One amusing side-effect of traveling the way that I do, is that after a while, your junk drawer starts to look a little bit like Doc Brown’s binder of different currencies from Back To The Future 2.
Most of the places I travel are on the Euro, but not all of them. The amount of Czech Crowns I have left would barely buy a glass of beer here, but I store it because at some point, I’ll be back in Prague. I try to use up my currency before I leave, but I don’t always succeed. I use paper CD sleeves to store them so I can see easily what I’m dealing with.
What’s the most interesting currency you have put aside?
My residence permit expires at the end of October, and I’ll be heading back to the US around that time. October may seem like a long way off, but it’s really not. I have less than three hundred days left in Germany.
I wrote a 500 days post back in June, after I passed the halfway mark of my time here. It listed a number of the things that I wanted to accomplish before I leave. Between June and December, I finished five of them. Here’s an updated list of things that I really want to do before I go.
I want to see the Tulip Festival in Holland. This will likely happen- My partner-in-crime Jenny and I are planning on trying to make it out, but you can’t really plan that too far in advance. The tulips don’t bloom on a set schedule and if they’re not blooming when you go, it’s a wasted trip.
I kinda want to see Mini Europe in Brussels. I’ll probably pair Brussels with a visit to Luxembourg- they’re in a straight line, more or less, and they’re all on my Geographic to-do list.
There’s a bunch of other places in Germany that I want to see. A selection:Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Oberhaus Fortress in Passau. The Tomb of Charlemagne in Aachen’s Palatine Chapel. The Auto Technik Museum in Heidelberg.
I’m going to see Carnival in Cologne. I already have my hotel room reserved for the events of Carnival Sunday and the Rose Monday parade.
I’m attending a wedding in July. I’ve wanted to write a post about weddings here for a while, but I haven’t been to a wedding in Germany yet. That’s going to change though: Over the holidays, Jenny and her boyfriend Robert got engaged! Jenny is my best friend on this continent, and I’m wildly happy for them both. I’m sure I’ll be writing about this happy occasion several times this year.
We’re going to Drachenstich! I found out about this too late last year to make it happen, but I’ve already got tickets for this August. I’m really looking forward to this! Drachenstich is a festival in Furth Im Wald which is kind of like Medieval Times, but with a giant robot firebreathing dragon!
Here’s a trailer thingie so you can get a sense of the festival.
I need to visit more countries. I haven’t been into Poland, Romania, Turkey, or Croatia yet, and I’d like to. And maybe Greece, if there’s time. There’s still so much to see!
If you only had one year remaining to live in your current country, what would you want to do before you had to leave?
Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, or Silvester to the locals. They’re not directly analogous. Silvester is a religious holiday, the Feast Day of Pope Sylvester I. They both fall on December 31st, though. It’s traditional at this time of year to take a look back and see what you’ve accomplished over the last twelve months.
On Friday, I landed at around 3:20 in the afternoon. The passport control line took roughly two minutes. After two minutes of waiting, the passport control guy apologized to me for the delay- goodness, I missed American customer service. I was all the way to the baggage claim a few minutes later.
I spent the next hour waiting for my suitcase to come off the carousel. I try not to check a bag when I travel for exactly this reason, but I brought beer with me back to the US, and that had to be in a checked bag. The carousel was spitting out bags for the entire hour- an Airbus A380 holds a LOT of people. In Frankfurt, there were three separate jetways going to the A380. This aircraft is HUGE! But I digress…
After my suitcase finally appeared, the customs line took about four minutes. It took me another ten or fifteen minutes to get through the little tram-thing that takes you to the rental car center, and then I spent another thirty or forty minutes in line for the rental car.
I hit the road at around 5:20 pm, two hours after my flight landed, and drove directly into Miami rush hour traffic.
Do you have any favorite or least favorite airports? Do you have any particularly amazing or horrible airport experiences?
Ali over at Ali Adventures recently posted about what it cost for her and Andy to travel through Europe for two months, and also what it cost just for their trip to the Netherlands. This sort of number crunching is always kind of interesting to me, so I wanted to break out some of my own spending.
