Making friends is a good thing!
Making friends while traveling is great!
And making friends at hard times or low times while on the road the greatest of all!!
Those friends that you make at the hard times of traveling are ever lasting; you are forced to trust each other under certain hard circumstances, and most of the times you come out of that situation as lifelong best friends.
I have made some great friends on the road, many of them are still very close friends until this day, some even came back to visit me in Egypt long after our trip was done, with others at least we still talk on regular basis online, thanks to facebook for making it easier to stay in contact with every person you get to know!
However, with every great thing comes its bad side.
At home, you make friends by getting to know them through people at certain gatherings, or through your school or work place, or even by chance in a bar or so. But my point is, at home, you always have all the time in the world to do what you want, and what they want. Meaning, if, for example, you’re into football and there is an important match going on tonight, you can watch it together, even if they are not THAT into football, because then after the match, or maybe tomorrow, you can go shopping with them even if you don’t enjoy shopping that much. You have time to do it all.
Making friends on the road is almost completely different than making friends at home.
On the other hand, making friends on the road and hanging out with them means you have to compromise and give up some things (and them too!)
To further explain it, you met those friends in a hostel, they are great people, extremely cool and you just want to hang out with each other for your stay in that country, you move together to the next city where they will only spend one day there, you wanted to spend two days, one of them hitting the beach and relaxing and the other checking out the museums and such…That is what I meant, one of you will have to let go of their itinerary.
And because we are humans, none of us has the same exact taste in everything like the one next to them. You can have so much in common, but there will still be a few things that are different.
And that is the point where you will have to calculate the risk/benefit ratio as we called it when dealing with drugs. You will have to see which one you will enjoy more, giving up continuing your trip with those friends for sticking to your taste and itinerary, or giving up a few things to stick with them…
There is no general rule, and it always depends on how much liking you have taken into those new friends, and if they are worth giving up things for them or not.
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Did you make friends while traveling? Did you have to change your itinerary or did they change theirs so you’d hang out together or each of you went their separate ways?
I initially only came to Cancun for a 3 month stay. I have now been here almost 2 years. Why? Well, I met someone special who I’ve become seriously involved with. She was the reason I came back from Colombia instead of continuing on South, and why I’ve made Cancun my “base of operations” for the next 4-6 years.
I’m still traveling, doing my immersion guides, working on The Expat Guidebook promotion and more….and will be doing more immersion trips to Brazil, Chile and Peru…but I am now using Cancun as my central hub, and coming back periodically to keep things going with her. So yeah…sometimes you can meet people in your travels who change your plans.
LOL and for some reason the “I did it all for the nookie” song from Limp Bizkit just popped into my head
Well I hadn’t met any significant others abroad – yet. And while in Spain last time I had in my mind the fact that after finishing the Camino everyone I knew there would go their separate ways and god knows if we’ll see each other again or not. And being Egyptian it is not that easy for me to go and live in a different country even if just for a while…So I had my facts straight about that
But my day to day itinerary changed a lot according to that group of friends I was walking with…I had initially planned to finish the Camino in 30 days, and not going to finisterre afterwards, and spending a whole week in Barcelona.
Ended up walking el camino itself in 33 days, and walking to Finisterre and spending 2 days there and spending only 4 and a half days in Barcelona
(So glad I didn;t pre-book that ticket from Santiago de Compostela to Barcelona 
)
Well, something else that I think you will find as you transition more and more into residual income from your website/blog and products you sell + affiliate commissions you receive from recommending other’s products is that as your income grows, you have more flexibility to go where you want, when you want, with less emphasis on the itinerary and more focus on the enjoyment of the moment.
That’s one of the things I come across very often here in Cancun; people who would love to stay here longer but they can’t because they are strapped into some 40+ hour work week back in the U.S. or wherever, and they only have 2 or 3 weeks of vacation before they have to go back to their jail cells. Er, I mean day jobs.
It’s getting harder for me to travel as a U.S. citizen. I’m working on a secondary passport presently, because with all the laws that the U.S. is putting in place (like FACTA and ex-PATRIOT Act), a lot of foreign countries are starting to shut the door to Americans and tell us “sorry, we don’t want you because there’s too much of a hassle in dealing with your government”. So, a secondary passport will also open more doors for you along with more income.
I know the major benefit for most of the veteran travel bloggers is that once you have around 1,000 to 1,500 USD a month coming in, you can pretty much go where you want, when you want, and just sort of throw itineraries to the wind. Yes, it takes time to build your online business/blog/website up to that point, but once you reach it you’ll find that there are a lot more opportunities out there, even with the restrictions based upon an accident of birth (citizenship).