Today we’d like to introduce you to Leandra & Jayk Brooks.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Leandra: Growing up, I would watch my parents work all year and save up their PTO and money to take the same vacation once a year to some resort in Cabo or Hawaii or a cruise. The travel the kids went on was to our grandparent’s house in Wyoming. So when I was 13, I begged my parents to take us somewhere else on a trip and even offered to plan the entire thing. I’m one of those weird people who gets an adrenaline rush off of a nicely organized to-do list and enjoys planning something just as much as actually doing it. Well maybe my parents were crazy, or maybe they didn’t think anything would actually come of it, but little 13-year-old I took the budget they gave me and planned an 8-day road trip from northern Utah to Oregon to drive down the coast to the redwoods and back home. And as hard as it is to believe, I really did plan it!
I had campgrounds for us to stay at every night with our little pop-up trailer, the best donut shops to stop at along the way, and a packed itinerary completely mapped out for which directions we would need to drive to absolutely maximize seeing everything we could on this trip. We even stayed in a treehouse one night! The only night I didn’t plan was the last night because we weren’t sure how far we would make it home before finding a place to stop, so my dad was left in charge of that. Well, we ran out of gas in Sisters, Oregon, and had to sleep in our pop-up camper in a cow pasture with coyotes outside all night until the closest gas station opened the next morning. That only further solidified that I should be the one in charge of planning from there on out. Then at 17 my older brother and his family moved to Switzerland for a few months.
I went to visit them and left the country for the first time ever. I saw France and Switzerland and fell in love with the experience of seeing somewhere for the first time. The first time I saw the Lauterbrunnen valley in Switzerland, I swore I would keep chasing that same feeling for the rest of my life. The excitement of knowing this is somewhere you’ve never experienced. Anything could happen. This could be your favorite place you’ve ever been to or the best day of your life, and you just don’t know it yet. To me, this was a kind of travel that not most people got to experience. They like my parents fell into a rut and lied that the only vacation and safe travel was to save up for that once-a-year cruise or resort. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with cruises or resorts!! They’re relaxing and convenient. But for me personally, they lacked authentic experiences and that exciting rush. When I was 20 I got married and I remember one night early in our marriage crying to my husband that I couldn’t bear the thought of not traveling and seeing the world. That I knew I was missing out on so much.
We were poor like most newlyweds, so travel seemed off the table. But that’s when we got to researching and getting very creative and discovered travel hacking and budget travel. We each took turns while finishing school working part-time in the evenings at a Hampton inn to get the employee discount. We figured out rewards credit cards that were best for travel and best fit our life. We learned about using a VPN to search for flights or checking sites like Skyscanner, Skiplagged, or AutoSlash. We then started discovering more unique things to do and visit, like the “Bread and Puppet Museum” out of someone’s barn in Vermont. Or the Goldbug hot springs on top of a mountain overlooking a valley. Experiences that weren’t cookie-cutter and weren’t that expensive at the same time. And as little money, as we had, we traveled. A lot.
We continued to meet amazing people everywhere we went, and it softened my heart and perspective on the world. I realized there were such good people worth getting to know their stories everywhere. I realized the value of learning from people who had life experiences completely different from mine and thought nothing as I did. Travel was making me kinder and more appreciative of the world. We now have friends all over the world we keep in touch with and continue to learn new perspectives from. And my love for it kept growing, to the point that I felt a need to teach others to do the same or to offer a service to plan in this way for them so they could also experience this. And so my first attempt at this, Leaving with Lenny, was born.
But as I was working, pregnant, and moving, and also trying out wayyy too many avenues of what to offer, I for a time lost sight of the original goal. So I went back to the drawing board and rebranded into Road-trip Rookies with 3 goals. 1. To help make travel attainable for others. Both in the sense of showing how affordable it can be if you’re crafty in how you plan it, and showing how not just the travel influencer can go to all these places outside of resorts and cruises. 2: To promote traveling with your family when you can. The experiences shared between my husband and I while traveling brought us closer together than I knew possible, and were creating a deep bond of memories together. Now that we have a 3-month-old little girl, we want the same for her throughout her life. In her short time here she’s already been on 4 flights! I truly believe travel can make families closer when it’s possible to do. I want to promote open-mindedness to others and appreciation of God’s children everywhere. It’s a beautiful experience to share and can help the generations to come.
