Codey Orgill is an Australian lifestyle vlogger, he loves bicycle touring, he has completed bike tours in the US, Japan and Tasmania and is currently preparing for an epic journey around Australia. Another passion of his is thrifting, which means going to thrift stores, finding deals and selling that online on Amazon (Amazon FBA), Ebay or Etsy.

Codey Orgill Youtube Channel: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucvlqvWh12g

Watch the video here:

In this episode I interview Matt Galat, he runs the channel JaYoe and under that mantra, which means ‘To Add Fuel’ he travels around the world on a recumbent trike for the next 10 years. In this episode we go deep about his mindset, why he does this and the best way to approach life.

Check Out JaYoe Nation!

Watch the video:

In this podcast I give a little update of my current situation being on the road again, and I explain the route I’m gonna do over the next months, cycling through Europe!

Donate on Patreon: www.patreon.com/TravelingTice

Shownotes:
Video of awful hostel in Norway: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2nN5oHqEus
Tim Cooke’s YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UCo-HnEvBlWJ2rTg08QdUs5A
Location Indie: locationindie.com
JaYoe Nation (Matt Galat): jayoe.com

WordPress: wordpress.org
Divi theme for wordpress: elegantthemes.com

Please subscribe to our new podcast series “TravelingTheGoodRoad” on YouTube.

Bicycle Touring the Netherlands | Everything You Need To Know! video I was talking about.

So yesterday I came across this video, and I think it is spot on with the content of this podcast episode!

In this episode I talk with TheOneGoodRoad on a hangouts live stream. We answer questions from people about bike touring and everything around it.

Click here to go to TheOneGoodRoad’s YouTube channel!
Click here to go to my Blog post about Programming!

Thanks for listening! If you want you can leave a comment down below and tell me what you thought about our conversation and how I can improve this series. Thanks again!

Perfect for on a bike ride!

The first podcast is a little introduction about me and why I like cycling so much. If you watch my YouTube videos most of this should already be familiar to you, but if you found something out you didn’t know about me, leave it in the comments below!

Link to Jayoe’s website: jayoe.com

And his YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/jayoe

What does a digital nomad web developer actually do?

So the jobs you can have with these skills differ. It could be that you have to work on a certain website, make a website from scratch or maintain a website. Also for whom you would be working differs greatly. From small business to Google, or Facebook. Web development is very client based. After all, the client gets to use the website to get clients of his own. So it is very important that you can communicate and meet deadlines. What I like about web development is that you have a lot of different flavors of web development. Some people prefer the front-end (what the visitor gets to see in front of him), some prefer the back-end (working with a database that only the admins of the site get to see and work with), some like to design a webpage and some like to make a website interactive, etc…

What are the languages you need to learn as a web developer?

First you need to learn HTML and CSS. These are the core languages every website uses, so make sure you learn these! At least a basic understanding of these two is required for any web developer job. The good thing is though, these are by far the easiest languages to learn! HTML stands for ‘HyperText Markup Language’ and is the language that contains all of the content that a website has, like text, images etc. This is the language you’ll probably begin with, and honestly, I think you can have a solid grasp of HTML in a day! CSS stands for ‘Cascading Style Sheets’ and handles all of the styling for a website, like font, color, layout etc. This one is a little harder, but still quite straightforward, compared to the ‘real’ programming languages like JavaScript or Ruby. So after these two the ‘specialization’ of your learning begins. Ask yourself: do I want to become a front-end developer or a back-end developer? The reason is, that there are different languages for the front-end as there are for the back-end.

Some good front-end languages:

• JavaScript
• Flash
• JQuery
• Microsoft SilverLight

Languages for the back-end:

• PHP
• C
• Java
• Ruby

Now any of these languages are quite different from HTML and CSS and in my opinion, also a lot harder. So you’ll probably spend most time learning the language(s) of your choice here.

How do you learn the skills you need as a web developer?

So back in the day there were 2 ways you could learn these skills: Go to school or learn it yourself. When you go to school, you can get a degree and have a higher chance of getting a better-payed job, but it will take a looooot of time and money. When you learn it yourself, it’s pretty much free except for your own equipment, but you don’t get a degree and the path to a well-payed job can also be loooong. But today there is another option: the online coding certification. There are online learning services (like Udacity, what I chose), that have a proper certification but you can learn at your own pace, so it is kinda like a mixture between going to school and learning it yourself. Every programmer I’ve read about or watched videos of said the same: Don’t go to college for this. College takes too long and because the web is constantly changing, it’s often the case that the knowledge you learn is outdated by the time you graduate. Besides, college is quite expensive. So basically you should learn it yourself or take on this online degree course. The latter is what I would recommend if you don’t have the discipline to figure it all out without help or if you don’t have the money to go to college or don’t want to spend the time/money to do that.

Which path did you take?

The path that I’ve gone is via a paid online learning service called Udacity (here’s a good review of this service). I started using their online course ‘web development’ about a month ago. The reason for this is because I want to become sufficient at programming in an as short amount of time as possible, and using this course I could probably learn a lot more efficiently and faster than when I had to learn it all myself (the free way basically). You also get a degree, when you finish the course, called a ‘nanodegree’. This service comes at a cost though: about $200 / month, which is not cheap, but they also have another subscription which has a 6-month no job money back guarantee for $300 / month, which shows that a job could be in arms reach! 6 months is probably also a lot faster than I could do, have I had to learn it myself, but even more important: having to build up my network myself. And that is also where the real value for this service lies: they have a complete program which builds up your profile and portfolio and helps you setting up a good network.

