- Total budgeted – $18,500
- Total actual spend – $21,442.17
- Travel-related spending: $19,068.48
- Unrelated personal spending: $2,373.69
- Average daily budget: $250
- Average daily actual spend: $289.76
Food was undoubtedly our biggest expense. Dining out is clearly much more expensive than cooking for yourself. However, when you’re at a campsite or AirBnb, you can’t fall back on a well-stocked supply of pantry staples so you have to work with what you have available. This meant a lot of the meals that I did cook were things that were easily assembled from prepared foods at the grocery store or grilled. I think 3 of the AirBnbs that we stayed at only had hot plates which also limited how much we were really willing to cook when we had access to a kitchen.
Food Spending
- Dining out: $7,051.49
- Groceries: 1,652
The second biggest expense was for reservations. Before the trip began we already had most of our national park campsites reserved and arrangements made with everyone we planned to visit. But we still had to fill in the rest of the gaps. We ended up only camping for 25 nights of the 74 that we were out on Part 1. I originally thought it would be closer to 40 but there were a couple more invitations to stay with friends and family that came up and then we had a few really long driving days after leaving Western North Dakota that we had to push through to make it to Chicago in time for Marla’s birthday festivities.
Reservation spend
- Reservations: $4,546.11
The third biggest expense was our car. $1879.76 was spent on gas over the course of 10,996 miles. Then when we got to Virginia we had to spend another $1511.91 on a new set of tires and some other scheduled maintenance.
Car spend
- Gas: $1,879.76
- Maintenance: $1,511.91
Finally, we made a data-driven decision to switch from Mint Mobile, our previous cell phone carrier to T-Mobile. Mint Mobile is fine if you’re not leaving the country, but God help you if you do. In addition to having really frustrating and confusing international coverage (just use wifi all the time was really not an option for us) we discovered that we spent an additional $372.20 on supplemental data (both international and domestic) that wasn’t included in our annual plan. Two weeks in on our Western European leg, and we are thrilled with the coverage we have with T-Mobile.
Data spend
- Additional data: $372.20
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