Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Friends, did you know that the Bible knows nothing of vacations? It's true. We, we Americans, we think vacation is our right. And I've been told that the Europeans are even more dedicated to a whole lot of it. And yet it's not really a biblical concept. However, here at Abraham's Wallet, we think that travel is an opportunity for you as a dad to do all sorts of good things for the spiritual, relational, intellectual, even physical culture of your family. And so today we're going to talk about how you can use travel. Spring breaks coming up. You could even put this to work next week. How can you use travel to build your family culture? So let's dive into it today on Abraham's Wallet podcast.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: Run your home and your dough like a biblical boss. You know, Mark, before you even get started, I have a thought. Thought just based on your first words. That is something I've been learning recently from the Bible. Old book.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: You've heard of it, the Book of Books.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. You know, there's many times when Jesus uses the word rest. So for instance, come unto me all you who are weary and heavy laden, and take my yoke upon you, and you will have rest.
So that word rest, there's many kinds of rest. Sometimes we can think of, oh, we'll have eternal rest. That's something that Hebrews four, I think talks about entering into God's rest. It's clearly talking about heaven. But the kind of rest that Jesus is talking about when he says, take my yoke upon you is a short term breather, just a breather for rest. And that we all need that. I think we could make the case that God built that into his design of the calendar, that we're supposed to have rest every week. So we. One of the things I hear in this topic is that if you can design a way of rest, and I'm going to use another non Bible word, recreation, that is the recreation of one's soul. That travel can really help accentuate that whole thing if you're kind of designing this for your family. Am I right or am I wrong?
[00:02:11] Speaker A: I think you're right. Okay.
I also have to say something before we get really into the, into the good stuff today.
[00:02:19] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: You might notice I'm wearing a hoodie today, Steve. And it's. Does that mean that it's cold?
[00:02:24] Speaker B: Cold where you are?
[00:02:25] Speaker A: It is chilly. But mainly I'm starting to get ready and we're talking about travel today. I'm going to do some serious traveling tomorrow.
Because last Wednesday my oldest daughter, she's a basketball player. And we had playoff game number one in which the Intermountain Christian School Lions, which is this hoodie, they went up against the Vanguard School, whatever their mascot is. Have you ever heard, Stephen, of the Kingston family in Utah?
[00:02:59] Speaker B: No. Are they. Is that the same as the Kingston Trio?
[00:03:03] Speaker A: No, the Kingston. You could call it a family or a cult, but they have their own charter school here. They are. They are like violent, fraudulent polygamists who live in the heart of Salt Lake City.
So they're constantly in the news for violent crime and fraud, and that's kind of their thing. But they also have a charter school which has been in and out of accreditation over the years. And we played this charter school in playoff game number one. And just to let you know how
[00:03:35] Speaker B: it went, they're kind of like a Mormon mafia. Is it what it sounds like?
[00:03:38] Speaker A: Yeah. But I think that the official Mormon church kind of disowns them because of some of their practices.
[00:03:44] Speaker B: Well, of course.
They're the seedy underworld of Mormonism.
[00:03:48] Speaker A: Right, right, right. But after the first quarter of our game, it was 28 to 2 Intermountain Christian School Lions. So we put a. We put a beating on them. And now tomorrow, I will be driving nine hours total to go down and back to a game in southern Utah to see these Lions play.
That's just one reason that you might travel as a father. You might travel for an athletic experience.
The Manual family has done that.
You guys have done that to see those Aggies play football even recently.
[00:04:24] Speaker B: We have been known in the past. Remember when we liked the NBA? Do you remember those days?
[00:04:29] Speaker A: I do remember those days.
[00:04:31] Speaker B: I would go to Indianapolis to watch a professional basketball game back in those days. But we don't do that anymore.
Just a little side thing, little point of humor. We could make a short list. When you mention the Intermountain Christian Lions, there's only a very small group of mascots that you're going to find with a Christian school. Am I right?
[00:04:54] Speaker A: You're so right. That of the last eight basketball teams we've played, I think seven have been the Lions.
We had the Winged Lions. Yes, we had the Lions. The Lions. The. The Knights.
[00:05:07] Speaker B: You might have an eagle thrown in there.
[00:05:09] Speaker A: The Eagles could have an eagle. Little Isaiah 43 reference. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:05:15] Speaker B: Knights. Little Ephesians 6. The Knights. They got their armor and their sword.
[00:05:19] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
My high school was the Trojans, which I always thought was weird because that's a. That's a weird combo Pagan group. Not really a Christian group.
[00:05:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:32] Speaker A: But yeah, you are right. I, I don't know.
Our local high school down the road here is the Beat Diggers.
What?
Yeah, what's the. Beat Diggers are just down the street.
[00:05:45] Speaker B: What's a Beat Digger?
[00:05:47] Speaker A: I think it's some. It's one who digs beets.
[00:05:49] Speaker B: Oh, beets.
[00:05:50] Speaker A: The food beat. Like B E E T Diggers. The Beat Diggers.
[00:05:56] Speaker B: This is the, this is the school's mascot.
