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Transcript from YouTube

Dylan Davino thank you for coming on the show today I know you as a web designer and a bit of a digital Nomad I know you took a two-month long cross country trip you have an incredible story of how you overcame two days into your trip your camper flipping over which we'll get into a little bit later why don't you start by sharing a little bit about yourself and then telling the audience what your travel lifestyle looks like yeah well thanks for having me on the show Tyler um so my name is Dylan Davino um I'll just go a few years back to kind of start my story I was going to yuk on studying engineering and this was during Co I was not liking my classes it was all on my laptop I was miserable um no social life no parties physically didn't see campus once and yet we were paying $30,000 a year for school and I was going with my cousin at the time so we both initially decided to drop out of school and start our first business which was Modern Age marketing and we pretty much did that for a year and a half building websites doing marketing for local businesses and that was a really great experience I did end up kind of splitting off for my cousin um he bought a window washing company and I started Davino digital so I started Davino digital in January of this year and you know fast forward to now it's about November of 2023 so about 11 months in you know we're we're doing really well I'm super excited about it and I'm also super excited to talk about the cross country road trip and just a lot of the lessons I've learned along the way awesome I can definitely brag about your web design skills you actually designed a travel path.com which is our website so anybody listening if you haven't checked out our website yet it's atravel path.com got a Blog a community Forum feel free to jump on there hang out for a little while um but yeah you did a great job with our website so thank you for so much at travel.com check it out definitely I can totally see why you know working paying the $330,000 in tuition and not having the social life that would just drive you crazy so that's some very admirable you you know started your own business and here you are now talking with me so that's awesome man um so when you were on your trip your cross country trip I know you were periodically working right you were you were working remotely how many hours and what did that lifestyle look like yeah so I I really was trying to make it more of a lifestyle than just you know going on a trip and not thinking about work because really like when you're working in a digital industry you have the ability to work from anywhere on the globe as long as you have internet and I kind of figured like this could be a lifestyle for me I could be you know going everywhere and doing this non-stop as long as I'm getting the hours in now during this trip I I was aiming originally to do 30 hours a week and then you know things happened we had scenarios you know which we'll talk about but I ended up working probably between 15 to 20 hours a week and that was mainly like me sitting down in coffee shops or restaurants or hotels responding to all my emails and talking to my team making sure that they're on top of all the projects that we had running and campaigns um so you know mainly communication I also kind of counted other time of like reading and trying to just better myself while on the trip and you know probably 15 to 20 hours to answer your question so from the day you decided you wanted to travel to the day your actual attire at the road and you were traveling what was that time frame yeah so I did the trip with my brother I don't know if I mentioned that but we one day sat down at like a breakfast place and we just started talking about the random idea of tra tring and that was about one year before we actually set off for the trip so we we sat down we had the idea and then one thing led to another we started saying you know this we might actually do this like it's not just an idea oh we're going to do it throughout that year we started um really planning the details of the trip trying to figure out what the itinerary itinerary would look like and how long it would be um where we would go and what we would do for fun and you know those are all things that we were ironing out until pretty much like the day before we left for the trip but um yeah about a year so that's great I can totally relate till you know you have that idea in mind and it doesn't sound real you're repeating it you're telling people you're going to take it but in the back of your mind you're still not quite sure I remember when you beat me by a long shot it took us like three years we had that goal in mind to do a two-month trip similar to yours and we took three years to do it but um I remember like thinking you know telling people writing it down we're going to take this trip but really you know not quite sold on it until you know a couple months it doesn't hit you until you're on the road you're behind you're behind the wheel and it's like yeah you're you're doing it you're doing it yeah during that time frame when you were planning and before you got on the road what was the biggest challenge you faced and how were you able to overcome that yeah so I think the biggest challenge for me was being able to get myself and my business in a place where I could actually leave for two months and it's not as easy as it sounds like I had to pretty much be able to hire and train new team members and have them be able to understand what we do and what my job is because you know I'm not working as much I'm not here to to take full responsibility I needed to make sure that I had a project management system in place and that I trusted my team members and that they