Before I get into the numbers, I wanted to say this: I don’t spend a whole lot of money at home. My rent and utilities are a little more than 20% of my income. Once I had the basic things I needed for my life here, I stopped buying. The walls of my apartment are unadorned- I never put up any art or curtains here. I bought one light fixture for the ceiling but never actually wired it in. I have a fair amount of gadgetry, but for the most part I live a pretty frugal existence. I don’t care to spend a lot of money on my residence here because I don’t actually spend much time there outside of the work week. If there’s a chance to be traveling to somewhere new, I’d rather be doing that.
I’ll be paying for this year’s travel well into next year, and I’m OK with that. Let’s talk numbers.
My tracking is a little less accurate than Ali’s post, for several reasons. First of all, my banking is spread across both American and German bank accounts, and my statistics come from my use of Mint.com, which is only valid for the US bank accounts. (I love Mint though- I never really understood just where my money went until I started using it a few years back.)
Secondly, and far more importantly, a fact of life in Europe is that cash is king. Outside of hotels and major tourist attractions, American style credit cards are rarely accepted or just don’t work at all. A tremendous amount of my expenses during travel are paid in cash, so I don’t have that side of things itemized. What I do have is rather amazing, though.
First, I went to my German bank account and I pulled the totals for two big categories. The first is payments to eventim.de, the German ticket site that I use to buy my concert tickets. I only pulled payments for 2013, so this doesn’t include tickets that I bought late last year, like the Leonard Cohen ticket. It also doesn’t include tickets that I paid cash for, or tickets that someone else picked up, where I paid them back later. In 2013, I’ve spent at least €110 ($144.99) on concert tickets, but it was more likely two or three times that amount.
Next, I checked out what I’ve spent on Deutsche Bahn tickets so far this year. Once again, there are times that I paid cash for my tickets, so those numbers won’t show up here. However, any time I planned a trip in advance, I bought the tickets using my German bank account, so I have that total. In 2013, I’ve spent at least €932.30 ($1228.86) on train tickets. The majority of these tickets are at a 50% discount, because I have a BahnCard 50.
Next, I went to Mint.com to pull everything that I’ve categorized as travel in 2013. This doesn’t include my 2012 travel numbers, which were also sizeable.
$7,826.15 on hotels. Hotels are by far the largest expense for my travel. There are one or two hotels that I paid for on my German banking account, but this is most of them.
$3,199.39 for air travel. This does include my upcoming trip to visit the US in November, but it also includes two trips to London and back, one to Paris, and one to Dublin. If a train trip would be more than about six hours, I consider flying instead.
$1,137.85 for rental cars and taxis. I don’t use rentals or taxis very often in Europe, as I prefer to use public transportation whenever possible- more than two thirds of this is for my rental car in Florida this November.
$442.65 for “travel” and “$377.76 for “Vacation.” This just proves I need to categorize things better. These two include tours booked in other cities, as well as things like the Paris Pass.
$112.25 for the rail ticket I booked between London and Cardiff for this October. This number doesn’t include the fees I’ve paid for the Heathrow Express, a train between Heathrow airport and Paddington station in London. Also, as previously stated, this doesn’t include anything from the Deutsche Bahn.
The total on all of this is $13,096.05 from the US banking and $1,373.85 from the German banking.
This means that in 2013 alone, and only 2013, I have spent a grand total of more than $14,469.90 on travel. And that doesn’t even include cash spending, food, or local public transit passes.
It is possible to travel at much lower costs than this, of course- hostels, couch-surfing, and cheaper hotel alternatives are everywhere. Many cities have free tours that don’t cost what I spend on Skip-The-Line tours from Viator.com.
The thing is, I don’t care to travel more frugally. My time in Europe is finite- I won’t be out here forever. In another fourteen months, I’ll be back in the US. Once I’m back within those borders, it will be a while before I travel internationally again: there’s still too much I want to see within the United States.
While I’m here, though, I’m making the most of it. I want to see everything. Here, let Buzzfeed chime in on this:
How much do you spend a year on travel? Do you ever regret the expense?
Whimsy. Tacos. The DMV. 