Transcript
Brett: Once upon a time, there were two siblings who loved to travel with one another and to share their love for travel, they started a podcast.
Brett: Welcome to the Discover Your Wilderness Podcast.
Brett: All right, so today we’re going to take a step back and kind of tell you a little bit about who we are. We realized we jumped right into the content that we had been preparing for you and never really gave you background as to who we are or why we’re making this podcast. So today we’re going to do a Meet the Hosts. My name is Brett. I live in Utah, I’m pursuing an MBA, and my sister, I don’t know if we mentioned that too, we’re siblings, my sister is my co-podcast host, Alicia. I have her on the line, she is actually traveling right now, so the sound quality might be somewhat affected, but Alicia, do you want to tell us a little bit about you?
Alicia: Sure. So like Brett mentioned, I’m in Ohio right now visiting our parents. I have two degrees in secondary education and instructional design, but I’m actually working as a project manager right now in publishing, and I love to go on adventures with this brother of mine, and apparently I like podcasting because this has been a fun little experiment for us. But like Brett mentioned, we realized some of you know us, but some of you don’t, and our stories might not always make sense if you don’t know who we are. So should we do some Q&A and kind of talk about our experiences and get to know each other?
Brett: Yeah, and since I have control over the audio here, I’m going to start asking you the questions first. So Alicia, a question for you, if you could take a month-long vacation, where would you go?
Alicia: Oh, my gut reaction, which I think is usually the best way to go, would probably be Italy just because I’ve been there before and I love the area, but I feel like I could really dig into it even more if I had a month to just explore.
Brett: That’s awesome.
Alicia: So I’m going to turn that around on you now. I want to know your one month-long vacation, and then I want to ask a question.
Brett: Okay, I was thinking domestic when I wrote this question. So I love the idea of going to Italy or somewhere that you have an entire month. Sort of, if it was a month, I’d like to think of myself somewhat as adventurous, but also somewhat as wanting to cash in on a very, a month is a fairly long amount of time. So I don’t necessarily want to try somewhere new and then discover that I don’t love it as much and still have another three weeks there. So I was going to say California because you have beautiful mountains, you have beautiful coastline, you have big cities and you have small towns. So the diversity of California is very attractive to me, but that’s if I was thinking domestic. I might go to the Philippines or Southeast Asia if I were going international because I’ve lived in the Philippines, so I’m comfortable there and there are a lot of places there that I know I still want to visit.
Alicia: You know, it’s interesting is that neither, well, both of us defaulted to a specific location, which is kind of implied in the question, but neither of us even considered renting a van or trailer or something and hitting the road and seeing all sorts of places for a month because that might also be, that might be my second choice, if not Italy.
Brett: Hmm, interesting, yeah. We’ve talked about that going national park to national park or something like that, so.
Alicia: Okay, so a little length of trip, not defined, if you could buy one way to get to any location, where would you go?
Brett: One way trip to somewhere, I might choose Europe, and mostly because Europe is very close in proximity, especially being in the European Union to other countries and travel between them is pretty open and flexible. So it lets you say, oh, I might fly into Paris, but I can go on a trip to Brussels or I can take a train somewhere else and you’re not committing to being in the middle of Canada per se. If you go to Greenland, you’re going to be on Greenland or you’ll have to take a plane trip somewhere else, so. What about you? So with one trip, one way ticket, someone says, hey, I’m buying you a ticket, but I’m so cheap, I’m only buying one way, not round, no round trip for you.
Alicia: Oh, my initial thought was funny because you took it in a, I can go to one place and then come back from any other location. So that makes me a little more free because of the one way ticket approach. My thought was, if I’m going to go somewhere and potentially be stuck there, where could I survive? And I thought, I think I could figure out how to survive in Hawaii, whether it was camping or joining an agricultural group or whatever, or Mexico. I feel like I could figure out how to survive in Mexico, but if it’s about, hey, half of the cost of my ticket was covered, maybe I’d go somewhere farther, that’s more expensive and let somebody buy me a first class ticket to Australia or something.
Brett: Gotcha, and you just arrived in Ohio today. So this might be fresh on your mind. What do you like least about travel?
Alicia: So you actually were very kind and gave me a ride to the airport this morning. And we talked about the fact that you always feel like you’re forgetting something. Even if you had checklists and planned and packed early, I despise that feeling where you always feel like I forgot something at the hotel or I forgot something at the house before I left them, the anxiety of not knowing what boxes you didn’t check, and if you’ll be able to get whatever it is that you might have forgotten, especially when you go to a place that you’ve never been, like abroad, and you don’t know if they will have deodorant at the place that you’re going.
Brett: Yeah.
Alicia: How about you? What’s your least favorite thing?