[00:05:58] Speaker A: Indeed.
[00:05:59] Speaker B: Oh, I would value a piece of, a piece of paraphernalia.
[00:06:05] Speaker A: Well, maybe I can get a South Jordan Beat Diggers hoodie for you.
[00:06:09] Speaker B: Oh my goodness, that's. That is tantalizing.
[00:06:14] Speaker A: Okay, I didn't know that. All right, that's.
[00:06:17] Speaker B: But you would have to travel to find that. Speaking of travel.
[00:06:22] Speaker A: Speaking of travel, let's get to the point. I opened with a kind of a controversial comment.
I might have poked your sacred cow just a little bit. But it's true the Bible doesn't talk about vacations, but it does talk a lot about travel. And in fact God commanded all able bodied Israelite males to travel to the central sanctuary, which later became in Jerusalem, three times a year minimum for major festivals. Those festivals were the Feast of Unleavened Bread. We call that one the Passover, the Feast of Weeks and the Feast of Booths, Sukkot. Those three times you had to travel. So I don't think we can say, you know, God's anti travel, Deuteronomy 6:16, it says three times a year all your males shall appear before the Lord at the place he chooses, at the feast of Unleavened Bread, the feast of Weeks and the feast of Tabernacles.
So there's something about hitting the road that God actually thought was so valuable that he designed it in to the commanded rhythms of his people. And we've been reading Deuteronomy as a family.
God's not like, if you have a chance, do these things, there's some pretty harsh consequences that include things like expulsion from your community forever if you don't follow these rules.
Um, so he's very serious about it.
Why do you think he did this? There's probably something, like I said, to be gained just from a change of scenery.
Obviously he also, when this, when this law was established, he knew that he would be putting a temple in place and say, right here, this is where you're going to worship me. And we here at Abraham's Wallet think that you can use this, this wisdom that was built into the Israelite calendar. You're not required to go to Jerusalem or something like that.
But you can use the wisdom here to lead your family spiritually, even though you certainly don't have to travel to obey God. So we're not here to tell you, hey, you made a great budget this year, but it doesn't have travel, you disobedient fool. That's not the point of the episode. We just want to tell you about a tool that a lot of you are already doing the thing. You're already planning time and money for travel. You just maybe haven't put any effort into making that more than just a big exhale and sitting in a beach chair for a week.
[00:08:51] Speaker B: Yeah. So we want to know, how do you make the most of these trips? How can you maybe tie heartstrings? How can you, I can't think of a better word than exploit. How do you exploit the time and to make the most of it? Yes, we're all ears.
[00:09:06] Speaker A: Tell us, why might you travel? I could come up with a at least three reasons. One, to celebrate or mark special occasions.
Two, to rest. You mentioned rest. It's actually something that we have to pursue. It doesn't just come from sitting still.
And three, for the development of new capitals in our family. So we talk a lot about the five capitals. Those are spiritual, relational, physical, intellectual, or financial.
You can actually build all five of those. You're like financial capital. I lose that when I travel. Have you ever been on a business trip? I'm going on one in a week and I'm doing it because I'm going to go try to make some money. These are all five involved in travel. I have a few examples of things we do. Steven, I have, I have some examples of things you do, but I'll let you share them. My wife and I try to mark our anniversaries with a little bit of getaway time because our anniversary happens in December. That's often combined for us with a Goals summit experience where we get away and sort of review and plan. That's always refreshing to our marriage and productive time. If you've been listening to this, you've heard me talk about our adventure trips. We can't afford to do this every single year, but every two to three years we have been saving, saving, saving to make some big world adventure happen.
The first one we did, we went to India for like three weeks as a family and it was transformative. The first week was just total shock. So if we had taken a normal week long vacation, it wouldn't have done nearly as much. But by the end we were like thinking about the world in a different way. A couple years ago we went to Europe and brought extended family with us. And so that was meaningful. And then this summer we're headed to the, the homeland of some of those NBA players we don't watch anymore. We're going to go to Croatia and Montenegro and kind of, I feel like they're producing some, some Jokic and Lucas and things like that. Of the world.
[00:11:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:11:17] Speaker A: But that's the plan this summer. So that, that took some serious planning and time.
Stephen, tell me about you guys travel rhythms. I wrote some things down that I've observed you doing that I thought, oh, that tick boxes. But maybe you have some at the top of your mind.
[00:11:35] Speaker B: We often travel for what we would think of as tent pole holidays. So as much as we're good at, I don't know, gently mocking people whose spirituality revolves around Christmas and Easter, those are still important holidays. So we want to be with family during Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter Passover, depending on which side of the family we're with. It depends on which, which one we're going to be celebrating, but we will typically travel for say, two out of three of those.
I try to mix in. It's been more in the last couple years, but I've always thought once every other year I want to do a spiritual themed travel for my family.
So we've been on mission trips a lot lately. We've been to Israel as a family.
And it's funny, I know that you guys are always kind of ahead of schedule. It seems like you make your plans in January for the summer and for the fall, which is inspiring to me. We are just now kind of trying to land the plan on where our family is going to go this summer. We have a few weeks that are open at the second half of the summer and one of our finalists is doing the Footsteps of Paul in Greece.
