What we spent: the GR10
It’s official. Traveling internationally (for our family at least) costs $200-ish per day. Doesn’t appear to matter if we’re vacationing in Europe or Australia, visiting a developing country or doing a long term hike. I’m scratching my head about this consistency, but I can’t argue with the numbers.
Having said that, the numbers above are arbitrary and idiosyncratic. On the arbitrary side, the accounting here was a little dicey. (Once again, Brian reminds me I’d never pass muster as a real comptroller.) The issue is that quite a lot of our spending was a) cash, and therefore somewhat hazy at the remove of a month or two and b) often, especially at refuges, a single fee that included a night’s lodging as well as a couple of meals. What I decided to do, mostly for simplicity, was split our cash and refuge spending in two and attribute one half to lodging and the other half to food.
Wild camping is free in the Pyrenees
My accounting is also idiosyncratic: our long hike was made much cheaper by the sheer fact that we already own quite a lot of ultra-light backpacking gear like packs, sleeping bags, tents, and cooking equipment (and we carried it around the world with us all year!). On the flip side, we did need some new gear, and I included that cost here even though, obviously, I’ll wear that down jacket for years to come, for example.
Free transportation!
I’m honestly surprised our food spending wasn’t higher because MAN ALIVE did we eat. One fact of the trail was that it was a little difficult to eat enough to maintain our weight and we more or less ate anything we came across, as a matter of policy. (At the start of the trip, Sam suggested “Cake One For the Team!” as our family motto and it proved surprisingly prescient.) As an example, one morning I listed in my journal Joe’s refuge breakfast: a bowl of hot chocolate, a croissant smeared generously with Nutella, some cut up melon, a bowl of yogurt drizzled with honey, a bowl of muesli with milk, and a large wedge of blueberry cake. Then, two hours later when we passed through a small village, he reported — astonishingly — feeling hungry again and ate three apricots and a chocolate croissant.
He’s probably thinking about how hungry he is