Brett: Red eyes might be, I mean yours wasn’t even a red eye, but I woke up at 5, 5:10 or so to give you that ride, standing in security and whatnot. Because sometimes we say, oh, travel, travel’s this idyllic thing, you go, you come back refreshed, but at the same time you ask anyone, have you had a negative travel experience, and everyone has one. So I think my least favorite part about travel, and we alluded to this last week, is the details or the orchestration of the plane tickets that get you there on time and the hotel that you can get checked into or an Airbnb that lets you in close to when your plane arrives, and getting all those coordinated can sometimes be a lot of work and you don’t want to lose a whole day because you’ve traveled and you’re doing layovers and stuff, so probably just the logistics of getting from one place to another.
Alicia: That does create a lot of stress or any vacation, especially when you’re so excited for this trip and then getting there is difficult and kind of taints the beginning or you’re anxious about it working on the way home, for sure. What is one place that you would definitely go back to and one place that you would, you’re good. You’ve seen it once and so all you need, you have other things to see.
Brett: One place I would go back to is Manila in the Philippines. You and I traveled there and we saw a bit of that city, but it’s such a massive city and it’s so close to Palawan and other beautiful locations in the Philippines, definitely still on my to-do or return to list. Would not go back to you? I’m going to get criticism in the comments for this. It might be Rome. Rome was nice, but I feel like we hit all of the need to places and it was okay. Other parts of, I loved Sicily actually, but Rome itself was, I don’t know, maybe a little overrated.
Alicia: Well, it didn’t help that, and we can get into this in a future episode potentially, but we had some pretty rough experiences in Rome that definitely made it harder to appreciate that city.
Brett: It didn’t help that the first, you get off, I guess this happens in Manila too, but you get off the subway or the train, you go up and the first thing I saw was a guy with a big gun, like a security guard, I was like, oh, I’m safe here. Alicia, what road trip games do you or did you play?
Alicia: Oh, oh, I still play them. Love me some road trip games. The alphabet game, classic, I know everybody has different rules for the alphabet game that should maybe be something that we need to standardize to make sure that there’s consistency and fairness, but I love the alphabet game and the game, we don’t have a name for it, but like the game where you track like, oh, there’s a hundred head of cattle on my side, so I have a hundred cattle resources and oh, there’s a forest over here, so I have a thousand tree points or whatever and then you pass McDonald’s and you’re like, oh, there goes 50 of my cow points. Do we have a name for that game?
Brett: I don’t think so. I think we just call that the cow point game or something.
Alicia: There you go. The cow point game. I also really enjoy that one, though I don’t know who has ever won.
Brett: Yeah, that’s hard to keep track of because growing up in Idaho and living in Utah, there are a lot of cows that we pass.
Alicia: Yeah, that’s a thing. Okay, my last question for you and then I’m good to wrap up would be, what are some elements that would go into your ideal vacation?
Brett: Elements that would go into my ideal vacation. Going back to the logistics thing, someone else planning it for me, me having input but being able to pass the reins off on the actual where we’re staying and that type of stuff.
Alicia: The nitty gritty?
Brett: Yeah, obviously I want to go with people that I care about, so my wife always makes it more exciting to travel with and we haven’t had our honeymoon yet, so we still have travel to look forward to, she and I, but other elements of an ideal vacation is adequate understanding of the, if it’s going to be high engagement type of vacation or if it’s going to be more of a relaxing vacation so that I can prepare for it and as much as I bash the logistics, early preparation is nice too so you can get in the mood for traveling.
Brett: So that’s a little bit about Alicia and I, Alicia, did you want to share anything else?
Alicia: Uh, no, I actually, as you were talking through that ideal vacation and what kinds of trips there are, it gave me an idea for another episode that we should do sometime in the future that I think plays in well to our title. We haven’t yet really dived into in our efforts to lay a foundation what it means to discover your wilderness and I wonder how many of our listeners are going, it’s an interesting title, but why? So as you talked about the different types of vacations, I just got really excited about the fact that we’ve kind of finished up stage one and our foundation and now we can start building on it and talking about what is your wilderness?
Brett: Yeah, we’ll also do another episode on recapping the first few episodes so as to understand the framework that we take into account before planning travel, but if you found this helpful and you think that what we’ve just shared about will be exciting to hear about, make sure to like, subscribe, share it with anyone else who might find it valuable and we’ll come at you next week with some more content on how you can discover your wilderness and maybe we’ll talk next week about what exactly that means.
Alicia: Have an awesome week.
Brett: Have an awesome week, everyone. Stay healthy. Enjoy your travels. And…
Up Next:
Now that you have met the hosts, go take an adventure with Brett… maybe.