So that's a possibility. I would, if that happens, I would see that as this is building spiritual capital. If you go to Israel, for instance, you know this. But if you go to Israel, spend time at these sites, you walk away. There's no convincing me that the Bible isn't true or that these stories are made up. I've been there. I just. It just builds your faith. That's all I can say to take time to go walk along these same places. So for the last several years, you and I have traveled to Texas in the summer to see clients. And while we're seeing clients, we've had kids at a Christian camp. So those are Things that I think those are all worth traveling for.
One of my goals is not only to tie heartstrings and have experiences with my kids through travel, but it is important to me that my children have a wide worldview, that this is one of the values of going on mission trips. For instance, we've been going to Mexico for a few years now, and it's really important for forming our children's worldview. So.
[00:14:00] Speaker A: No, that's great. I. I mean, even thinking back to trips you did when your kids were younger, I always think about the. The Laura Ingalls Wilder trip that you guys took.
And I don't know if you'd call that spiritual or intellectual or both, but it's been cool to see. I think that even things like traveling for sports, some people are going, oh, gosh, that's not. We don't care about sports. We're way too Christian for that.
And I've had some really meaningful connections with my wife. We traveled to see a concert that we really liked. It wasn't a worship concert. It was just some musician that we thought was really fun and gifted.
That was a relational building trip. I can't speak as an expert on this because I haven't done it, but since my little girls were tiny, I've told them, when you're 17, we have to take a trip together, dad and daughter, and it has to be a challenge that is hard enough that there is a realistic chance we will fail at our objective.
Mom said it has to also have less than 1% probability of death.
So that eliminated a lot of the things I wanted to do, like raft the Amazon or something. But no, no climbing Everest.
My youngest is nine. So that trip is way out in the future. But we already talk about it. Like, what. What kind of things do you think might we want to challenge ourselves with? And we could spend a year learning something just to go do that together. So lots of opportunities.
I want to talk today, though, about some practical hacks to making this possible for families and some traps you can fall into. Because, Steven, praise God, whether it's work or fun or whatever, we've gotten to both. Probably travel a lot more than average. I know for sure that there's listeners that I've talked to that are like super duper travel hackers and would make us look like peasants with their travel itineraries. How so? Great. If that's you, call us. You can come be on the show and educate us all.
But I also know there's some people who are like, we haven't taken our first plane ride as a family and we don't think that that's at all required. But we've been blessed. We gotten to do a lot of traveling and we want to share some, some learnings. So, Steve, I don't know, what do you think? Traps or practical hacks? Where would you like to begin?
[00:16:37] Speaker B: Let's start with traps.
[00:16:39] Speaker A: Okay, I kind of referenced this in the start, but my first trap is doing the standard American thing and viewing your vacations as the, quote, happy part of your life.
Don't do this.
Justin Wolfenberg has been on the podcast a few times and he says it's better if this is like, my life stinks. I have to go sit in my cubicle and I just look forward to my two weeks of vacation every year.
You would be better off not going anywhere and using that two weeks to make your life not suck so much.
Like, spend a week building an awesome fire pit in your backyard so that you're excited to come home to it all week. Or, you know, so if you start out from this place where travel is the thing, thing I live for, and my escape from the ho hum, you're kind of destined to have an underwhelming experience at best and a really sad experience at worst because you're like, I get this feeling even sometimes where I go, oh, this is a week long trip and it's Wednesday and I'm starting to see that it's about to be over and I will have to go back to the, to the drag. Personally, I felt that a lot more when I was doing things professionally that I was just not that invested in.
We do think for sure there is extreme nobility in going out and providing for your family. So I'm not saying you have to have a job that's just your passion and you love it. It's like being on vacation to go to work. I don't think that's true at all, but I do think you should before you go spending gobs of money on travel and make sure that you have optimized the part of your year which is the majority of it where you're at home and say, are there things that are just out of whack here that we need to address before we can go and have experiences elsewhere.
Have we trained our kids at all or are they going to be a disaster when we travel? Well, just by training kids so that you could confidently say we have a three year old that's going to do excellent on an airplane because they know how to sit and Respect our, our instructions.
That would be not just beneficial to you when you do travel, it would also be beneficial to you every day that you're at home. So that's, that's my first tip. Although it's not specifically a travel tip, it's a, before you travel, ensure that you're not escaping something just to come back to it as a wreck.
[00:19:07] Speaker B: I think that, I think that's definitely a trap that people find, which is, I don't really like my life.
It's basically that travel is kind of a drug where I get to hallucinate for a week and then I come back and go, oh, this again.
It's not going to help you long term. It's not going to build anything.
[00:19:25] Speaker A: My second trap has to do with luxury. You know, this is one of the topics I like to talk about because I think there's the prosperity gospel folks out there that say, if you really trust in the Lord, he's going to give you a Bentley in a private jet. And we don't think that.