So this is what I’ll be doing for the next months

I have the luck to be able to learn to program full-time now, because I don’t have job during the day and I currently live together with my parents. In the future I plan to make another post in this sequence giving you some more updates about what I’ve come across and learnt in the programming journey.

Please leave a comment down below if you have any questions about programming and web development!

– Tice

Here is the video:

So yeah, the definite answer to the question is: IT DEPENDS.

Now first I want to point out something I didn’t talk about in the video: The INITIAL COST.
In the video I didn’t talk about the initial cost of bike touring. Now, you can find some good resources and blog posts about this topic, but I focus on the cost WHEN you are actually bike touring, provided that the initial costs are already done. (These costs only happen once in theory, when you gear up for your first bike tour, and you can use the same gear in your next tour.)

In the video, I talk about four factors which influence the cost:

Destination
It depends where you go, different places have different prices. So do some research on that before you go! Now, I’ve visited some expensive countries in Scandinavia (Norway in particular!) and I did know that it was expensive, but not THIS expensive.. (especially Norway!) and I’ve spent quite a bit more than I wanted initially. I didn’t do that much research in advance, so that’s my fault but when I hear other people talk about their bike tours in for example Romania, they spent about 3 to 4 times less than I did in Scandinavia, and they even went to restaurants every day, which I did only once!  Yes, it can differ that much! So it is very important that you do some initial research and it’s important to gear up accordingly. For example: when you go to Scandinavia: bring a camp stove and cook your food yourself, which brings us to our second point:

Budget
So now you know where you’re going and what to expect in price. Now it is time to create a budget. A budget is important because then you know how much you want to spend and it is less likely that the money escapes you. Now, I didn’t make a clear budget on my first tour and that way I spent about twice as much as I wanted initially. That’s also why I had to quit early (there were other reasons as well) on my bike tour.  Anyways, the questions you should ask when making a budget are for example: Do I want to eat in restaurants, or cook my own food? Am I going to stay in hotels every night, or am I going to wild camp (also depends on destination)? And of course you can make out which options are more expensive than others.
For a normal traveler there are 3 general types of expenses: Shelter, food and transportation, but for bike tourers 2 are already covered: transportation and shelter (if you carry a tent). So if you want to go as cheap as possible, you should only have to spend money on food, which you can narrow down to a very very low cost level as well. (Tip: When going to Norway, the Kiwi supermarkets have a cheap brand called First Price, the quality might be a little less, but these products are often about 40% cheaper than the same product from another brand.)

Way of travel
For normal travelers this could be a matter of which mode of transportation, but for bike tourers that’s already determined, so for them (and also other travelers) you could say this is about the pace of travel. On my first bike tour I was definitely a fast traveler, traveling from city to city with about 2-3 rest days every 2 weeks of cycling, especially in the beginning. Now this influenced the cost of bike travel in a good and a bad way. Good, because when I was cycling, I tended to camp during the night and leave the next morning. Bad, because every day was different, which could lead to some unexpected costs, which might be a fourth type of costs especially bike tourers can deal with. When you cycle, the chances increase that you break your bike, such as a flat tire or a broken chain, which can lead to repair costs. I didn’t have many unexpected costs, but I definitely had a few, especially some that afterwards, I could’ve prevented. So I think that as the number of bike tours progresses the amount of these costs decreases. The prime example was the 50 euros I had to pay a bike mechanic in Oslo, Norway, just for some little tweaks on my gearing and a look at my disc brake pads, which I thought were worn out, but they weren’t worn out at all, so he just put them back.. (it was actually 70 euros, but he gave me a ‘reduction’…). So slow travel might be cheaper than, but doesn’t necessarily have to, when you decide to stay in an Airbnb apartment for a month that is 30 euros a night. But it can be cheaper when you do it in a cheaper country. Anyways, for my next bike tour, I definitely want to travel slower, also because I’m gonna take on a remote job, which will mean I need to make some time to do that, which means staying longer at some places, which I think is only a good thing, because then I can have some more time to enjoy the place where I am and travel in a more relaxed way.

So there you have it, in the video I also talked about a fourth factor, which is if you are making money while traveling. I actually did make a little bit with YouTube, which I’m very proud of, but wasn’t nearly enough to cover the costs. In the future I do want to become fully sustainable and able to travel indefinitely. But this might not be the type of travel for you, so do your research on destination, what you want to spend and how you want to travel and you will have a good guess of how expensive your trip will be.

Some numbers on my first bike tour:

• Total cost of 85 days of bike touring: €3215.76 ($4001.69)
• Daily average: €37.83 ($47.07)
• 5 days in the Netherlands
• 14 days in Germany
• 6 days in Denmark
• 18 days in Sweden
• 23 days in Norway
• 7 days in Finland
• 4 days in Estonia
• 4 days in Latvia
• 1 night in Lithuania
• 3 days in Poland