As of Oct 13th, we are on the road again, headed towards Alabama to visit Dan’s family. Alabama is a 1500 mile trip for
Camping all alone in a Kansas State Park
us. We will cover about 300 miles a day with some rest/work days built in. It should take us about ten days altogether. Right now we are camped in a Kansas State Park. There is one other trailer in the whole place. Our site is on a narrow peninsula with a lake surrounding us. After spending several weeks in the Boulder area, the space and silence is wonderful. The owls were hooting and the coyotes were howling last night. You just don’t get that in the city. It is raining today, but supposed to clear later. We are hoping to get out in the kayak tomorrow.
We just spent several weeks in Boulder catching up with friends and work. Dan had a couple of site visits, and we attended a friend’s wedding. We kept getting asked the same questions. “How can you do this so young?” and ”Aren’t the gas prices really hurting you?” The answer to the the first
Dan took this picture on a site visit to Glacier National Park in early October
will be covered in a future post (short answer; don’t have kids and live below your means!) and the answer to the second is no. Yes, diesel prices are higher than we would like, but we are still under our budget for the year in that category. We can control how much we spend on diesel by travelling slower, staying longer, etc. The things that are hurting our budget are items like groceries, medical bills, and entertainment. Like everyone else, we are spending more on groceries than we were a year ago. About 25% more, and I don’t think our eating habits have changed.
Medical bills were higher than anticipated due to Jenn having to have an endoscopy earlier this year. Luckily, we were able to go to Monterrey, Mexico and have it done for a lot less than it would have cost in the states. In fact, including our travel and vacation costs in Mexico, we spent half of what we would have in the US for the exact same procedure. This doesn’t even consider the fact that the standard of care was fabulous and we actually have a doctor that we can talk to or e-mail anytime. What a difference from the states… this trip really highlighted some of the problems with health care in America. I could write a whole entry about this alone. In the end, the important thing is that the problem is fixed and I feel good. It’s hard to put a price tag on feeling good.
Entertainment is the category where we have blown it the biggest, but I am not sure we would do anything different. We had to replace my laptop when it was stolen, and we have gone gambling a few times. Dan made up for some of our previous losses by hitting a royal last time, but we usually expect to lose and treat it as entertainment. Some of our purchases, like a new camera lens, an HD TV, and the kayak, will provide hours of free entertainment in the future. I expect our enertainment costs to come down next year, but we want to have a good time as long as we are out here. There is no point in denying ourselves just to save a few dollars. There are many areas it is really easy for us save. We don’t eat out a lot and we tend to like cheaper places to stay. Those cost saving measures don’t feel like we are denying ourselves anything and help balance out our extravagances.
In the end, I tell people to think about how much their mortgage, property taxes, car payments etc. cost them and then realize that we don’t have those costs. Yes, some of our costs are similar, but a lot of them don’t exist for us. We spend about 50% of what we did when we had a house. That means we need to bring in a lot less money to sustain this lifestyle. As to how we got to this point, I’ll cover that some other time.
