The Costs, Broken Down

For years now, whenever I travel, I log my expenses. And I mean EACH and EVERY little thing I purchase, I write into my log. Every coffee, stick of gum, bag of ice, is written down. It's always interesting to me seeing where my money goes. When Dirk and I went to Maryland, same thing -- we kept meticulous records of our spending, saving all our receipts, entering them into our logbook at the end of the day.

I generally have four categories, and one personal spending column (souveniers, etc.):

• Fuel
• Lodging
• Food
• Misc. Sundries (for example laundry, worms, firewood, tarp) or unexpected things (like an air mattress or extra sleeping bag, LOL)

My initial estimate in our planning stages was $2,200.00. I finally got around to doing all the totals. Here are the costs of our NWT trip, broken down (sorry about the manual formatting -- Blogger doesn't have the column/indent feature):

Fuel                   $850.85
Lodging             $683.53
Food                  $426.26
Misc. Sundries  $347.76
                          _______
TOTAL:           $2,308.40

As a couple, that worked out to $121.50/day; individually, $60.75. We ate well, had lots of fun, didn't want for anything. I'd say that's a pretty well-budgeted vacay. Take away the cost of the extra sleeping bag purchase (it got pretty cold a few nights in those mountains) and  new air mattress, we hover around the $2,220 mark. The money we have left over is being rolled over into next year. Therefore, if anyone out there knows of anyone who has a low-mileage Grand Caravan or something that they're trading in on a new vehicle, let us know -- we're throwing around the idea of converting one into a camper. For real. I figure we could do it up for around $1000. Complete with spray-bombed paint finish. LOL