The Colorado Springs Gazette final

The thrifty traveler: Crossing globe on a budget

BY JON MITCHELL jon.mitchell@gazette.com

Lacy Elam is proof that you don’t have to make big bucks to dream big — including traveling the country and the globe.

And her strategy for making sure travel funds are available is pretty simple.

“Just a lot of self-control, really,” the 32-year-old Colorado Springs woman says with a smile.

“I don’t shop on Amazon in the middle of the night. I don’t buy anything that I don’t need. My fridge is never full. I’ve had the same hiking boots for 12 years. It’s a very minimalist lifestyle.”

Elam, who works as a portrait photographer and also does freelance webpage design, doesn’t have an eye-popping income that allows for lavish vacations at top-tier resorts. Even so, she’s still managed road trips this past year to the east and west coasts of the United States along with several national parks along the way.

Meanwhile, she recently retired the pair of waterproof Merrill hiking boots that she bought 12 years ago, right before she left for Europe to escape what she looks back on as a dead-end job.

Ready for a change

More than 10 years ago, Elman was making a living styling women’s hair and had regular customers who came into her Richmond, Va., store.

She sold products. She cut hair. She got people ready for photo shoots. She would use a lot of the products she was pushing.

And she loathed all of it. “Oh my God,” Elam said. “I did that for several years in Richmond and just hated it. I used to straighten my hair or curl it every single day. I used to get my nails done all the time, I’d go to spas every day and use all these products. It turns out I’m allergic to a lot of that stuff, but I’d use them anyway. We had to. It was part of the job.”

The “eureka” moment for Elam came when she realized how much money she was spending on these services. Makeup, hair products, nail services and pedicures, even 10 years ago, could run as much as $500 monthly, she said. Plus, she said that job was taking a toll in other places.

“You’re serving as the stylist and the therapist for people,” Elam said. “It’s super draining.”

So she said farewell to that life — and adopted that minimalist mentality that would free up cash she could use to travel the world.

Planting the travel seed

Elam said the experience at the hair salon prompted her to want to leave the place she grew up and figure a few things out as a young adult. She caught on with an organization called workaway.com, which finds and offers jobs to overseas travelers.

Some of the jobs she took on included a horse farm in Germany where she “shoveled horse manure, took care of the animals and cooked for the owners.” She eventually moved on to Spain, where she said she ran a bed and breakfast.

She scored big with her next gig in Portugal, where she was supposed to work in a family’s butcher shop but, instead, became a travel companion for the family while they were out hiking and adventuring around Europe.

All total, she was able to see most of the continent on a visa that was extended to two years. It also afforded her the opportunities to have multiple experiences that included snowboarding in the Alps and a weeklong stay in Amsterdam.

She eventually came back to the United States to live in North Carolina, then moved around the country before she and her boyfriend, Jim Shields, moved from a small town in New Mexico to Colorado Springs in March 2020, when traveling became an even higher priority.

“I’m just not someone who can sit around and stare at a computer screen all day, even

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2022-12-04T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-12-04T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://daily.gazette.com/article/283167202589684

The Gazette, Colorado Springs