And 3: not limiting your experiences. Again, before the resort and cruise lines Sue me, those are awesome experiences as well! They provide relaxation in a safe environment. But I want to teach people that there are also other options out there. Like getting to shoot the cannon off of the USS Constitution in Boston for evening colors (we did that!), or having your Airbnb host in Europe knit some boots for your baby from the wool of the sheep outside the window where you’re staying. Or sleeping in a rented airstream next to a lake in the fall foliage, complete with raccoons scratching at your door all night (okay maybe the raccoons part we can skip next time.) but my point is, there is so much to experience.
And it’s so amazing and beautiful, and if it’s something that speaks to you, I want to help you experience it. And if a resort or cruise calls your name, I’ll help you find a way to make it more affordable so you can go more than once a year when you’re burned out. Overall, I want to teach people that we’ve been told so many half-truths about traveling, and if you desire it, there are ways to make your dream travel happen.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
We started as Leaving with Lenny. We had so many ideas and no true direction, to begin with. We weren’t totally sure at that time what we wanted to be our outcome and weren’t focused on the parts we were passionate about. We didn’t know how to start an LLC. We scrapped together a blog and a Shopify site for travel tees we sold for a short while. We didn’t know how to get our message to people. And because our messaging wasn’t clear, people didn’t totally understand.
It was just learning and learning and learning. So we took a break and identified the 3 goals that were the most meaningful to us and decided to just focus on how we Could make those 3 things happen. We began to view our offerings from the customer’s perspective rather than just our own. We did work for free in exchange for feedback and applied it. And we rebranded into Road trip Rookies which overall met our goals to help others do the same better.
As you know, we’re big fans of Road trip Rookies. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
In short, what we offer is that for a small fee, we will plan your trip to your interests and budget, but it’s truly so much more than that. Your trip plan includes options on flights based on the best price and most efficient routes to get to your destination, hotels, and Airbnbs based on best deals and unique stay experiences (like staying in a treehouse!), an itinerary of what you could do based on the interests you share with us, the best deals on a rental car if you need one, and the best places to eat! But each plan is extremely personalized.
We’ve helped find the best tattoo parlors for clients to commemorate the trip at, accommodations for your party of 16 to stay at, provide suggestions like picking up the rental car a day later and offering nearby walking experiences to help you save, activities with all of your parties ages in mind, and absolutely unique experiences that you haven’t heard of, like a donut shop ghost tour that takes you to each of the donut shops around Nashville telling you about the hauntings of the city along the way! We also provide discount codes and hacks to save beyond the deals we’ve found as well. Some examples are if you get the hotels.com app you can save an additional 25% off of some locations, or if you book an activity through TripAdvisor, use the app and code APP10 for 10% off! (You’re welcome!).
There are so many ways to save and have fun unique experiences, and we put in the hours of searching the far corners of the internet to find them for you. What makes us different as well is that we don’t get any kickbacks from this. So we aren’t trying to persuade you to stay with a specific chain or do specific activities for our own financial benefit. We simply are just passionate about travel and want to help you have the same experiences with ease. We also don’t do the booking. We provide every link in an organized manner with photos and details so you can easily hit the link to book now or give it a few days to think about it.
There is zero pressure to book anything, we just want to make it easy and accessible to you for when you are ready on your own time! The only encouragement we give to book quickly is that deals can often change fast, but that’s why we also provide cancellation policies and details of which party you have to go through to make changes so you aren’t scrambling for the fine print later. We even provide baggage policies and costs on the airlines we suggested flights through so you aren’t blindsided by those costs either.
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you.
I go back and forth on if I believe in luck or not.
I prefer the phrase “fortune favors the bold”. I would say we’ve been lucky to have the experiences we’ve had which have equipped us with the knowledge to travel hack and budget travel, but we had to take a lot of risks and learn from our mistakes. Therefore, over time fortune favored us for our bold choices to just go for it! And we’ve had a beautiful life so far based on that life motto, and that makes me feel pretty lucky.
Pricing:
- At this time a trip is $75 per location. If you are interested in more than one place and would like a plan for each one, we do charge for each trip planned, but also offer deals on multiple being planned at once for you to choose between. For further context, if you want to do a road trip, that counts as one “location”. We only count it as multiple when you for example don’t know if you want to visit Oregon or Florida and want full details on both.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @roadtrip.brookies or @leavingwithlenny
- Other: Fill out this form to get started on a trip with us! https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSesZT8GTBRarQGjVVWMK6PwyTtaKKeZVkypl7cimHDXviLTPg/viewform
Image Credits
Jayk & Leandra Brook, and Trever Thompson of PSC Photography