And we've also both come from kind of a spiritual world where for, for a while, any luxury was sort of viewed as well. If you, if you have any luxury in your life, you're like the JV team for Jesus. You're not really pushing hard on the gas pedal for, for Christ.
And I think this trap is like most traps in life, a road with a ditch on both sides. So there's overdoing luxury. And I will tell you in every category where luxury exists, it is very hard to taste it and then go backwards.
I talk about, I didn't have a, I never owned a car that had a leather seats until I bought my truck in 2019, bought a used truck with leather seats. And now I'm like, well, that's just table stakes now. Could never imagine going backwards on that. And that might sound real unspiritual to you, but just know that if you're judging me, it's because you're still back in that mindset.
[00:20:43] Speaker B: That's because you have a cloth seat.
Mark, I'll give a confession here. I now have table stakes and a spoiled requirement that's now part of car purchasing for me. It's the adaptive cruise control. I'll never ever go back again. I must have it.
[00:21:02] Speaker A: I think it's cute that you think adaptive cruise control will exist in two years and by then our AIs will just drive us everywhere. Oh, okay, okay. But you're right. I, I tried adaptive cruise control this summer and I, I Find myself constantly back in my 2016 truck going, why is this thing not just stay where I want it?
That's a, that's a good feature.
I've talked about this, but I wrote the notes for this episode right as I got back from my 20th wedding anniversary trip.
And we went to Thailand, just the wife and I, and we wanted kind of a mixture of relaxing, warm place with some adventure mixed in. So.
And we saw a great deal on plane tickets. This. I'm going to give you numbers to, to fly to Thailand for round trip for the two of us was going to be like $2,100 for the tickets, one each.
That was total. So it was a good deal, I think, you know, 1100 roughly per person.
And I saw that for 3200 or $3300, I could upgrade that flight not to the comfort plus Stephen, but to the delta one.
Yes, I've seen the delta one as I walked by it and turned the opposite direction and saw their beds and their bows, yes, noise canceling headphones and their little grooming kits and their white tablecloths.
But I've never experienced the Delta 1.
And I will say I was buying tickets now for this summer's trip as a family to go to Europe and,
[00:22:42] Speaker B: and the first thing you did was to look, see, I wonder what Delta one would cost because that's what I
[00:22:47] Speaker A: really would like to do a hundred percent. And I actually called the airline and said I'm trying to upgrade just my wife and I and leave my kids in the back. And you can't do that on an international flight they won't let your kids on.
But yeah, it is, it's crazy because when I got into that seat, I had never experienced a flight with that level of luxury.
Now I'm like, man, if I could just do that each time, I really enjoyed it. So it's hard to move backwards and you have to be thoughtful about not just can I afford it, but is this the precedent I want to set? I took Kyla, my oldest daughter, to Cincinnati a year and a half or so ago for your oldest daughter's quinceanera.
And they said, oh, you travel a lot, Mark, come on up to the front, have a first class seat. And I said I'm going to decline that because I don't want to have my daughter in first class quite yet.
I'm not judging you. If you have first class tickets for your family, you can do that. But for me, I just said it's so hard to move backwards on the Luxury scale, that it's worth it to me to sit in a smaller seat on a relatively short flight to not break the seal on that experience for her. And if she gets to a point where, and she's stewarding wealth where that's a totally reasonable expense, great. But I don't really want to set that expectation in my kids at this point in their lives.
[00:24:15] Speaker B: Totally fair.
[00:24:16] Speaker A: The other ditch on this road is underdoing luxury. This is a real thing too. When I was a relatively newlywed, I had gone to South America as a college student for a year and studied abroad. And I wanted to take my wife to experience some of the things I'd seen. And we were pretty broke. But I said, we're going to do this trip. We saved up some money, did it on a budget. And I reserved the same types of accommodations for us in South America as a married couple that I had reserved for myself as a single backpacking traveler, which meant in some cases shared bunk rooms in hostels. And it was really a wonderful experience when I was 22 and getting to meet people from all over the world and sit around campfires at night, it was not the experience my new bride was looking for in a travel I'll be darn experience. So it would have been worth it to bump just a little bit. Maybe we're not going to the Ritz, but just a little bit of a bump up to say a private room.
[00:25:27] Speaker B: Private room, yeah, sure.
[00:25:30] Speaker A: So don't underdo it, but don't overdo it. And be very wary of this principle that when, when you taste luxury, it's a lot harder to go backwards than it is to go forwards.
[00:25:42] Speaker B: This is one of those issues, Mark, that we bump up against on Abe's wallet repeatedly.
We could be talking about 10 different things.
And the fact is that luxury is something that we just have to be aware of. We have to be careful to go. I mustn't assume this for my life or else I'm going to become jaded, self centered punk. I don't want to do that. And I also don't. I want to receive a nice thing with gladness.
So I would see it something like the way that you handle whiskey. Can you take a little sip of whiskey and enjoy that? That's kind of a nice moment there. And I can put that down and move on with my life. Or is it, I gotta have this all the time. And if you have to have it all the time, it's to your own detriment. It will be your undoing financially and spiritually, if you just demand, we just have the, we have the best of everything. Which I don't know when this is airing, but we're recording this during Lo Doefeb. And one of the great things about lofeb is that you do not get luxury for anything in any way. That it's all low living, it's all being very circumspect about your life.
