I drove from Alaska to Argentina in 22 months, and my expenses on the road were identical to what they had been for the previous two years going to work every day.
It's very common to go traveling the world for basically the same amount of money you spend just going to work.
Damn, that really has me thinking about doing something similar. One advantage of being in Web development is I (and many others here) can work from anywhere as long as there is an an occasional Internet connection. Certainly nothing full-time (defeats the purpose of traveling), but a few hundred dollars here and there probably goes a long ways.
Do it! I commented elsewhere in the thread, but for my wife & I together we spend 3500USD/mo and are quite comfortable. Travel's a blast. I found I really prefer contiguous blocks of work (several-week chunks) so work and travel don't each distract me from the other.
Travel slowly, immerse yourself in the daily in-and-outs. Rent apartments, do housesitting. Stay at least a month in a big city, use it as a "home base," and make shorter excursions out from there.
At the same time, there's adventure to be had coding and traveling at the same time... had to mute myself in a Google Hangout daily standup once because the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohri drums from the Delhi streets below were drowning me out. Brushed death on a Bangkok mototaxi in rush hour traffic en route to a give a meetup talk. Most exciting of all: found novel timezone bug in an app once by working in a zone (India Standard Time) with a 30-minute offset.
Everything you want to know is on my blog. If you have any specific questions, feel free to post a comment there, I'll reply. I really like to help out others doing the same thing in any way I possibly can.
I'm dead serious when I give the offer of help in any way I possibly can.
Also, there is no need to be jealous. It's not expensive, or overly difficult. It was also by far and away the most rewarding thing I've ever done in my life. If you want to do it bad enough, change a few things around in your life and you can do it!
It's very common to go traveling the world for basically the same amount of money you spend just going to work.
http://theroadchoseme.com/the-price-of-adventure