your weekday hours are being spent in order to squeeze everything in your busy schedule.
Pre-baby and before my husband moved away for work, we had been able to travel almost every weekend by using these tips below. We tried traveling every weekend but in the end, we wanted days where we can just stay at home and chill, so we formulated an every other weekend rule to rest and catch up on stuff we were not able to do on weekdays.
Remember that this is just a guide and your final schedule is dictated and controlled by you. If you can’t travel every weekend and just want weekends to sleep in and be a couch potato then by all means do it!
If you love to travel, chances are you have a long list of places to visit that keeps growing every day. Whether your goal is to visit all the countries in the world, visit all the tourist attractions in a specific country, or immerse yourself in a new culture, what you’ll need is time, energy and money to travel. Working a full time job fulfills the money part, where you can potentially earn enough discretionary income to support your travels, but that saps your energy and you barely have enough to do anything fun.
So what do you do with that conundrum? Instead of letting your free time go to waste, remember that holidays and weekends are yours, unless work makes you come in on a weekend or holiday. The plan is to free up your weekends from chores so you can travel and explore.
These are tips on how to free up your weekends so you can concentrate on travel. We focus on key things to help free time you would normally spend on chores, errands, and the like.
If your work means you’ll have to log in early and log off late and your bosses want you sitting on your seat the entire time then you’ll have to dictate time for yourself. It is inhumane for people to expect you to sit and eat in front of your desk during the lunch hour, right? And of course you’ll need time to grab water, eat your food, and have bathroom breaks.
I’ll say if you’re in the situation above, extend these break times to 15 minutes or more. You will need a tablet or a smartphone that can connect to the internet or have an app where you can make notes in. These devices are time and life savers. Here’s a few things you can do during this break time.
When you’re a traveler, it is essential to check your credit cards to see if there are any unauthorized purchases and if you are staying in budget. Use this time to check if the credit cards, mortgage, utilities, and other bills are paid on time, and there are no outstanding balances. After all, you’ll need an impeccable credit score if you’re planning to travel hack.
You can also use this time to check and research stocks or funds that you’ll want to trade in. See how the market is going, and use this time to buy or sell securities. If you are planning to become financially independent so you can travel full time, then you’ll definitely need to be on top of your money situation.
If you are reselling stuff online as a side hustle, then also good to check on the site and see if you made any sales. Use this time to check emails or other websites you need to go on to help you earn extra money on the side to help fund your travels.
If you are travel hackers (like we are), one always needs to stay on top of the ‘game’. This means needing to check any travel news, deals to chase, and keeping up with what’s happening in the hobby. I usually do these at lunch breaks or during work down times.
Reading the news and blogs can get pretty addictive so I try to keep it simple by visiting a few go-to sites and stopping once I’m up to date with the latest news for the day. A lot of these sites tend to repeat content, especially I’d it’s a big deal so one just needs to read it once, learn about it, and be done.
If you love to read books as a hobby and also to learn new things, I would recommend reading a few minutes before you go to bed. This calms your mind so you’re not exactly looking at electronics when you’re getting ready for bed. You can also use other spare time you have to listen to audiobooks or read books while you’re waiting in line for something.
You can also schedule something in your calendar to make time for your hobby. Set up an appointment on your calendar for an hour or so to read books or to check your emails or work on your side hobby. Once it becomes a habit that you’re going to do something at a certain time of day, then you won’t need the phone appointment anymore.
It is always better to be consistent and do something at specified times daily instead of skipping days and catching up.
Instead of defaulting to watching TV and puttering around after you log off from work, why not use this time to run chores? Here are some ideas that you can do after work (aside from looking after your kids/pets if you have them):
Now that you’ve got your what to do after work checklist ready, here are some handy tips on how to plan for a weekend trip.
Usually, weekend trips consist of us driving within a 2-4 hour range (maybe 5 hours, but that is pushing it) or a short flight or cruise that can be extended to 1 or 2 weekdays if need be. This means looking for domestic flights, or short trips to the Caribbean if you’re based in the US. If you’re in Europe then another country can be a short weekend trip away since every other country is close by. If you live in Asia you can travel to another country by overnight bus, but it is a bit harder considering the infrastructure there.