I'm in, I'm in our office right now, as you know, Mark, and we have a little, there's a little, there's a little tiny fridge in our mini kitchen over there. And that thing is like, it's like a beeping red light right now. And it's going, I need sodas and I need frozen foods for Stephen to have lunch when he's in the office. It's, it's a wasteland right now. And I, the luxury meter in me is going, would be nice to have some fine foods in there, but I'm not going to get them for the rest of the month because it's good for my soul.
And I think your example of not wanting Kyla to be in first class is a really good one.
You just proved on this wonderful trip with your wife that you're not afraid of having, having nice things if it's, if the price is right. And you, you know, the, the moment is right, but you're also wise about you're not letting you know, opening the floodgates at all times. I must have the finest of everything.
I think that was real wisdom for you to say, I don't want that for my daughter right now. So it's something that we just repeatedly come across as we're stewarding wealth, is knowing how to handle luxury. And it would be, I'll just say this definitively, finally, it would be unwise. I don't care how much money you have in the bank. It would be unwise and not good for your soul if you said at all times, we're having the best of everything always. That would not be good for you. Wait, did you close the loop on what you did with Delta 1?
Because you gave us some numbers.
[00:28:29] Speaker A: Yeah, the Delta 1 upgrade was like $3,300 for both of us round trip. So we're talking, I mean, not nothing, $1,100 upgrade, and yet dramatically worth it for that experience.
And the fun part, Steve, is when you take the Delta 1 from Salt Lake to Korea and you have a connection from Korea to Thailand, the Asians know how to do the luxury. I'll Just say better than we do.
[00:29:00] Speaker B: That is a fact.
[00:29:02] Speaker A: And so I was also bumped to their hyper premium cabin on that short six hour flight from South Korea to Thailand. And it was even better than the Delta flight. So awesome. Again, not something I've had to slap my own hand as it reached into the Delta 1 cookie jar for future flights and say, no, this is not your new norm.
Yeah, but for a 20th anniversary trip, worth it given where we were at. Again, this all is in submission to a budget and has been planned as part of the long term financial plan.
Okay. My other trap though is travel perks.
Again, this is a road.
If you have four kids and you fly to see grandma and grandpa twice a year.
Steven, if you have two kids and you fly and grandma lives in Houston, please take two minutes to sign them up for frequent flyer numbers with whatever airline you use. Because you will be surprised that after three or four years you'll open that account and go, wow, we have a free plane ticket. Yeah, that's just, that's smart. Don't pass it up. If you use a debit card every day and you're responsible and debt has never been a big problem for your family, you can sign up for a credit card and you will pay it off every month. It will not be any different than using your debit card and they will give you. In our case, we signed up for a credit card and got a lot of points, enough for a whole one of those annual anniversary trips end to end covered just for signing up and spending our normal spending on that credit card.
So don't pass up on these perks. Even the credit card that I use for my day to day, it has all these travel perks that don't just. They don't call you and say, now we see you're going on a trip, be sure you use these things. But when I got on American Express and clicked benefits, I was like, oh my goodness, there's so many things that I have to click opt in. And then when I do, that rental car I reserved is suddenly upgraded to a premium rental car for free.
[00:31:13] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:31:13] Speaker A: Or insurance is covered at a better level, all sorts of things. So don't pass up on trip on perks that are out there.
And I'm not here to accuse anyone, but I also think you can get a little bit, a little bit overdoing it on the travel hacking and travel perks stuff. So if this is your thing and you have the time and it's a blessing to your family, great.
But I Think travel hacking and like essential oils and certain chiropractic treatments end up being sort of areas where people can get sucked into a Vortex and maybe CrossFit too. It's like they want you to know.
Everyone I know who is really into the travel hacking will grab me and go, would you like us to sit down and I can share with you all of these things? And it's tempting, but I think maybe you don't have to do all that. And it's even possible to maybe overdo the travel hacking a little bit. So I would say just be aware, value your time and. And you don't have to open a new credit card every six weeks or whatever.
[00:32:29] Speaker B: Yes, true.
[00:32:30] Speaker A: That being said, I reserve the right for Abraham's Walt to have one of these travel hiking experts on and teach us the. The low hanging fruit tricks. So I'm not an anti travel hacking, but yeah, it's the same thing. I go to CrossFit, but I'm not really into the people who tell you that everyone should do it. That's all. Okay. I've kind of given away my number one of three practical hacks, which was my family's not doing the travel hacking thing today, but we do at least get credit cards that offer good rewards. We sign everyone in the family up for the airline accounts and get a free ticket once in a while.
And there's these websites now, I don't know if you've heard about artificial intelligence, Stephen, but it's doing all sorts of crazy stuff in the world.
And they'll look for things like scheduling errors in airline schedules, and you can get an alert when there's an opportunity. So we did this a few years ago. We went to Alaska on a lark for spring break that had not been on our list, but my wife was just taking care of somebody and they said, do you know tickets from Salt Lake to Alaska are $100 round trip right now? And we said, what?
