2015 commentary -

We stayed in motels every night and ate out every meal. Our credit cards saw plenty of action.

I was in charge of the motel section. The charges came in over two billing statements. The first error I found was from a locale we never stayed at. I made the reservation, then changed the route. I was sure to note the cancelation number, date, and person I spoke with. A charge of $262. showed up on my card. It's an interesting note that the room in question was $80., how they came up with $262. I do not know. When I called, the charge was quickly taken care of. It might not have been so easy had I not noted the cancelation info.

Another night, the billing was $7.62 more than the correct charge. Not a huge amount, but not correct either. It took three phone calls to take care of this one.

The last lodging billing issue was being double billed the correct amount, $130.. I called on this today and am still waiting for resolution.

3 out of 30 nights is a 10% rate of failure. That's pretty high, IMO. The incorrect dollar amount was almost $400. not insubstantial.

Quick version - check your credit card statements carefully after a tour. Or, wild camp every night - no credit card charges!

Jacinto did not track the restaurant charges. I wonder now if we should have saved all of the receipts to double check. Was there a 10% error rate on restaurants also? We traveled through tourist areas, food was expensive. We could have spent less on food, but chose not to.

Our budget was $200. a day for lodging and food. I'm quite sure we came in under that. We haven't sat down to do a final credit card tally.

Travel expenses were quite high with the one way tour. Our next trip will be a circle tour, easier and less time consuming. Our choice was to rent a moving truck to transport our bikes. End of the story is it probably would have been cheaper to pack and ship the bikes and buy plane tickets for ourselves. We've done that before, and had minor damage to the bikes. We like knowing we can roll our bikes right out of the truck and start riding. Your comfort levels might be different than ours. One note on moving trucks - prices when we were checking varied by almost 50%. Check around. We ended up going to Bellingham rather than our actual starting point of Sumas, a $500. savings and an extra 27 miles.

2017 update - we now have credit card apps on our phones. We can check the charges as they are made. That makes life so much easier. We had no errors in either lodging or restaurant charges for 2017.

This year Jacinto's mother passed away unexpectedly. We had to cancel a planned trip. Since our lodging was reserved in advance for a 30 day tour, that was a number of phone calls. When we rebooked later in the summer, prices had increased dramatically in some towns. At the Gateway Motel in Salida, CO we originally had a room for $79. When I rebooked, the price went up to $129. In Aspen, we had carefully arranged to arrive during the spring season. When we actually traveled, it was summer season and the price went up $50.

We had three locations out of the thirty who charged cancelation fees. Buena Vista, Lake City, and Creede.

Lodging in touristy Colorado in the summer months isn't for the faint of pocketbook. My previous mental average for lodging was $100. During the 2017 trip, anything under $150. was a deal and the couple of places we stayed under $100. were met with suspicion.

It should be noted that many mountain towns in Colorado have hostels. You can stay for less money if you are willing to share a room and use the bathroom down the hall.

For 2017 we stayed by accident at lodging that offered breakfast. Typically I eat oatmeal in the room, but Jacinto always goes for breakfast. This year he had a restaurant breakfast only twice. Many times when we are at a place that offers breakfast, it starts too late for me as I like to get on the road early. This year I was more relaxed and waited for the breakfast. Sometimes it was worth waiting for, sometimes not. But it was included! We decided that price shopping for places that included breakfast, especially if it was more than a continental breakfast, was worth the effort.