Behind all the joy of gliding through vineyards and Eucalyptus forests, of feeling so sophisticated sitting at little cafes in medieval villages, and so forth, there is of course always a little accountant in the background totting up the costs. Wait, here he is now, and he is pointing to ever rising costs!

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Of course the accountant can tally the costs but can not judge the worth. Whatever the costs we show below, was it worth it? Our answer must be yes, because we are already plotting our next foray. More about that later.

We started out this blog with a page about air costs. These of course will vary from nothing, for those who start their bike tours from their front doors, to no doubt a very high number for people from the southern hemisphere who come to tour in the north. Our little niche is North Americans going to Europe. But even for these, air costs can vary a lot depending on how you do it. We recently asked a friend how he can hop to Europe for just a few weeks touring, given how high that must make the per day air cost. The answer was points, garnered through a credit card. But we think you need to be running a business through a card to gather meaningful amounts of points.

This time around, in terms of airfares, we set ourselves up for every type of high cost you can imagine.  First off, we traveled with the bikes. This opened us to some really ripoff bike box charges, like the 250+ euros we paid TAP airlines to carry the two boxes from Montreal to Porto. And having the boxes even forced us to pay high shuttle costs (50 euros) to go from airport to hotel in Porto and the reverse. Our next folly was in stopping over in Montreal (remember, we are talking cost not worth), where we paid over 200 euros total  to store the boxes at the airport (coming and going to Europe) to avoid dragging them into the city. And finally we did do the stopover at Montreal, rather than flying direct from our west coast to Europe. It seems that increased the base airfare cost by 40%. The reason is that the airlines do not quite charge by the km, so trips of the same total distance can have much different costs depending on routing and stopovers. 

Given all that, our total airfare, storage, and ground shuttle cost for this outing to Portugal was 3691 euros! Of that, 814 was for the bike  box transport, and 172 was for our one checked bag.  814 euros! True, you could not quite buy an ebike over there for that, but you could get a darn nice push bike, or how about a laptop, or something else of lasting value? 

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Turning to some of the other costs of the trip, Portugal turned out to be quite economical for hotels, and seriously cheap for groceries. It's hard to disentangle the part of hotel costs that is for the typically included breakfast, but if we leave the breakfast cost in there, our average hotel cost was about 80 euros. The cheapest hotels we used were 40-50 euros, and we topped out at 160. The highest costs were in Porto and Seville, where we had to work hard to even keep it under 200, while in Lisbon we kept the cost down by going outside the tourist core. This strategy is only for extreme cases, though, because it's no use being a tourist in the industrial hinterland of a city.

The impact of "breakfast included" is great when it comes to total food costs. We found restaurants in Portugal to be not that great, and that foods found in the breakfast buffets was generally higher quality and more nutritious. So we filled up mostly at breakfast, and took along some bits too. Remarkably, there were some days when we had no other food costs than the included breakfast. And in the grocery stores - 14 euros could be a typical total, for food that could last us a day and a half! Over all the days of the tour, the average grocery and restaurant cost was 24 euros. And that includes a few very costly and fun restaurant outings!

Sadly, the category "Treats" did not amount to much this time. Treats usually means bakeries for me (though ice cream is in there too).  Usually a bakery is an irresistible draw, but in Portugal though they were plentiful, they were weak enough that the draw faded. That at least shows that I am more addicted to the quality than the sugar. Or maybe the crime of the Portuguese bakeries was in not putting enough sugar in there?

Ice cream in Portugal was of reasonable quality, though often not totally great. And there were a lot more places to get it than in France. (Germany and Austria and no doubt Italy are the true gelato heavens.)  The cost was "reasonable", or these days even cheap, at about 2.50 euros per scoop. Dodie points out that I would typically go for two scoops!

Souvenirs is another category that has faded for us in terms of total spending. I used to buy a pin or a sticker from every single place. But that has resulted in little more than a shelf at home stuffed with stickers and pins. I do like putting the stickers on the panniers, but they do not survive the weather very well.  (One that has survived is the "Camino"sticker on the front of Dodie's handlebar bag. To this day, the sticker earns us a lot of "Buon Camino"s.)

Dodie remains devoted to sending postcards to the grandkids, and we know these are well received. Even my brother says he treasures the few postcards that we direct his way, and to other friends and relations. The main cost of postcards is in the postage, which these days does not differ from that of a first class letter. And of course, in Mexico we had endless hours of fun just looking for a post office, none of which had stamps anyway! 

In Portugal we spent 69 euros on postcards and postage. That is double what we managed to spend last time in Mexico.

Comparing the makeup of costs for this trip to our last visit to Mexico, for example, reveals dramatic differences. These relate to the factors already mentioned - the airfare costs, breakfast included hotels, quality of treats, etc. But look, hotels plus food were 74% of the story in Mexico, but only 54% in Portugal. And airfare (even carrying bikes along as we did) was 7% for Mexico, but a whopping 32% for Portugal.

Sticking with Europe, hotel plus food was 66% for our recent England and France tour, and airfare was 17%. So Portugal really was quite unique.

Coming off this experience - of high air costs into Portugal, coupled with high costs of bringing the bikes - we are now cooking up another scheme. Taking our cue from the Maher-Wearys we will cycle back to Iberia in the  Fall  (from Germany), store the bikes there, and then return to  our bikes  for another Iberian go 'round (with the cheap hotels and groceries) the following Spring.  That way, I suppose, the next "What It Cost"  page can focus more on storage costs than air fares. Probably you can't win, but we still say it's worth it!