These are things we didn’t see ourselves doing when we first started our world trip. Hope you enjoy our little traveler confessions.

• Stay at nicer hotels - when we first started the trip we prayed  for upgrades but we never payed for one, we were just so cheapo! Now, depending on the price of the upgrade we might actually pay for the view and the times we have upgraded, we haven’t regretted it.

• We prioritize location over price (w/in reason) - initially we’d stay at the nicer, but maybe farther away properties, basically we’d get more for our money. The convenience of staying close to places we want to visit, or eat at, is worth the extra bucks or less nice room. I wouldn’t say we are spending more, we are picking a smaller room closer to everything over a bigger place that requires a lot of walking or public transport.

• Sometimes pay for a room w/ breakfast - In South America we didn’t pay extra for the room to include breakfast because it was so easy to find a cafe and fresh fruits. In places like India the breakfast is generally a buffet and would feed us for a good part of the day. Also street food was more sketchy early in the morning (not that many people around and not that many vendors open). There were a few cafes and the cafes were generally more expensive than breakfast so it made sense. Now we gauge how hard it will be to get breakfast before unilaterally banning that option.

• Chase golden hour - some of our best pictures have been at golden hour, you know, that magical time before the sun rises or just before the sun sets? It doesn’t mean we don’t take pictures outside of these times, or that we always get up early, but we do try our best to visit iconic places at these times to give ourselves a good chance at a great shot.

• We fly more - when google maps (or blogs) say the time between 2 places will be waaaaay longer than it would be by plane, we consider flying much more. For example, in Myanmar the time between Yangon and Inle lake, by bus was 12hrs, by plane 45min. The price difference was significant, but the flights were still only $40/person vs $10/person by bus. Even though we paid 4 times more, the time we gained was worth it to us. We are on a long trip, but taking the cheap, long option isn’t always the best for us. Conserving energy to still be really excited about a place matters too, and on a trip like this, you’d be surprised how often you find yourself a little depleted.

• We negotiate better and take it less personally (we also negotiated more informed) - this is especially true in countries that loooove to haggle; that’s just not part of our culture and being given exorbitantly hight prices when we first started felt like a massive insult, “what did we look like, cash cows?” Now we know that’s the name of the game and don’t take it personally; we either try our best to negotiate by asking before hand how much something should cost or simply walk away if our attempt doesn’t yield what we think is a good price. Plus, we don’t have much room in our bags anyway.

• Less camera shy - this one was a hard one at first, because we don’t normally take pictures of yourself doing everyday things. It’s hard too because you don’t always look like you think you do. Now we try to record our days more and not only do we get photos we are happy to look back on, but we’ve also introspected a bit on things like improving our posture.

Any traveling confessions you’d care to share? leave them in the comments below!