How much?

Gill is an avid reader of other people's blogs - one thing a number of fellow travellers have done is to keep careful records of the costs of long term travel - which is useful for others contemplating escaping south.

Clearly some people have managed to maintain a detailed spreadsheet as they went along. Having just escaped a spreadsheet dominated work life, this was not something either of us was going to do. However, since we use a Halifax credit card to pay for everything in Europe - a great way to avoid currency surcharges - then looking at the statements after we returned has enabled us to make some calculations regarding the total costs incurred during last autumn.

Total  for 72 days travel, including the tunnel outwards, return flights to UK in December and 50% of long-term parking at Alicante Airport, fuel, living costs and site-fees : £2545 or £35.34 per day.

Excluding living costs - food, entertainment and cafe life - then the cost is £1323, or £18.37 per day.

This means that two of us were living on £510 per month so far as day to day existence was concerned - considerably less than at home. However, we did not eat out much - preferring to visit a cafe most days as a small 'treat'. Where possible we found free sites to visit and avoided 'tourist traps'.

We stayed on more camp sites than we planned and so overall costs could be reduced by using aires more frequently. Overall we spent 896 euros on places to stay - that is about £9.33 per night. Apart from a couple of occasions all the camp sites we used were ASCI approved and the discount card proved really worthwhile. We aim to reduce the costs further by finding more aires - but not at the expense of compromising on where we want to visit. It will be interesting to compare our costs over the coming few months as we have, I think, become a little more savvy about living well, but cheaply!

Furthermore, since we returned the price of diesel has plummeted and the Euro weakened - all good news for long term motorhomers.

It will be interesting to compare the total costs for our Spring trip - we shall be in Spain mainly, and there is no doubt on a day to day basis it's considerably cheaper than France.