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Dave Ertel

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About

We are Dave and Nancy of www.leavewithoutpay.com. 

We started the leavewithoutpay blog back in 2010 when we were getting ready to jump off the treadmill for our first major career break and extended bicycle tour.  That trip turned into a 22,000k, 26 country odyssey. We returned from that trip in late 2012.

We had so many great adventures on “Big Trip One”, we promised ourselves we’d do another big trip once we spent a couple years working and topping up our savings accounts.  Well, as these things go, a couple years morphed into more than four years.  Finally in 2017 we were ready to head out again.

For our second big trip (“Big Trip Two”) we decided to take on one of the world’s most iconic bicycle tour routes – the length of Americas, Alaska to Argentina.  We started this trip on May 25, 2017 in Fairbanks, Alaska and finished it on January 10, 2019 in Ushuaia, Argentina.  The trip ended up covering 27,000k and 16 countries. 

Now that we have completed two multi-year long distance bicycle tours, we sort of feel like that box is ticked.  We’re not ruling out a third multi-year trip but for now we are thinking that shorter trips (6 months maximum) may be the way to go.  We are currently contemplating riding Japan top to bottom and we are both still pretty keen to take another extended tour in Europe.  So far we’ve ridden our bikes in 47 countries, but we’ve never made travel an exercise in ticking off countries.  If this were a focus, clearly heading to Africa or the Indian subcontinent somewhere would make sense (wait, wait, where’d Nancy go, she was here helping write this summary only a minute ago… Ok, ok…  Maybe we need few easy trips first before Bangladesh or Ethiopia come up as travel destinations.  Phew!)