Other people are a bit more extreme and jet off to Europe or South America for a long weekend (between 3-4 days), but we feel that is a bit too much for us. Jetlag is a bummer, so we tend to avoid crazy time zone changes
One can use the weekend and personal vacation days at work to make the getaway a few weeks long, but what if you’ve already used up all your days, there’s no holidays and still want to go on weekend getaways? Here are a few downsides on weekend getaways, based on our personal experiences.
Getting from one place to another takes a bit more time than what you would expect. Say you want to go on a weekend getaway by flying. You may need to fly out Friday night after work, spend a few hours at an airport waiting for the flight, actually getting on a flight, and getting to your destination. Then you’ll need to do that again on Sunday night when you want to go back home. It multiplies the amount of time that you’re spending in airports, not to mention the wait times.
Of course you could do other things while waiting at the airport or while on the airplane, like writing, sorting videos, reading books, or catching up on shows and movies, but you are essentially compounding the time you’re spending in transit.
Same thing applies if you’re on a weekend road trip. You double the driving time driving from a destination and back the next day, not to mention the wear and tear on your car and mileage you’re adding to it.
The time you spend waiting on a plane or driving around for the weekend could have been spent exploring nearby cities, going to more attractions, and the like. Once time is gone, it is effectively gone. This also leaves us with another weekend getaway issue.
Because you only travel and visit places during the weekend, you tend to spend more on transportation and accommodation. When you stay longer in one destination, you only tend to buy one airline ticket, and you don’t spend as much on gas getting to your destination and back again in a short period of time.
Airline tickets are a tad bit more expensive during weekends, especially if you plan to fly out on Friday nights and come back on Sunday nights. By traveling only on weekends, you miss out on the flexibility and the cheapest seats, which are usually available on Tuesdays/Wednesdays and middle of the day flights.
Accommodation costs could be more expensive – a lot of hotels offer 4th or 5th night free stay offers if you choose to stay longer with one hotel. AirBnBs and other short term rentals also give discounts to those who prefer to stay for a week or more. A lot of hotels in touristy cities know that there are a lot of people visiting and tend to raise prices on a weekend than on weekdays. Even if you pay using points, some dynamic point programs like IHG and Hilton charge more if you want to stay on a Friday or Saturday night than say, on a weekday rate.
Public transportation may not be as readily accessible on weekends so you may need to pay more for private taxis and tours in some destinations, not to mention car rental prices can be higher too (in some cases, we didn’t particularly find it is the case all the time).
So, that’s another downside of weekend travel, but expect to pay the price if travel truly is your passion.
If you’re spending a lot of time traveling on weekends, life and chores have a tendency to pile up. Housework chores, rest, and home maintenance need to be tended to, and sometimes you can’t always put these aside until after your workday is over.
The time after your working day is already pretty full, but you can probably still squeeze a few more tasks and chores on the other average 4 hours you have in the day, provided you don’t work crazy hours in your day job. That 4 hour average gets cut down to 1-2 hours if you have 1 child, maybe less if you have 2 children.
So imagine what time you’ll sleep and get up every day when you have this type of schedule. Not having enough rest can weigh down on you and slow you down. Worse, it may actually affect your health and mental state in the long run. It’s good if you’re young but if you’re older, you definitely are slower and need more rest.
One reason why we don’t travel every weekend is because we don’t really want to. As much as we want to explore and see the world as much as we can, we need our time to rest and have a sense of normalcy and routine in our lives.
Some weekends are just spent lounging around in our living room, watching YouTube or Amazon Prime Travel shows. On these days, a few hours would be spent running errands, buying groceries, cleaning the house, doing yard work, catching up on chores, and the like.
And you know what? That type of weekend is perfectly fine. One does not have to go through life like an infinite quest with no rest. Rest is extremely important, at least for us, so we schedule rest weekends on our calendar. Before we had a baby, we would have 1 rest and reset weekend every month. Now that we are our own little family, we travel, then the next week, we rest. This enables our baby to have a sense of routine at home, and gives me (Ruby) time to catch up on blogging, backing up photos, and researching deals and trips.
So go ahead and plan your weekend trips. Just go. See if you can travel every weekend, but if not, then pace yourself. If you can’t travel every weekend then don’t give yourself such a hard time if you can’t do it. If something is not fun then it’s not exactly worth doing, so know yourself, your limits, and set your schedule for yourself.
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