Wednesday, July 20, 2011

The final post....

This has been a; slice, ball, blast, delight, enjoyment, pleasure, hoot...you get the idea...I have had so much fun writing in this blog!!

I have enjoyed going back and re-reading my posts and also from hearing from all of you on how much you enjoyed reading our posts of the big adventure.  As of today there are 8392 views on it, which is amazing!  

I was going to continue to write some reviews of campsites but after thinking about it, I don't want to influence others with our opinion on what is "good" or especially "bad" ...they are all good, if the weather is right, the company is right etc...

I was also going to detail out the expense of going on an extended road trip, lots of people ask me how much it costs to do this sort of thing, again, that is subjective. 

Do you have income while you are gone?  
Do you have bills at home to pay while you are gone? 
Do you have your house rented out? 
Is your RV paid for?  
How far will you travel each day? 
What kind of RV parks/campsites will you stay in?
What is the price of fuel? 
How is the Canadian dollar? 
Will you do lots of sight seeing?  
Will you eat out lots?  
Are you towing a vehicle or will you use your bikes? 

As you can see there are so many variants to the costs....



We had a budget of $800 per months for fuel and $800 per month for RV/campsites. Some of our months we spent $1500 on fuel but other months we only spent a few hundred dollars...some months we spent a fortune on campsites, other months we had free places to stay.  

Over the year our average was just below budget...fuel came in at $6600 for the year or $600 per month...camping came in at $7010 for the year or $637 per month.  

Our food expense was all over the board...some months we had huge costs...some months we ate cheaply...we only ate out a few times a month, mostly when we were visiting company.  

The entire year away from home ended up being cheaper for us to live in the RV than to live at home.  We only had to worry about the 3 costs: food, fuel, camping. 

At home we have a mortgage to pay, taxes, insurance, phone bills, cable bills, internet bills, hydro bills, gas bills, maintenance on the vehicles, maintenance on the house...we have only been back home for 7 weeks now and are already feeling the debt load going higher and higher...

If any of you are considering doing an extended journey, just do it!  You don't need to be a millionaire, you don't need to be mortgage free, you don't have to be retired, you don't have to wait until the kids are out of school.... if the time is right for you, just do it...we have no regrets now that we have done it but we had a million concerns before we actually left!

So, in closing, I want to thank every one of you for reading this blog, for making it worth my while, I hope that it will be up and running again one day in the future...one never knows...maybe, just maybe!

Bye for now, ciao, farewell, adios, cheerio, arrivederci, sayonara, so long, au revoir, see ya!

Kelly
xoxo