Our Long, Strange Tour

Welcome to the GITV Travel Blog!

From both of us Gypsies, let us welcome you to our brand spanking new travel blog. From here on out, we’ll be regularly updating this little blog with tales from the road, photos, and videos of our travels. “But what’s with the name?” you’re probably asking yourself.

GITV = Get In the Van

Go ahead, don't be scared, just GITV!
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Go ahead, don’t be scared, just GITV!

One of our favorite bands – Umphrey’s McGee – has a song called “Get In the Van.” Not surprisingly, Umphreaks eventually took this phrase and used it as a way to encourage others to join in the traveling party and go on ter. As we’re always trying to persuade people to go to shows, travel, or even move to the other side of the world with us, we figured it would be a good name for the travel blog.

Introduction to the Website

Some of you may know us very well. Others of you may just know us as those two crazy hippies you raged with once. Even others of you might not know us at all (yet). Either way, you’ve probably missed out on a lot of what’s happened with us in the last five years. That’s where this website comes in. Here’s a crash course to the different sections:

  • About: Pretty self-explanatory – read our own personal bios, the story of how we met, and a write-up of what we’re trying to do with this website.
  • Timeline: Great for people with short attention spans, the timeline takes you through the past five years with big colorful picture collages and short descriptions of the major events in our lives.
  • GITV: This is the blog portion of the site. We’ll do our best to update it as we go along.

Our Long, Strange Tour

'Merica
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3 months coast-to-coast across the USA.

America, F**k Yeah!!

Sometime in the fall of 2012, we decided that we didn’t really like working. It’s not that we didn’t like our jobs; it’s just that we didn’t like having very limited vacation time. As such, we made a choice to bust our asses for that school year, resign from our jobs, and hit the road full time. Instead of taking another short two-week trip back to the States, we started our journey off with a 3-month coast-to-coast trip that took us to the three biggest cities in the country, our nation’s capital, ten Phish shows, a bunch of national parks, tons of sporting events, and much, much more. We spent quality time with family, friends, bands, and teams, and it was awesome. Keep an eye on the website in the future, as plenty of our stories, pictures, and videos from this trip will begin to surface. For now, here’s an interactive map that shows you our route:

Banana Pancake Trail

After such an epic trip around the US, you’d think we’d be ready to settle down a bit and go back to work. You would, of course, be wrong. In fact, we’re only just getting started. After packing up all of our worldly belongings in Beijing and moving them down to Kunming, we’re setting off on an 8+ month backpacking trip around the Banana Pancake Trail. If you’re not familiar with that term, it basically just refers to making the loop around SE Asia. Ever since our first backpacking trip around Thailand and Laos in 2011, we’ve been fascinated with this part of the world – the place where everyone seems to be on vacation, whiskey is cheaper than water, and things like the Full Moon Party and In the Tubing are just par for the course. We plan to travel slow, maximize our time in each country, and really dig our toes into each place as best we can. For this trip, we’re throwing plans out the window, and we are setting out only with a rough idea of the path we want to take. With at least 30 days in each country, we’ll be able to travel on a whim quite a bit. Just like a couple of Phishheads, eh? We even need to improvise our vacations. On this trip, we plan to hit:

  • Vietnam
  • Cambodia
  • Laos
  • Thailand
  • Malaysia
  • Myanmar
  • Philippines
We're pretty pumped about getting back to the Philippines!
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We’re pretty pumped about getting back to the Philippines!

We hope to make a giant loop out of this trip and return to China via Hong Kong, where we’ll take the long way home and ride the train to a few other places in the Middle Kingdom before eventually getting back to Kunming, finding an apartment, and going back to work. If all goes well, it’ll be a full year of full-time traveling. As such, we’re calling this whole adventure “pre-tirement.” We’re pretty sure that word doesn’t exist in the common vernacular yet, so here’s what it means:

pre-tirement: to retire for a short period of time in your younger years; to travel full-time in favor of working full-time

So there you have it, folks. At this point you should be all caught up on what us silly hippies are doing. We’re excited about sharing our experiences through this new site of ours, and we hope you’ll all get in the van by following along on the blog and our various social media platforms.

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