Barbell Travel

A simple idea:

To have a more fun, enjoyable, and interesting travel experience, embrace the extremes (barbell) between super “scrappy” (cheap) and “bougie” (expensive/fancy) experiences.

Avoid the middle

When traveling, avoid going to “mid tier” ($$) restaurants. Better to embrace the extremes. For example in Mexico city:

For lunch eat street tacos (50 cents a piece), and for dinner eat a super fancy meal ($20 a plate).

The reason why:

The price difference is generally not that much between a “mid tier” and a “fancy” restaurant (20% difference in price), but the experience of a fancy restaurant is usually 200% more interesting (in terms of food options, ambiance, interior decor, service, presentation).

Traveling like a baller on a budget

For example even when Cindy and I were broke and starving college students, we embraced a similar barbell travel strategy:

99% of the time eat super super cheap street food, but 1% of the time have the fanciest and most expensive meal.

For example in France, most of our meals were from the grocery store, rotisserie chickens, bread/cheese/salami. But for at least one meal, we would go to the fanciest restaurant in town (not ordering much food, enough not to be kicked out).

This way we remember vividly the super expensive/fancy experience, and yet we still kept in our budget by eating cheap meals 99% of the time.

Barbell living

Perhaps we can also take a barbell approach (embracing the extremes) with living:

1. Live extremely frugally (ascetic lifestyle), but for the few things you do purchase or own, make them the highest quality. For example feeding yourself on $2 a day on eggs while wearing $100 Merino wool t shirts (owning 2x).
2. Cook home most of the time to save money, but when you do go out to eat dinner, dress up and go to a fancy place. Or if you’re going to eat out to a restaurant, avoid $$ Yelp restaurants and instead go very cheap (buy Groupons for dinners, what Cindy and I do).
3. Better to travel to a developing country (Vietnam, Mexico) and have a more luxury experience, than to go to an expensive place like Paris and not really be able to afford anything.

More turbo thoughts on travel to come!

ERIC