No Excuses Episode 53: The Lovers Passport on Turning Your Hobby into a Career

In this episode, Sean Corvelle sits down with Giselle and Stephen, also known as the Lovers Passport. The couple discusses their passion for travel and adventure, tips and tricks for traveling on a budget, their bucket list, and so much more.

Connect with Giselle and Stephen on Social:

-Website: theloverspassport.com

-TikTok: @theloverspassport 

-Instagram: @theloverspassport-YouTube: The Lovers Passport

Listen Now

Apple PodcastsSpotifyStitcheriHeartRadioTuneInPandora

A LOOK INSIDE THE EPISODE:

TM: What are some tips and tricks for planning a trip?

S: there’s so many. I feel like one thing that we really, really try and talk about is budgeting, just because a huge part of our audience does work full-time. They don’t want to go out and spend $5,000 on a week-long vacation, so finding free places to camp or free places to stay is huge for us and kind of our niche. So we use three websites to find almost all the free camping in the US that we’ve done so far. We use FreeRoam, which is really, really helpful. People can leave reviews, how safe that area is, what it’s like. Then, we use Campendium, which is another one. We don’t use that one as frequently, but it is also a great resource. And FreeCampsite.net. I think that most people are like, “Oh, I have to go and stay in a five-star luxury hotel. It’s gonna cost a couple 100 bucks a night.” Where we’re on the more end of, we’ll sleep in the back of our 4Runner out in the mountains with beautiful views for free. I think that’s one of our biggest tips. So many people ask you, “How do you travel so much? You guys must make millions of dollars,” we’re like, “No, we just traveled very, very cheap.”

G: I feel like the next piece of advice too, would be just being over prepared. Not preparing is the failure where a lot of people run into when you’re doing these kinds of trips, especially in adventure travel. So, if you’re doing a road trip, making sure you have jumper cables, you have a spare tire, you know how to put on that spare tire, you have an emergency kit, you have anything that you could possibly need if you were stranded and don’t have cell signal, like a GPS beacon or something like that. There’s just a lot of tiny little nuances that you don’t really think about because you don’t think about the worst case scenario when you’re planning to go drive up Highway One, for example. But if you’re going into the mountains or somewhere else, or the desert, where you don’t have cell signal, you just have to be very cautious and prepared in terms of, what if something happens? What if your tire goes out? Can you change it? That’s kind of where we’ve learned a lot of stuff because as glamorous as the Instagram is, a lot of the stuff that happens behind the scenes is like, Stephen falls on a cactus or we need the emergency kit and we don’t have pliers or something really small like that, like, oh, shoot, we don’t have pliers to pull out all the cactus needles. Or we were like, in the boonies and luckily, some other car was there to help us because we had a different tool that we needed to get the tire out because it was stuck. There’s just so many little random instances of things that are going to go wrong, and you just have to know that that’s gonna happen. So being prepared, or over prepared is a good way to mitigate it, but just know something’s always gonna go wrong. It’s not always picture perfect.