About Us - Travelling Gleefully

Hey!

We’re Katherine and Krissie, a couple from Australia. We met in 2015 thanks to separate overseas trips that we shared about online, and we’ve been talking about travelling ever since.

We hardly travelled for the first several years of our relationship while we were each finishing our university degrees (Katherine in Media, Krissie in Psychology), but had grand plans to move to London in May of 2020. When Covid quashed that plan, we got jobs in our fields and kept saving like crazy, hoping that one day we would be able to head out into the world together.

In the two and a half years that followed, we got a taste of the 9-5 life, and it wasn’t at all what we wanted. We dropped our plan of moving to London to work, and instead began planning a year of full-time travel instead.

About 4 years after we began saving for our move, we quit our jobs at the end of 2022, and set off from Sydney.

We had no idea how much it would cost us to do the trip we were dreaming of, so we weren’t sure we would make it to the end of a year. We ended up being under budget enough that we were able to travel for a little over 15 months, arriving home in February 2024.

We’ve travelled to over 30 countries together, and have been to a few others separately before we met as well. We love to share our best tips for travelling on a realistic budget, as well as the best things to do in all the amazing destinations we’ve visited. We also love sharing our real budget and expenses, so you can have a realistic insight into the cost of full time travel!

We launched this blog in November 2023 so keep your eyes peeled for lots of new blog posts coming soon. Happy reading, and safe travels!

Katherine and Krissie x

FAQ

When did we meet?

We met online at the start of 2015.

How much money did we save for the trip?

We each saved about $60,000 AUD for this trip. We originally planned to travel for a year, meaning we had about $330 together each day. We decided to aim lower, with a goal of $275 a day so we could hopefully travel for longer. We’ve managed to spend even less than that, and we’re now travelling for 15 months (a budget of around $260 per day together).

At the end of the 15 months, we had spent just under $111,000 with a daily average of $240.14.

How did we save so much money?

We have always both been savers when it comes to money, and we both have prioritised travel since before we met. We made sure to put money away for this trip from every pay since we started planning in 2018. We always put money in our savings as soon as we get paid, and plan our budgets to live off the rest.

We have been very privileged to have university educations, allowing us to get reasonably well-paid jobs (although we’ve always earned below the median salary for where we live). We also spent some time living with Krissie’s parents during the pandemic, which allowed us to save some extra money.

What does Travelling Gleefully mean?

The “travelling” part should be pretty self-explanatory haha but the “Gleefully” part has two meanings. First is the obvious, that we’re happy travelling. Both of us feel like when we are travelling, we are our best selves. But also, we both love Glee 😂 We actually met each other thanks to Darren Criss (if you’re also a fan, please let us know!), and we thought it would be great to have a little nod to the show since our relationship wouldn’t exist without it.

What are our favourite places?

We’ve loved most of the cities and countries we’ve been to, but some stand outs are Italy, Vietnam, and the Greek Islands. Special mention goes to NYC, which was actually part of the reason we met!

Where have you travelled to together?

We have been to quite a few Australian destinations together, including Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Byron Bay.

Other than a weekend overlap in Bali in 2017, all of our international travel together has been on our world trip. Here’s the route from our whirlwind 15 months overseas: