We had just begun our trip and were already taking a pause.

As our route included Paris, we had planned to spend some time in my family. Bordeaux – where my family lives – was not directly on our route but it was a rare opportunity to spend three uninterrupted weeks with my parents, sisters, brother-in-law and nephews, an occasion we rarely had.

Besides enjoying our family time, we also had to finalize a lot of our trip’s planning and logistics. Traveling for a year is a lot of fun but there are also multiple things to take care of, especially when using land and sea transportation.

During our stay in France, we tackled three major tasks:

Money, money, money (management)!

How would we manage our finances on the road? At that point, we were following a general Excel budget we had used to plan our savings and key pre-trip expenses and a notepad to follow our daily expenses. But based on our overspending in New York and London, we needed to find a better system.

After some research, Ben found an app called Toshl, the perfect tool for daily budgeting in multiple currencies. We could also use it on our cellphones to register our expenses, even when offline.

Planning of our next leg: How would we get to Saint Petersburg?

Even if we didn’t want to plan too much, we knew we had to be in Saint Petersburg mid-September, as we had pre-paid our train tickets between Saint Petersburg and Beijing. We now had to organize our trip from Bordeaux to St Petersburg. Our original plan was to travel through Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. This itinerary was expensive and required multiple night trains and ferries.

After some thought, we decided to go through the Baltic States instead. Our new route would bring us through Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland. Although this would be a shorter (and more affordable) route, we would still not have much time to travel it (a mere 16 days for 6 countries).

Mongolian visa: If you don’t have it, you don’t get in!

We had our Russian and Chinese visas but I still needed to obtain my Mongolian visa (Ben’s Canadian citizenship dispensed him from that one). Since we did not have time in Paris, I sent my passport by mail to the Mongolian Embassy with my visa request and waited. We had counted the number of days needed to get my passport back in time. It gave us 48 hours before our departure from Bordeaux.

The plan was perfect.

And it worked! We got the visa right on time.

Sometimes, you just have to trust the universe.

Since it worked, I can now share this platitude with you!

After three weeks of drinking too much wine, playing Tarot and going to the beach, it was time to get back on the road, our next stop, Berlin.