On the Road Expenses and Statistics, Month Two

Two months of continuous travel!

Exactly 60 days ago I was taking the plane to start our journey around the world. I was so excited, and somewhat anxious about this new life we were getting into.

Now we are in Las Vegas, spending the day in these wonderful hotels and casinos, and thinking how happy and lucky we are! So far our trip has gone smoothly, although it has been tiring. Our plan was to start slow and take our time in each country so we don’t get exhausted, but since when do travel plans ever stay the same?!

We are extremely exhausted and craving a break (seriously?!). Visiting six states and nine cities and traveling 7,251 km (4,506 mi) through four different time zones is not an easy job. There is a lot to observe and tons of information to digest!

I was a bit worried that we would not like Los Angeles, (based on our bad experiences with St. Paul and Minneapolis and the fact that we were mentally and physically exhausted). Fortunately, the moment we landed, we felt l in love with the city, life and activies.

A decent part of our second month was spent at my uncle’s, which gave us the pleasure of reuniting with family and getting to know my cousins. This also helped reduce our expenses a lot, since we didn’t have to worry about accommodation. We also took the first week off to relax and do very few things besides spending time with the cousins.

Let’s see what we have done this month!

Travel statistics:

• Cities visited: 6We continued our travel within the States, visiting St. Paul, Minneapolis, Mankato & New Ulm, Walnut Grove, Los Angeles and now we are in Las Vegas.

• Accommodation:

Paid accommodation: 1 day. We spent this day in in a cheap but fancy hotel in Vegas (our first hotel since we started traveling!).
Free accommodation: 29 days

• Transportation:

Number of buses: 4

• Minneapolis to Mankato for $70
• New Ulm to St. Paul for $60
• Los Angeles to Las Vegas for $50
• Las Vegas to Los Angeles for $60

Number of planes: 1 (the cost of the plane is calculated in the first month of our travel expenses).

• Money Spent: We ended up spending $4,293

This is the total we spent this month, but it includes a round trip ticket ($3,280.00) for two to South America and Europe. So if you subtract this amount, you will get to a total of $1,013 , which is great considering we traveled to six cities and covered 4,548 km (2,826 mi)! Of course, this excludes the plane ticket from St. Paul to Los Angeles, which was calculated in the first month of our travel expenses.

Over 30% of our spending went to transportation. We spent around $310 between busses and local (in-city) transportation. Thus, if you subtract transportation we ended up spending less than $24 per day for two people in the US—not bad!

Of course, CouchSurfing and our stay at my uncle’s place played a great role in reducing our spending on accommodation. This number would double or triple if we had to pay for that!

Also, over $170 was spent on gifts for our hosts. This was added to the sum, but was mandatory to show our appreciation to our kind hosts, who were more than amazing.

Spending by City:

• St. Paul: 3 days on an average of $88/day. If you subtract the tickets between cities, the number goes down to $55/day.
• New Ulm, Mankato and Walnut Grove: 3 days on an average of $55/day.
• Los Angeles: 14 days on on average of $29/day. Again, if you subtract the tickets between cities, this goes down to $16/day.
• Las Vegas: 11 days on an average of $29/day, or $23/day if you subtract the tickets between cities.

I believe we could have done much better with our tight budget and reduce our spending even more if we had managed to slow our travel speed and stay longer in each city.

• Next month travel plans:

We are still in the States until the first week of November, and we are planning to maybe fly to San Francisco or go back to Los Angeles to continue our exploration of the city. We have booked cheap flight tickets to South America and will be traveling to Bolivia on the 4th of November, where we plan to stay for three months. If you’d like, you can check out our travel plans for the next six months.