And found a cheap place to stay and did some hiking and it was. It was great. So flexibility in your schedule combined with some of the tools that can go discover opportunities can really be meaningful in terms of travel hacking Light.
[00:34:01] Speaker B: Is there a website that finds those kind of opportunities for you?
[00:34:05] Speaker A: The one I've used is called going.com.
[00:34:08] Speaker B: okay.
[00:34:09] Speaker A: And it will look.
[00:34:11] Speaker B: That's not the bathroom website. That's a different one, right?
[00:34:14] Speaker A: No, it's going like as in on a trip.
[00:34:17] Speaker B: Oh, okay. Okay.
[00:34:19] Speaker A: Yeah, not going. Not other kinds of going.
[00:34:22] Speaker B: Okay, all right. Going on.
[00:34:24] Speaker A: Although if you're gonna go To India.
You need education in that as well, because you could have.
[00:34:30] Speaker B: There could be an India travel website that's both going to India and once you're in India, managing. Going in a different way. Maybe like travel toilet paper or something.
[00:34:43] Speaker A: You and I both had just such a wonderful experience. Speaking of traveling and going, we went to visit our friend Jordan in Oregon, and the man had a smart toilet set up that he did. It was a toilet. Yeah.
[00:34:59] Speaker B: I think I could make the toilet, like, heat up with a phone app or something.
[00:35:04] Speaker A: Yeah. And we won't talk about all of its features, but some of them were surprising.
[00:35:09] Speaker B: There's no need to. Yeah.
[00:35:12] Speaker A: Okay. My number two tip, and I've been using this a lot.
[00:35:15] Speaker B: That's your number two tip. You get it?
[00:35:18] Speaker A: Oh, gosh, you phrased it that way.
[00:35:22] Speaker B: My second tip.
[00:35:23] Speaker A: You meant the second tip on my list of practical travel hacks. Yeah, yeah. Is that I think AI can mostly replace a travel agent. You know, there. There was the. I used to say, who uses a travel agent? Cause we can just get on to Expedia and find a package and things like that. And I've never been a guy to walk into a travel agent, but I did spend hours and hours trying to read TripAdvisor reviews and what are the best things to do in this place?
And now I've done three vacations in a row where we had different objectives. And I talked to an AI about those and said, here's what I'm trying to do. I want to build intellectual experience, some downtime as a family, and here's my budget and here's my dates, and it will come back pretty fast with a list of here's what you should find. And I have found that if you. You do have to apply some judgment here. So click into those little sources and see. Okay, it recommends this restaurant. I'm going to just bip over to Yelp and see or whatever the local review site is. Do people actually like this or is it just the first result that came up or something like that. But we hired travel guides that charged twice as much to do a city tour of a place. We were.
If you hired them through, like, Airbnb or one of the tour websites, but they had their own website that I probably never would have found.
And my AI just found it and said, oh, this guy is the cheapest by far. And he's offering the same experience on Airbnb with five star reviews. You can hire him directly and save a ton of money.
So I think used smartly these AI platforms, especially for finding guides, finding what parts of town you want to be in. So we're like I said, we're going to Croatia. I had no idea about Croatia. It said, well, you can stay inside the old city walls and have this type of experience, or for a third of the money, you can stay a four minute walk. Well, on the map it looked like it was two miles. I was like, that's a long. But it was actually really close. So it was, it's again helped me choose a good place for our family to stay.
And I think that it's a great starting point to build out an itinerary and it's been really successful for me recently.
[00:37:57] Speaker B: That's great. I have done the same thing where to build out an itinerary, have an ongoing conversation, kind of check the conclusions that Grok or whatever is giving me. Like, oh, okay, that sounds right. But like you say, I'm going to go check some reviews, make sure, et cetera. I did this for my wife's 50th birthday trip to the south of France and came up with a very specific itinerary, you know, and everything was booked and it was kind of like, I hope this is going to work. But Grok helped me do all of that stuff. And I, and I did that second level that you're talking about where in a couple of instances, like we booked a kayaking around this beautiful bay one day. And so I just kind of had a little email exchange with a couple of people at the place. Is this actually going to work? I'm told I should park here and whatever.
And so, yeah, it's good to do that checking up. But man, the service itself of just helping me walk through those things was great. And of course it scans a gazillion websites and finds you the greatest opportunities. It's great.
[00:39:02] Speaker A: I think the third tip I have that goes really well with that one is that if you're like me, you need to roll off the ambition dial about 20% of whatever you think.
[00:39:15] Speaker B: Here comes the big Mark Parrott hack. This is the one, everybody.
It's 45 minutes in. You've been waiting for the Mark Parrott tip. Here it comes. This is it. Yeah, speak up, boy.
[00:39:28] Speaker A: So I hated a trip that was just sitting on the beach up until I became a business owner. And once I became a business owner, I said, this is actually wonderful. I need to have a trip like this once a year. But I used to be so about adventure, intellectual capital. Like, we're here.