were able to do my job essentially without me kind of being there to oversee them all the time because you know I knew even going into the trip that there would be times where I didn't have internet there was a couple um stretches where I probably went to or 3 days without any internet and I didn't being in Tech is impossible yeah yeah so there were probably you know some some times when u i really relied on them to you know take take that responsibility so so you say the bulk of that year I know you had a lot more going on but in terms of the biggest obstacle getting you know systems in place and hiring people was that full years worth of work was that like the last six months or how much time if you could kind of ballpark that yeah I I probably didn't start focusing on it until about 6 months before we left I started the company in January of 2023 and I initially immediately brought on one team member her name's Amy and then you know throughout the whole year we were focusing on training her getting her up to speed and just working on the way that we cooperate because quite frankly she's a better web designer than I am anyways but really just trying to figure out how we work together and how the systems and communication all Loops in um that was like one of the things we were working on initially and then bringing on another team member and being able to get them up to speed and learn how our company works you know so it's kind of just being able to repeat that process and get people on board it does take a good amount of time I know you're a huge Bookworm like I am were there any books or other influences that helped you overcome that challenge H I'd have to look at my collection I mean I think initially the book I'm thinking about is the 4-Hour Work week um you know he talks about a lot of different principles that you would need to understand to be able to only work 4 hours a week and to be able to travel and do the thing that we're talking about right now um one of the things was delegation so being able to or Automation and delegation being able to either automate tasks or delegate them to other people um so that you can free up some of your time yeah the 4our work week I remember I I don't know if I finished that I read that a long time ago I remember I think after read that book at the right stage in your life cuz when I read that I was still working W2 didn't really know what I wanted to do and it didn't make a lot of sense for me but if I read that now I probably should pick it back up I'm in a position where you know I am self-employed and I'm working towards this lifestyle I would probably have much bigger impact on me right now so thanks for bringing that up I'll have to check that one out next yeah I feel like there's you know a lot of situations like that where you you don't really fully understand something until 6 months later when you're trying to put it in practice and you're like oh that's what that guy was talking some of the biggest frustrations and struggles you faced on the road I like asking this because like myself you know we worked really hard to get on the road and you know some people they think once they get there and they reach that goal it's all sunshine and rainbows obviously having been on the road for two months yourself there are things that happen probably frustrations you weren't expecting so any of those frustrations or hassles that you weren't prepared for that you might want to help a fellow listener before they take their trip yeah would now be a good time to talk about the trailer flipping that is a bit of a hassle yeah let's let's go on that one sure yeah so probably one of the biggest um hassles that we faced during the trip was so this was on the second night of the trip we yeah we we left we were in Tennessee we we were driving all day so we we left in the morning um and then we drove all that day and then um we drove all the next day and then that night um you know we were driving and uh essentially what happened was the weight distribution in the trailer was off so you need to have um weight in the the front in the middle of the trailer but not the back and we think that there was too much weight in the back which essentially when we were on the highway and kind of going around like a corner and maybe like a gust of wind came from a truck driving by but it started to cavitate back and forth and death's way they say right were you driving when that happened I was asleep and then so what happened it started going back and forth and then uh eventually the whole car and trailer ended up turning all the way around and then the trailer was flipping while that was happening and the way that ended was we were facing kind of the oncoming traffic on the side of the road um and yeah the trailer was in complete pieces hopefully we can get a little video of that going over this but yeah if you're watching this on you Youtube I'll overlay some of the the photos and the videos I saw Dylan and like thankfully you guys were okay but I mean that trailer was completely shredded there was no you couldn't recognize it yeah that's that is wild man yeah it was wild and you had the you had the sway bars on defin I think just the weight distribution was the main thing we didn't know at the time and you know um yeah I would say just study up on the way that you're going to be um mounting your trailer or just the vehicle that you're in and you know safety you know thankfully we spent a year preparing and had like a whole list of things that would be good for emergencies and we brought like everything you could think of all the tools all the this the that emergency supply and we ended up using all of it like you know we we had to use every every essential thing that we brought and bring all of that you know ask Chad GPT what