Your Own Expectations - Views from bfreebwell.com

I received an email for another milleniallist, who is passionate about breaking free of the status quo, and I stumbled upon an organization she is affiliated with which has written some awesome posts, I recommend these two especially:

Breaking Free Other's Expectations and Finding Your OWN

How to stay on your path to finding what makes you happy when others don't understand

We Leave Tomorrow!

4Packing Recommendations 4

There were a few different blogs that I referenced for really great packing lists, I have attached the hyperlinks here for your convince:

Girls Complete Packing List, What to bring vs. what not to bring, Packing Light!

And then of coarse I modified my list to fit me and the activities I plan on doing while backpacking! 

Luckily my sister isn't bringing much with her, so I was able to put our shared toiletries in her backpack, for example we purchase regular sized conditioner and shampoo because the travel size ones are only good for about 3 washes if you have shoulder length or longer hair. 

This is the backpack I am bringing, as well as a leather messenger bag for daily use when we leave our packs at the hostel. 

   

Everything I have read saids to pack as light as possible, so that is what I have attempted to do, but I still have the burning urge to keep adding things to my pack!

With Love, G

Attempting Yoga Tricks with the Fam

\ 

I was teaching my little cousin some yoga moves and things got a little carried away! 

   

With Love, G

Planning a backpacking trip to Italy and Greece... Where do you start?

Once my sister and I decided we wanted to make this happen, we then realized that we should probably start to put some information together and plan a bit. Since I was living about 600 miles away from her at the time, we weren't able to meet up and put together a game plan, so we opted for the next best thing (and my lifeline all through out college) Google Docs.

In order to keep an excel sheet up to date real time, while we both accumulated information we decided to create a Google Excel Doc where we could both edit it instantaneously. Here is a screen shot of how we organized our budget, our timeline, to do list, places we wanted to see, ect. I highly recommend using this platform to organize yourself a bit :)

Then we started filling it in! I used sites like Nomadic Matt, the savvy backpacker to get averages on how much it would cost for hostels, food, transportation, activities, etc.

And we created a general timeline for ourselves, we don't want to plan everything out to a "T" but we do want to at least have a general idea, and make sure we end up in Athens at the end of the trip to catch our flight!

My sister and I are the adventurous type, so we have been looking for activities like parasailing, scuba diving, and more, in these cool locations, and I have found that Nomadic Matt's travel guides are a really good place to start! I have been looking through the Greek Isles Activities on his site, and then taking it a step further to research the individual companies that we might make a reservation through and also so I can see how much it will cost.

So far this is been the method to our madness I hope it helps you get started in planning your next trip!

With Love, G

The Most Expensive Part of Traveling.. Airfare

I have recently discovered this website called skyscanner.com, and it has some amazing features. For one you can look at the entire year and see when it is the cheapest to fly to any given destination! Not only that but you can look at the cheapest city or country to fly into on a whole continent! Pretty awesome, especially when you are traveling on a budget like I am. That is the website I used to buy my tickets to and from Europe for my backpacking trip this summer! Click here to see the website for yourself!

With love, G

Breaking Free of the Rat Race is SCARY!

I moved away from home right after college, and started my first "big girl" job in a "big city" and was headed down the road called "success". Well, turns out society's version of success and mine are quite different, but I wouldn't have known this if I hadn't spent the last year away from everything I love and know.

And now I am trying something new, I am trying to build a career out of what I enjoy, and so far I haven't completely figured out what that means, but I know that what I had can't be it. And sometimes the best way to figure out you want is to first figure out what you don't want.

If you are experiencing anything similar to this I suggest you watch this video!



This is Water from Patrick Buckley on Vimeo.

Everyone talks about breaking out of your "comfort zone" and to break free of being content and safe, well, it is not easy. Who really is every ready to defy everything we have been taught we must do our entire lives? Separating other people's expectations from your own is hard work, but if you are interested in diving deeper into what you really want, think about these questions:

-Write down a list of what you want
-Now look at that list again and think about which of those come from an internal joy and which come from an external source
-Think about what external source caused you to want (or think you should want) those things
-Now focus on either eliminating those externally driven wants or at least toning down your efforts towards them, and focus more of your energy on the ones that bring you internal joy

The steps above are a combination of questions and ideas from a book I am reading called "20 Something, 20 Everything" by Christine Hassler (which I HIGHLY recommend) as well as this article (but don't be decieved by the title): "The Three Most Important Questions You Can Ask Your Teenager" by Michael Mulligan. Honestly I don't think it should be titled that, but either way it has some really great ideas and concepts in the article that I related to ALOT.
Click here to read the full article, and let me know what you think!

With love,  G

Bucket List: Italy & Greece

Me - "Okay so in about three weeks I won't have a job,"
Sister - "AWESOME! Lets go on the backpacking trip to Europe that we have always wanted to go on!"
Me - "(pause, considering rational things like money, and rent, ehh f*%! it)... I'm in!"

And that's how it happened, we bought a plane ticket to Rome and three weeks later a plane ticket back to the US from Athens, other than that we don't know what the heck we are doing... (If you have any insider tips on things most tourists don't see let me know!) 
So needless to say, I have been obsessively looking at photos of the Greek Isles, and other islands in the Mediterranean, and well... there is no shortage of them. When my sister and I were deciding where we wanted to go and Greece came up, the first thing I though of (as any true 20 something girl should) was Sisterhood and the Traveling Pants. I want to find my Kostas Dunas! Oh and you can bet I will be jumping off that same dock that Alexis Bledel, as Lena Kaligaris, jumped off of in Santori, "can you turn my black roses red!"                           
Anyway... so I will be traveling through these two countries with my little sister. We have never backpacked before, and I have only stayed in a hostel once (and right when I walked in the bar tender puked on the ground and the hostel manager dropped a towel over it and went to bed, good first impression). Needless to say, I am a little nervous, our plan is to bring one of those plastic bed sheets parents put on mattresses for their little kids when they wet the bed, and to put it over the mattress in the hostels and then to lay our sleeping bags on top of that, hopefully eliminating the chance of bedbugs or lice or just sleeping on a bed someone just had a "really good time in", yikes!   

If you have any tips please let me know! :) 

With love, G