September 3, 2014
Statistics: Costs
Even though cycle touring can look like budget travel, it is not exactly cheap. For starters, I was just tidying up a file cabinet and had to deal with literal snowdrifts of receipts from outdoor equipment and bike shops from the past three years. In principle, you can grab and old pair of shorts and your ten speed from college and just go, but it is never like that. To do long distances, you do sort of need good equipment, and refining what you have is just natural.
But that is just the cost of getting set up to go. The other costs, the ones that I want to tally in this page, are the daily costs of actually travelling.
The first cost for us of travelling in Europe is airfare. This depends on the season, the destination city, whether arrival and departure cities are the same, and the airline chosen. For us, the minimum cost is about $1000 each. For this exact trip we probably ended up with twice that.
Once you hit the ground, the costs are for food, lodging, and a myriad other things. It depends on what you want to track and on how finely you want to break it down. We tallied even the costs of postcards, of souvenirs, of treats (a major category!), and of postage for mailing souvenirs like maps and pamphlets home. The total cost for 92 days of all the fun was €7811 ($10,115), or €85 ($110) per day. This included a (very reasonable!) €443 ($574)for treats, mainly eis and bakery, and an eye catching €3400 ($4400) for guesthouses. Here is how it all broke down:
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Compared to previous trips, it was the guesthouse use that was new for us. It started when we struck out from Paris, sort of cross country and not along any established tourist route or region. That meant that organized campgrounds were scarce. As for wild camping, while we enjoy the peace and quiet of a stealthy corner somewhere, and have no particular attachment to showers or toilets, we just don't feel comfortable with the prospect of being given the boot. So, enter the guesthouse. Particularly in Germany, guesthouses are sprinkled about much much more liberally than campgrounds, and then - there are the addictive breakfast buffets! The guesthouse cost, also, is less than what might appear because those buffets satisfied a significant proportion of our food needs. On the other hand, the guesthouses often had seductive restaurants, where you could pay €30-40 ($39-52) for an evening meal for two.
We started out thinking that a double bed in a guest house should cost €50 ($65), but in truth the average turned out to be €69 ($89). Here is how it broke down:
In US dollars, that's 14% under $65, and 35% over $104!
So, is all this too much to pay for a cycling adventure? It depends of course on your income. The average daily cost is certainly more than we spend when staying home, but even at home we find ways to squander money. I just looked on the Air Transat site, and for $884 each (a mere €620) we could be in Amsterdam tomorrow. Let's go!
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