is all the emergency items I need for a road trip and bring all that um it'll probably help you out was your car all banged up I mean I guess not oh it was okay yeah we had a big dent in the car cuz when it was turning around the trailer um hit hit the back of the car so man so walk me through what was going through your mind so that happened probably I think it was late at night you said and you're probably on the side of the road for all night right waiting for you know you have law enforcement emergency um what do you thinking you're 2 days into the trip you worked a year for thinking about turning around you're going to persevere I mean you don't really want to sleep in your car for the next two months with your with your brother so what what was going on in your head there I you know I was asleep when it was happening and then I woke up as it as we were starting to turn around and everything U my brother who was awake and driving um told me that there was a 30ft wall of Sparks when when the trailer was flipping and everything um and there was you know there was another kind of car that was right like behind us when it was happening and they ended up um seeing what happened they immediately called the police and you know tried to get us help and everything um and then the police showed up about 20 minutes later and um later on the tow companies ended up coming to try to look at what was going on and they ended up determining they wouldn't be able to to help because it was just too much yeah it was too heavy too big tooo much stuff everywhere and we essentially we ended up sleeping there all night on the side of the road on a like a blanket outside and then um we had the toe company came kind of like in the morning and in the during the night we were also Gathering all of our valuables and putting them in a pile and then we ended up taking that pile and going to early check in for a hotel at like 4:00 a.m. um so we brought it all to the hotel we got our stuff situated and then and yeah it was kind of the the next day that we found out that they wouldn't be able to deal with the trailer for almost a week so it sat on the side of the road um just for a week yeah man that must have been like I said just so emotional and everything go I mean you're probably having a little bit of you know post-traumatic stress too cuz you know like thankfully guys are okay but it might not have been I mean that's a pretty yeah it's a miracle that we all we all made it out safe and then to kind of go into what was going on like in my mind mind at the time um well my brother and I were talking like what are we even going to do like do we just turn back we're only a day into this thing you know well on our second night but um you know we we figured we spent too long and we worked too hard to just cancel everything and turn back so we ended up deciding to stick out the trip and just do it in our car and that was quite a challenge which I'm sure we'll kind of talk about throughout this as well changed the dynamic you have cites booked and you had to kind of reschedule everything or were you just going to um we didn't have anything booked yet which is good but we had um we paid for this thing called Harvest host which lets you kind of park at different wineries or Farmland different areas like that and we were just planning on Walmart parking lots that and anywhere we could pull over to sleep you know having the trailer and then when we lost the trailer we were like yeah well we don't have any sleeping plans whatsoever we're going to have to basically um just pull over wherever we can find and that's worst enough cuz Harvest hosts don't allow if you don't have a functional camper or trailer you know with water kitchen electricity you can't sleep in the car there I'm sure you try to talk to the host and everything but um yeah that's that is an incredible story of just adversity and I'm going to have a hard time getting another show that's going to Top This one in the future cuz that's that's incredible how you guys were able to not only get through that but then have the mindset and just to stay positive I'm sure there were some you know some moments where you were kind of shaking your head but to move forward and go through with it yeah I think optimism is definitely uh like one of the the key traits I would say if you're you know it just in life you know try to be optimistic and always keep your head up and don't let anything stand in front of your way of you know what you want to do yeah I'm sure this goes without say but obviously you made the right decision right continue on that trip memories it was great you know no regrets at all and even looking back on the whole trailer experience like there was a little while where it was really stressful and I was there was a good part of the trip where I was like freaking out I was like I don't have a room I don't have a bathroom like you know I'm dirty I haven't showered in four days and um you know it was not easy for me I'm kind of like a homebody um but you know the trip made me a lot tougher and it was like really good life experience that now I could take that and you know I can know that I can live in any part of the country in a car and I don't need anything except for my body and you know a few essential things and I can survive so feels and then you get old and you realize you were taking your bed and your hot water for granted for the past you know your whole entire life did you do I mean I'm sure you stayed at like a couple airbn bees or hotels throughout or was it we did yeah yeah we needed it every once in a while um and we also had friends that we stayed at occasionally like I have a couple friends in California um you know in Colorado my mom lives there so we were kind of like bouncing around staying with friends