What goes around...

As promised, the follow up:

So the discussions that came to a head on Vancouver Island were the culmination of a few things.

First up was money - despite our quite decent amount of pre-trip savings, and keeping a lid on our travel expenses, the US & Canada were both costing more than we had hoped, and the budget projection for the second half of the year away was coming up considerably short. Whatever you're doing, being stressed about the money takes the fun out of it...

Second up, and just as important, if not more so, was whether extending ourselves (via loans, credit cards, whatever) was going to be a worthwhile use of the money. We were both finding ourselves running seriously short of enthusiasm to see and do things, or to do the logistics work of finding accommodation and where to get food every day - short term solutions like the stop in Seattle were good for a while, but continuous travel is exhausting, mentally and physically (is that the world's smallest violin I can hear? Thought so...)

We'd already noticed that epic vistas weren't triggering much of a reaction any more, and our desire to explore new cities was near-zero. Some of that saturation is definitely an effect of already having been reasonably well-travelled - after the Himalayas, other mountains just don't do it for us ;-) It's quite different at 37 years old than at 17, when everything is fresh and new and amazing!

Thirdly there was a building desire in both of us to live in our own place again and be 'grounded'.

The conclusion? Sticking to our plans would lead to us spending money we didn't have, to not make the most of where we were going, when we would really rather be at home. Therefore, we have decided to change our itinerary quite drastically, and come home in mid-November. Way back in the planning stage we'd envisaged two big trips - one for the US and Canada, and a separate one for Australia and New Zealand. Hopefully we're just reverting to that idea, and we're postponing the big southern hemisphere trip to a later date. We're extending our stay in the US in order to come back to our favourite bit (the Colorado mountains) where we're currently living in a little cabin for a month (hurrah for long-term visas!) before we finish off with Nevada and California.

We hadn't bought tickets to New Zealand, and it's the place we both really want to do justice to when we go. Being under budget pressure and too travelled-out to enjoy just seemed like a terrible waste, so we've cut it entirely (sorry Dave!). Tahiti's out too - despite having paid for flights, it wasn't going to be value for money to keep spending the rest we would need.

Our round-the-world tickets take us through Hawaii and Australia, so it seemed crazy to drop that entirely and fly directly home. As such, we're going to spend a week on Hawaii and about a month in Oz, seeing Sydney, the south east coast, and Melbourne, jumping to the Red Centre for a week, and then a last week in Perth and the west coast. That's still a pretty awesome Australian holiday! If we can, we'll come back and do the circumnavigation the next time.

It feels insane to be planning to leave Australia in the balmy late spring and arrive back in dismal British November, but we'll just have to get over that... at least there will be Christmas with the family to look forward to!