The facts and figures

Well here we are back in Halifax. We figured we could look for jobs overseas while being home for the holidays, to rejuvanate our souls and our bank accounts.

$16,000, 19 countries, and a walk from Halifax to Montreal later, thus concludes what we’ll call chapter one.

Now that we had a solid three month excursion under our belts, I can’t help but wonder what it consisted of. How many nights were spent in hostels? How far did we travel by train versus car? How did two people spend $16,000? 

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Before you take a long trip, I would say it’s normal that you have certain expectations of how much ground you will cover, or what your budget will be.

Usually, unless you’ve scheduled your entire trip (removing all uncertainty and spontaneity), the reality may have been far from the expectation. 

Though we only used full rain gear once in 91 days, we really, really used it that one day.

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Point a to point b

​Lindy and I thought we covered a lot of ground travelling, at times too much of it. We met many people also on multi-month trips, some people never staying more than a 2-3 days in any single location.
Although you could “see” a lot more travelling that way, for people like us, it’s also a good way to run yourself ragged.

I swear, an almost symmetrical pie chart was not our intent.

So how far did we travel? If you were a crazy person, and summed up all the distance trained, flown, walked etc.. You would come close to a number like 26, 390 Km. I am that crazy person.

I didn't include the 17,000 Km covered by flight in the pie chart on the left, because it's not as interesting.

When I was doing some research in August, I read that if you are doing an overland trip (Contiki, Odyssey, Endeavour, etc…) that travelling more than an average 100 Km/day can feel rushed and hectic. ​

​We traveled about 8,300 Km through all modes of transportation (excluding flights and walking) which turns out an average of just over 90 Km/day. We can both confess that when we do another long trip, we will aim to have less than 90 Km/day, it was a lot of moving around at times. 

We found taking buses generally to be more convenient than trains, which made us happy to reaffirm our decision not to get Euro rail passes. Many of the people we spoke to who bought rail passes felt a bit hand cuffed to the rails. In order to make the purchase worth it, they said sometimes they basically had to go out of their way to use trains. Especially in the Balkans, we found buses more convenient to use and very accessible.

I mentioned before in a previous blog, if you’re travelling with two or more people, rental cars are really the way to go. The most distance was covered with rental cars, using them in Iceland, Norway, Germany, and Scotland. Here are the routes we took below.

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on a walkabout

How long does it take to walk 1,000,000 steps? Apparently for us the answer for us was 70 days, right around November 10th. That many steps roughly translates to 750 kilometres, or an average of between walking 10-11 Km/day.

My legs hurt looking at this graph. 950 Km hurt.

Please allow me to qualify some of the points on this lovely line graph above. Three of these four spikes correspond to a hiking day, one of them was just a “regular” day walking around in Budapest. According to Walkologists (maybe that’s a thing?) any day above 10,000 steps is a good one. 10,000 is indicated by that yellow line, so on average we did well to surpass that.

​You can see that the overall trend is downward, it might have something to do with us getting worn out, though I prefer to think of it as our interests were just shifting to things closer to us...  

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Sleeping around (Not in that way)

We thought three months was a good, long stint of travel. But yet again, whether it’s the 25 year old teacher couple from Quebec travelling for 10 months on saved money, or the 19 year old Australian students travelling for 8 months while taking a semester off university, people we met seem to find a way to travel for very long periods of time staying in every type of lodging you can think of.

So where did we sleep during our 91 days away? Basically we stayed in eight different types of lodging as seen by number of nights.

From least frequent over traveling overnight, to most frequent of hostels.

An excellent way to save more money is to add a Couchsurfing pie slice, and drop every other lodging type except for “Friend’s” and “Tenting”. You really can't beat free.

​It was worth it to bring a tent, considering our first month of travel, we camped 7 nights in September.

However, Sept 30 was the last night of the three months we used the tent. In hindsight, it was not worth it to bring a tent for only 8% of the time…

​Lesson learned!

When all campgrounds are unexpectedly closed in Vianden, over budget hostels are the next best option!

It's about fine tuning your balance. If you are OK to POTENTIALLY (emphasis on potentially):

• Receive good night hugs from your Couchsurfing host
• Brave cold weather in your tent
• Tolerate some less than considerate hostel roommates

Then you should be fine to skimp on accommodation cost. We were more or less comfortable with what we spent on accommodation.

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Kroner, Kuna, Marks, Pounds, Euros...

​Lindy and I had set out a pretty achievable and thrifty budget, at times too thrifty for our own good. But even though we’d consider ourselves on the frugal end of the spectrum, we still met people who were able to sustainably travel farther and longer than us by stretching their cash.

20,000 forints, not quite a 1:1 conversion to the Canadian dollar.

​Be it tenting, Couchsurfing, hitchhiking, or abstaining from alcohol and restaurants, you can always find ways to pinch the pennies.

So how much does all this cost? For two budget-minded people to travel in Europe for three months, it will run around $16,000. This is for EVERYTHING.

All transportation to, within, and from Europe, all accommodations, all food and alcohol, the whole kit and caboodle. 

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​Surprise, surprise! The most expensive components of the cost were transportation, accommodation, food, and alcohol; basically three of every four dollars we spent was in these categories.

It shouldn’t be a shock to realize how Couchsurfing, hitchhiking, and buying groceries can save so much money when you see how much food and lodging dominate your budget.

Hey, museum entrance fees certainly are educational.

The doughnut above represents my credit card spending. I was the credit guy, Lindy was the cash gal. About two thirds of our total spending was done through credit, unfortunately this resulted in about $300 in currency exchange fees or 3% of every purchase.

​In my opinion, this was very much worth it to save the hassle of having to withdraw and carry a bunch of foreign currency.

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And that's how the cookie crumbles. There's a million more details I could delve into, but as a believer in diminishing returns, I must resist.

That's how three months of travel looks on paper. Although it's not as glamorous as the beautiful landscapes, intriguing history, or vibrant people you come across during travel, ​if you are looking to improve and learn for next time, it's just as important.

Tune in next time for the final (for now) entry on my solo experience through Croatia and Sarajevo!

A lot has happened since the '84 Sarajevo Olympics