and then getting hotels um tried to stay some in some sort of house like once or twice a week to keep our sanity um but otherwise we had to be on the road and driving and going to new places so you can't always just chill in the hotel room you know you got places to be well Swit gears a little bit into kind of money tips and budget do you have a any travel hacking money saving tips that you learned along the way that would like to share with our audience so I think one of the initial things is if you have all your backup supplies and especially things that you're going to be using a lot of so like propane was a perfect example of um if you don't have all of the extra propane that you're going to need for the trip you're going to end up having to buy it from Super overpriced like rural convenience stores that are charging you like $20 for a little can of it and you know keep in mind this is to cook pasta or rice you know so you're talking about 20 meal not including the food you don't want to pay that much for propane or stuff like that so try to um stock up where it's cheap and then use it you know in the places where it's not going to be cheap so after traveling consistently I know you did two months what would your monthly budget look like did you have a budget in mind did you completely blow it like we did did you stay on track with it or what would that budget look like for a listener yeah so I had a rough idea of how much I wanted to spend and we kind of did like a spreadsheet calculation which by the way we were way off I mean it was like not even completely relate with that yeah yeah the gas was one thing because you plug it into Google Maps or whatever and it's going to say this is the distance that it takes to go from here to Florida to California to Canada back to Connecticut and it's going to tell you that that's 12,000 mil but what you didn't consider is that there's probably an extra 5,000 miles of going driving around the national parks or the cities or going back and forth to your hotel and um you know the roads are curvy and like there's just all these little things you didn't think about that ended up adding thousands of miles to the trip that we didn't anticipate um but that being said we actually ended up spending less on gas than we originally anticipated because we didn't have the trailer we're Towing it yeah you got much better gas mileage so we anticipated uh 10 m per gallon with the trailer and then we ended up getting 20 because we didn't have it the whole time but we ended up going at least 50% over the amount of miles that we predicted so that kind of balanced out I think that I roughly spent $2,000 a month to to go on the trip and to live and you know which is really not that bad all things consider you're probably eating out a lot too cuz you didn't have a kitchen for the most part buying food and eating out like at least you know probably once a day or every other day you know cuz we needed place to work too so um yeah gas was the biggest expense and then all the food and supplies that you need is the probably the second biggest expense and excursions can also cost a decent amount um if you were staying at hotels that price would go up a lot um and you know there was particularly we were in Vegas and I I spent $500 for pretty much one night in a hotel there that quickly adds up you you can't be doing that if you want to spend one or $2,000 a month but if you want to you know if you're young if you're dependent and you feel like you want to travel and you don't have a lot of money it's totally possible you just have to rough it a little bit and uh it's not a bad thing plus the the gas prices I know you were talking about earlier when we left it was like four in change the price of gas per gallon and then out in California we saw $7.49 I know you had it similar price so that threw us off a little bit too yeah definitely looking at all the different prices for everything across the country there were some places where it's cheaper too I mean you know we got to like Arkansas and we saw like to maybe $250 I don't know exactly but it was in the $2 range which was cool too um kind of seeing all aspects of it but definitely uh yeah you get a lot of like life experience just seeing all the different things that different states have to offer too so I know you were working periodically how were you getting sell service um was it coffee shop Starbucks I know you mentioned that earlier if you want to add to that a little bit I had an unlimited hotspot plan on my phone so typically I would just be creating which phone plan offers that um AT&T okay yeah unlimited plan and yeah we pretty much I would just create hotpots like whenever I had service but no Wi-fi which was a lot of the time I mean you know in the car if I didn't have the Wi-Fi password for somewhere um but alternatively if I was at a restaurant or a coffee shop I would hook up to their WiFi and um use that because there's definitely times when you don't have service and if if that does happen then you need to find a restaurant or somewhere that can provide Wi-Fi to be able to connect all right one last question I have before you wrap up it's not exactly the best destination your favorite place but just one cool experience that you want to share like one memory that really stands out when you think about it you think man I'm glad I took that trip um I really liked Colorado and that's where my mom lives and my sister moved there on the trip we actually brought my sister to Colorado um kind of dropped her off along the way and there was a lot of different things there like the 12,000 ft mountains you know beautiful if you're into like hiking and you know scenery I think that those were some of the coolest spots that we saw for that and then in particular like one of my