Darned vacations posts are overlapping. If you are confused, well, so am I. Trust me, all of this planning and post morteming is a heck of a lot of work. That map below took weeks, but it is accurate.
The credit card bills are in and now all I have to do is pay up on the 2007 Western Trip. Let's see how I did. 89 days on the road.....
Gas $1,991.75
Food and Wal-Mart (consumables) $ 841.65
Lodging $ 0.00 (ha!)
Restaurants $ 91.71 (another ha!)
Cargo Box $ 263.00
Assorted gear $ 463.00
Vehicle repair $ 87.66
Athletic Clubs $ 49.00
Camping Fees $ 20.00
Sub Total $3,807.81
Unaccounted for cash $ 250.00
Total $4,057.81
I did buy a computer and a camera to go on this trip, total additional costs $1300.00 but I will not add that to the overall trip costs because the camera and computer would have been incurred with or without the trip and I am left with those devices in working order, well sort-of (note to self: don't throw laptop). The same could be said for the camping gear but I probably wouldn't have bought the stuff if I wasn't traveling so the gear was left in the final accounting, I will be getting lots of good use out of the gear in the future though. With my inevitable bad luck I knew that the minute I set foot in my car that gas costs would skyrocket so I had budgeted for the escalating fuel costs, its sort of sad that I have to do that, if I didn't have bad luck I'd have no luck at all. I had a mental budget of $5K for the trip but did not make any effort to keep an accounting log while traveling so I am pleased that I came in substantially under-budget, I'm such a colossal tightwad.
The 3.5 week cross country trip that I took with my friend back in 1982 cost $450.00, what a difference a few years makes. Back then gas was $0.48/gallon or some such, but this time I got to do what I wanted to do and I didn't have to listen to 3 weeks of bellyaching from a militant lesbian. Stay tuned for my BLM and National Forest tour in 2015, hopefully by then I will be using solar-powered vehicle.
I challenge anyone, even you hitchhikers, to pull off what I did for less money.
I have been plotting and planning to photograph these bridges over at the Gunpowder. I wanted the foliage to be as dark a green as possible so I set my sights on Labor Day weekend. The hour I spent photographing these bridges proved most entertaining. I got down to the Gunpowder off the road no problem. I took a few photos of an egret and then decided to cross the Gunpowder with my camera on my head so it wouldn't get wet. I used a beaver dam to get out of the water. Whoever said beavers were great dam architects were wrong. They can't build a dam worth a damn, the stupid thing collapsed and I fell into a brier patch which had some sort of poison ivy at its base. Once I got up and got out of it some guy riding a Vespa on the bridge started sexually harassing me from the bridge. I only was able to bellow out a few mother-fuckers until he sped away. Then I took some more pictures only to find myself buried chest deep in mud. I thought in might be interesting to die a slow death via starvation because I couldn't get out of the mud in one of the most population-dense areas around. I managed to crawl out of the mud on my belly, my camera got very dirty. I was very dirty too and it took 2 showers to get clean, days later my ankles are still covered with red splotches and my clothes are ruined.