This is our unique opportunity. Let's go. Go, go, go. And that was true. Whether I was with my family or just my wife, I was going to pack it full.
And even using AI now makes it possible to do that times two or three. So you just have the whole world at your fingertips and you can optimize. Well, look, if we could stop in this city, in between these two cities, and they have this experience and, you know, I think that I have found through trial and error, mostly error, that if you take what seems like a normal full itinerary and say I need to cut out about 20% of this, it dramatically decreases the odds that something like a missed flight connection or even if I'm traveling with you, Steven, I don't think you need this tip because it's impossible to rush through a trip with Stephen. He's going to find four diversions between points A and B that are very interesting. But we have to build time in for that, for that curious exploratory nature that the Lord gave you. Fact.
And that's a good thing. I think that if you're very type A, go get them. Check things off the list. You miss a lot of what we're talking about and what we're going to wrap up with is just some tools for you as a dad to put some intention behind the trip. I promise you, whatever you think the purpose of the trip is, you can still have that be the purpose of the trip. There will be unexpected things that happen that you go afterwards.
Man, I mean, it was great to see the Alhambra in Spain, but the real magic was that one dinner with the guy that invited us to come into his house, and we sat and talked till 11pm and it was just wonderful. You didn't know that was going to happen. If you had packed every second of your schedule full, you might as well have been on a Apple Vacations tour bus tour where they just shuttle you from one stop to another. It kind of ruins for me some of the point of running your own family trips.
[00:41:56] Speaker B: I think that makes a lot of sense.
[00:41:57] Speaker A: I've come to peace with the idea that I'm going to sit in airports for longer, for example, because I've also.
Even in trips where it's all gone perfectly smoothly, I was like. I was stressed like 30% of that trip about missing the next connection, whatever that was. And just to have more time and more. More buffer is worth the fact that you didn't see this one extra ancient temple or whatever.
[00:42:25] Speaker B: Agree. Let me just say one of the things, one of the advantages of planning out an itinerary is that it'll remove the stress.
Like, oh, we've already got those tickets booked. Well, you can't get them now because it's sold out. Well, we've got. It's all right. It was all planned out.
So if the goal is to reduce tension and stress, aren't we trying to get away from that? Isn't that one of the reasons that we're traveling? Unless you want to do a 17 year old challenge, you want to introduce specific kinds of stress.
We, we're trying to, is trying to be restful. So let's not pack it up so much. I've just learned that like transition times, you just don't know what that's going to be like if you're somewhere that's not home. So overpacking a schedule is a sure recipe for failure. You don't want it.
[00:43:12] Speaker A: I'll never forget getting ready for bed and we were in Paris and the next morning we needed to fly to Rome and I just bought a plane ticket from Paris to Rome. I thought, yeah, we'll need an hour to get to the airport or whatever.
And I thought I should check.
So the. Do we need to get a cab the night before or something? And I looked and Paris evidently has an airport that's like three hours from downtown Paris. Two and a half.
And so we woke up at 2:30 in the morning for a 7:00am flight.
And, and it was not my family's favorite thing that we had done on that trip. But yeah, you know, live and learn.
[00:43:55] Speaker B: Rough.
[00:43:55] Speaker A: I want to give everybody a tool that we built. Stephen, when I say we, I'm using the royal we. Really, I think you put things together, do it. Yeah, yeah.
And it's not, it's not really all that complex. And you could do this on a piece of scratch paper and get 98% of the benefit out of it. But, but the real magic is that you, dad, if you're listening to this and you're a dad, you're just putting some thought into what's the purpose of the next time we spend on the road, Whether that's a two, an overnight camping trip or a massive family vacation in Europe, it doesn't really matter.
And what we've done is create the strategic vacation guide. We've talked about this on the podcast before, but what we want you to do is stop at the beginning of the year. You could do this when you do your vision summit and say in the coming year, what are the times? It's possible that we might be able to get away. And there's blanks there that say spring, summer, fall, winter. You might say spring is dad's super busy season. So we're not getting away in spring, but in summer we can take a big trip. And in the fall we could maybe take a weekend away. Great, write it down. And then what's a good mix for the kind of trips we're going to take? So rest, where it's just truly about restoring and rest, mission and service, family experiences or adventure. That could be intellectual capital type trips.
Just mark down what would the mix be if we had our druthers? And then what should we be celebrating this year?
I think travel is a really good way to mark things. I think it's of part. Part of why the Lord built it into the required calendar is because he wants us to acknowledge certain times and certain events as specifically important.
And because he made us. He knows that when we get away, we go, oh, that's a memorable thing. I remember that trip. I certainly can remember the trips I've taken a lot better than I can remember really good weeks I had three years ago at home, even though they might have been really good weeks.
So what are we celebrating or marking this year? And then we just give you a place to say, okay, how might these ideas all come together? And could we put a few trips on the calendar?