favorite memories was going to the Red Rocks Amphitheater so it's basically like a a concert Stadium on top of a mountain overlooking the city of Boulder um and it's like super cool maybe maybe I can get a picture of it over here as well we'll overlay that listening on YouTube we'll have a picture of it here yeah yeah and you know we just went and saw like a guy named camp and I'm not like a huge fan of his music but my family my brother does like him and my mom as well um but just like the experience was super cool like thousands of people up on top of a mountain Red Rocks all around you and like the city lights you know behind where the person's like playing their music so it was really cool first time going there y yeah have not been but definitely I've seen pictures and you're definitely making me want to add it to my list so yeah yeah definitely add it for anybody listening to the show right now who would like to set up a similar travel lifestyle that you set up what would be your one call of action for them to start doing today yeah I think it kind of depends on the route you want to take it so there's kind of two routes I could see um route one would be you're in a digital business um and you can work from anywhere and then you're trying to do a trip where you're also working and that's kind of like the approach I took to traveling um which which is trying to juggle both traveling and digital work at the same time and if you're trying to do that then do your research on all the different industries that you can go into web design social media marketing email marketing copywriting you know there's a lot out there a lot of options um and once you can kind of figure out your process and it does take a while to start anything like that or really any business whatsoever um but once you figure out your process and you start to get it rolling it doesn't take that long to be able to go on a trip like this because it only costs $2,000 a month you know like we said and if you can just if you can build up an income of a couple thousand a month from you know your business then you are able to do that and then kind of like the other route would be if you wanted to be in any career whatsoever and then just save up the money and then you don't have to work on the trip and that's another great way to do it as well because you don't have to be thinking about work and you can just enjoy the strictly just the traveling part of it which yeah most people that's probably what most people would want to do uh and it's a great way to do it as well sure I think the toughest thing to do is just finding a career that allows you if you are W2 that allows you to leave for a month or two months that's one thing we had to make an adjustment for obviously you had your own business but yeah that's a great tip um any YouTube channels or other influencers out there that you watched that motivated you and inspired you to travel um your channel for one the path Beyond so I mean you you announced it we already kind of had our trip planned like before I knew you were going on it but then seeing your videos come out on Instagram um was definitely motivating and also talking toar that yeah when you got back talking to you and seeing all the pictures and everything you know kind of like we mentioned earlier it doesn't hit you that you're going on the trip until you're on the road and I didn't really know like what to anticipate but um yeah I was just seeing all the videos and I was like this is going to be crazy like I don't even I know that when you take take a picture of something it doesn't really capture the full effect of how cool it is and I was like man these look really cool on the camera on my phone just imagine how they're going to look in person um so your channel is is definitely a big one but yeah besides for that I actually didn't do like a ton of research or like um you know I kind of just wanted to dive into it and see what happened and I was busy as well I'm so glad to hear that man I know that's like I'm sure you've gotten the same thing but like when someone tells us that we've inspired them to travel it's like one of the things one of the reasons why we did that Vlog and one of the reasons why we're doing this podcast now and I'm sure you've gotten the same feedback like you've inspired somebody else and you know this episode will Air hopefully it'll Inspire somebody else and that just that chain keeps unfolding so that's great man yeah I think that's the point yeah just try to uh you know Inspire other people and do do good things and yeah good stuff hey man thanks for coming on the show again I appreciate you taking the time here where can my audience find out more about you yeah so I have a YouTube channel um an Instagram on Instagram Dylan Davino and on YouTube just look up Dylan Davino and you'll find me so my YouTube channel is more about business and then my Instagram is just my life personal so and in terms of your work your Davino digital.com that's something you can do pretty much remotely if someone's listening to this podcast from across the country they can reach out to you and you can help them right I know we did our Google remote calls when we were setting up the website so mhm definitely we can work with anybody across the world as long as we uh speak your language right um and yeah you can look us up at Davino digital.com if you are looking for any website help or you know boosting your online presence we'd be happy to help awesome hey thanks D again for coming on the show this was a great podcast what an incredible story thank you for sharing your story on the adversity you guys faced with the camper flipping over and all the helpful tips So yeah thank you thanks for having me I appreciate it

 

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