How To Choose Who To Go Travelling With

If you’re spending quarantine planning your next big adventure, whether a road trip or a luxury hotel visit, you might be wondering who to take with you. Travel can be a test of a friendship or a relationship, and no matter how well you get on with someone at home, that can all change when you’re sharing a hotel room. Here’s to choose the right travel companion. 

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Choose Someone With Common Interests

If your idea of a good vacation is exploring the local area and checking out museums, you need a travel buddy who enjoys the same things. If your vacation companion would rather stretch out by the pool all day, you’re likely to have arguments about what to do, and end up getting on each other’s nerves. 

Choose someone who enjoys the same things as you, or at least someone you are happy to compromise with and take it in turns to choose different activities. Before you agree to go away with someone, check out some travel advice for the area you’re thinking about visiting and make sure there’s something for both of you there. 

Discuss Your Budget

Everyone has different ideas about what is reasonable to spend while you’re on a vacation, and it’s important to discuss the limits before you go. If you have more disposable income than your friend and like to treat yourself to expensive dinners and cocktails while you’re away, you’re going to fall out with a travel buddy on a tighter budget who prefers to seek out a bargain meal. Have a chat about budget first and agree on what you’re willing to spend when you’re out together. You can always take yourself out without them if you’re looking for a pricier treat. 

Match Your Personalities

The fastest way to fall out is to head off on vacation with someone too different from yourself. If you like to plan everything in minute detail, you’ll definitely end up annoying a free-wheeling friend who prefers to just head out and see where the day takes them. Make sure you choose travel companion who you have lots in common with, feel comfortable with, and are able to talk to for hours a day without running out of things to say. 

If you go with someone who has a similar personality to you, you’re more likely to agree on what you want to do, where you want to go, and be able to spend all that time together without finding one another irritating. 

Avoid going away with anyone who is too opposite to you. At home, their zen-like approach to life might be a great counter-balance to your talkative, excitable nature, but if you’re together for an extended period without a break, these differences of personality can easily lead to clashes. 

Choosing the right person to travel with is important if you want to have a good time together and still be the same good friends when you come home. Much like living together, enjoying each other’s company socially is not a guarantee of success. 

Thoughts On Always Eating After 7PM

This post is brought to you by our sponsor, “Always Eat After 7 PM”. The opinions expressed below are my own.

It takes 21 days to make or break a habit, which might seem like a lot of days in a row to do something, but once you get past those three weeks, you've got a new lifestyle that makes you feel better about yourself. Over the last month, I've been using the new diet tactics in Always Eat After 7 PM: The Revolutionary Rule-Breaking Diet That Lets You Enjoy Huge Dinners, Desserts, and Indulgent Snacks—While Burning Fat Overnight by Joel Marion and it's changed the way I think about food. 

“In general, healthy fats can also help increase feelings of fullness and satisfaction because they regulate appetite through a number of mechanisms, including the release of appetite hormones. What’s more, combining fat with fiber has been shown to further increase the satiating potential of fat. The satiating power of fats is often one explanation offered to describe why some weight loss trials have shown that low-carbohydrate (and higher-fat) diets tend to lead to greater weight loss than low-fat diets.”

Over the course of the month, I've learned to cook and eat foods that keep me fuller longer and I can eat large portions of. It's given me more energy and focus, as well as making me feel better about myself and feeling healthier. It wasn't hard to change the when I was eating, as I already was doing intermittent fasting without realizing it. It's easy when you aren't a breakfast person already. Based on surprising science, Always Eat After 7 PM debunks popular diet myths and offers an easy-to-follow diet that accelerates fat-burning and allows you to indulge in your most intense food cravings: Eating the majority of your calories at night. 

Bestselling author, Joel Marion, is a fitness expert and nutritionist debunking the myths underlying traditional dieting and offers a simple, highly effective weight loss program. I think this diet is easy for everyone to follow and make it work for them and the foods they enjoy. I finally learned to take time to prep food to make cooking easier on me, and I sat down to meal plan in order to make the most of my shopping trips and using ingredients in more than one meal for the week, also saving me money.

Joel gives you the tools to change your eating habits for the better, feel good about it, and get excited about your meals. Most diets give you a sense of foreboding, because the restrictions on what you can and can't eat are strict and unappetizing. Knowing that you can't eat your favorite foods and that you can only eat a small amount of what you can eat just makes you sad, but with Always Eat After 7PM allows you to eat those foods you love and also tells you when to eat them so you get the most out of your diet. I know it will be simple to keep it up, because it's easy for me to follow.

Want to get started on your own weight loss journey, or just feel better about yourself, get fit, or have more energy? Now's the time to start! Always Eat After 7 PM: The Revolutionary Rule-Breaking Diet That Lets You Enjoy Huge Dinners, Desserts, and Indulgent Snacks—While Burning Fat Overnight by Joel Marion is now available to purchase. Learn more about the book and how to purchase here.

Learn more about my journey by seeing my previous posts:

• Post 1 - Getting started
• Post 2 - Why I chose this diet/book
• Post 3 - My progress

What's one food you can't give up?

This post is brought to you by our sponsor, “Always Eat After 7 PM”. The opinions expressed above are my own.

Saving for Vacation with Swagbucks

As a budget traveler, the more money I can save on my trip the better. If you are also looking for ways to add money to your vacation fund or save on luggage or other travel goodies, then look no further than Swagbucks. Here are just a few ways to get points that you can trade in for gift cards or Paypal credits:

Use Coupons

Swagbucks has coupons for things you want to buy at the grocery store. Get points for both printing and redeeming them.

Take Surveys

On your downtime, or while you're watching TV, or standing in line, take some surveys to earn Swagbucks. There is always a great list of surveys that fit into whatever time you have free.

Watch videos

Interested in celebrity news or new movies or current events? Watch featured videos to easily earn Swagbucks. I don't always love the videos, so I have them play in the background while I'm doing other things.

Web Search

If you use Swagbucks to search the web, they randomly give out Swagbucks. If there's a special event going on with collector's bills, you can earn even more than usual. 

Get Cashback in Swagbucks

I have SB on my Chrome browser where it will pop up the cashback button on eligible websites. If the cashback is better than Rakuten or has better coupons, I'll use that and then get my cashback in the form of Swagbucks. This can really help you rack up points quickly for payouts.

Sign up with this link and get 300 FREE Swagbucks (that's $3!) when you accrue 300 SB in your first 30 days. I've been using Swagbucks for 10 years or so, and I used it mostly for free Amazon gift cards for travel gear and party supplies. It really allows me to get more for my money. 

How would you use your free money from Swagbucks for your vacations?