Hi! We’re Shane and Iylana, a Texas couple who loves traveling the world.
We’re exciting to launch this blog and share our travels with you, but more than that, we’re looking forward to helping inspire your next adventure.
We’re approaching 8 years of marriage, and have so far traveled to 17 countries together, learning a lot along the way. Each trip teaches us something new about how to maximize our travel and get the most for our money.
Travel doesn’t have to be expensive! It’s easier than ever to find good deals on transportation and accommodation. One of the events that gave us the idea to start this blog happened when some friends were soliciting advice for their next vacation. We suggested Turkey as an affordable and fun destination. They were floored to find out that two weeks abroad cost us about as much as they were planning on spending on a weeklong cruise!
Another instance happened when Iylana’s mother found a “deal” for a weeklong cruise down the Nile River—her dream trip. Feeling like we could do better, we put together a two week trip to Turkey and Egypt that included everything (and more) that the packaged “deal” had. We doubled the length of the trip and included another country for about the same price!
Inspired by these events, we have launched Penny Caravan, to share our adventures and to hopefully inspire your own. We want to be very transparent about our trips and how we put them together. That means breaking down our costs and letting you know where we could have saved even more, and where we should have splurged. It means posting about deals we hear about, and sharing the tips and tricks we learn along the way.
We’re not professional travelers. We work full time jobs and try to squeeze every drop out of our vacation time that we can. We have a mortgage, monthly bills, etc. We’ve just made it a point to prioritize travel in our lives, so we do everything we can to get the most out of every trip.
We invite you to come along on our journeys, and hopefully learn a thing or two that you can use to “travel on a dime!”