I think you can add a budget to that. You could say, well, this year we would love to be able to spend 10,000 on travel, but we can spend 2. And we've realized we have friends that have a cabin and they said we could use it for a weekend. That might be a trip that costs us $150, the gas money and a nice bottle of wine to leave them as a thank you gift. But we're going to spend most of that money on a family vacation. And, you know, $2,000 if you got three or four kids doesn't go that far. So we're going to be going. You could be like my family growing up and go to the Ozark Mountains and enjoy a condo in Fairfield Bay, Arkansas. That was our regular vacation.
Or, you know, maybe we have to split that and say, Grandma and grandpa are living in Florida, they're not doing so well. So we're gonna go see them. Maybe that's a road trip. And then we're gonna do a family vacation. But just put some thought to it. Then we give you a space to actually lay out some schedules for each trip. So what are the things we're going after, like how are we going to exercise this trip? Well, Stephen, your family's gonna be walking the steps of Paul in Greece. So we feel like exercise box is checked. We don't need to go find a place to lift weights. What about food? Are there specific things we're gonna try to do or is this a. Food is not the point. So we're gonna eat really cheaply so we can fund other parts of it. Are we going to try to accomplish anything specific intellectually? And it could be as simple as, you know, I'd really like to read. I'm taking a flight, a long flight and instead of turning on the movie screen, I'm just going to read a book on the way. You could write that down as a part of the goals.
And finally we give you a day by day schedule that's I think really useful if you're going to create a trip. And this will force you again to say, okay, I laid out my chat GPT itinerary and it's just go, go, go. That looks like too much. There's not one minute on this trip where I would naturally just pick up a Bible and spend time with the Lord. Well, fix that. So just lay out your days and think about that. So we want to make this guide available to you and there's going to be a link to it, I believe, right in the show notes of this episode.
[00:48:37] Speaker B: Mark, I'm biting my tongue as you're talking because one of the reasons that we made this is because it was such a, it was such a light bulb on for me when I actually I found over years that my wife and I were taking these so called vacations and at the end of them we would both be frustrated because the thing that we really wanted to happen, well, I really wanted us to spend an hour in prayer and that really never happened. It didn't happen. Why didn't it happen? Because nobody made it happen. So you just showed up and go, I don't know. What's the next thing? I don't know, just go do this thing. You could be on a cruise ship and the same thing would happen. Well, what's, I don't know. Look on the itinerary, there's shuffleboard right now, let's go. I don't know, just go do the next thing. As opposed to walking in the door and having had a conversation with your wife where you go, dear, what is going to make you feel rested and recreated in this time? And one of my big ahas, I just never knew this. Just a Dumb guy.
My wife said I never take the time to stop and get my nails done. If I could just have my nails done when we go on vacation, that would mean a lot to me. It just makes me feel rested and whatever.
Oh well, I think we could swing that. That's not a big deal. I just never have made that a priority. So like talking through what and we get so specific in my family. Like I'll just say I want, I want as many mornings as possible. I want us to not have any screens on before 10am and I want us to sit and have a family conversation around breakfast. To me, if you get that, oh, it just changes the day. Oh, I'm so happy with the day. And my wife will say, I imagine us one afternoon at like 4 o' clock before the sun's gone down, us all sitting and watching a movie together. That would just be so fun to feel like it's still daylight but we're watching a movie together. Okay, well we can make that happen. Having these kinds of conversations, which is what the vacation strategic vacation guide supposed to do, make you have these conversations. You go into your, your weekend or your week going like I know we're going to hit a home run because I'm going to make sure that these things happen anyways. It's been a game changer for me and it served a lot of people. So we want to make sure that you get your hands on the strategic vacation guide.
[00:50:56] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. And you even will just retrospectives on your vacation like you just described, where you go. I had no idea that getting your nails done was even going to be meaningful to you.
If you have enough of those and you go, well, the family, what we really want is an hour of time to read some family exercise or some individual time to exercise. Maybe dad and a couple of the kids want to go play a round of golf. Sometimes you zoom out of that and you go, this could all happen very effectively somewhere that is not nearly as expensive as where we were thinking about going.
[00:51:33] Speaker B: That's true.
[00:51:34] Speaker A: You could say the perfect place for this vacation we've described is actually Fairfield Bay, Arkansas. And you don't, you don't have to go to Hawaii for that vacation. You can save Hawaii time. Where you know, what we really want to do is just experience mind bending beauty for the first time. We want to show our kids that, okay, great, do that. But yeah, sometimes you'll realize, well, we don't actually need to do whatever super expensive thing that I when I log into, you know, Delta. They try to push, push me towards. So that's our goal is a. That as a father, you would just be intentional about thinking about how to use everything you do as a family. But this is one place where a lot of people put a lot of money. So think about how you're going to leverage it at any budget. We think this is doable at any budget, down to zero effectively. And that's the reason that we came out with this guide and this episode. So I just bless you dads. Whether you grab our guide or whether you just sit down and spend some time with the Lord and say, help me to lead my family well in everything we do, including these trips that we're planning on taking, we bless you to do that effectively and to feel the good things that come from leading your family in this particular area of life, which is travel. Until next week, we're just encouraging you, as we always do, to run your homes and your dough like a biblical boss.
