I took a solo road trip and spent less traveling for six weeks than I would have if I’d had a home base. Yes, traveling CAN be less expensive than staying put. Here’s how.
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Let me start by saying: I’m not a numbers person. I have a lazy budgeting method for a reason. When it comes to numbers, I hide. I round up. I ignore.
It’s not just about money; I do this for all kinds of numbers. I budget exclusively so that I can travel, have no idea what I weigh, and use clothing items instead of temperatures to describe the weather. Not a numbers girl.
However, I quit my job with a number in mind of what I could spend per month to sustain myself for a year. Therefore, I have to keep tabs on what I’m doing and spending. The following numbers might not be 100% accurate (see the first paragraph), but this is the approximate total of what I spent and experienced over the last 5 weeks of my solo road trip around the United States.
A really mediocre drawing of the route that I took
Solo Road Trip: Cost of Gas, etc
67+ hours of driving
4,765 total miles driven
My Honda gets 33mpg hwy
About $370 spent on gas
Got an oil change before I left for about $55
Thought: this would be less if it weren’t a solo road trip and if I had friends to travel with!
Solo Road Trip: Cost of Lodging
Amarillo – CouchSurfing $0
Denver – stayed with friends $0
Wyoming – Solo camped 3 nights $30
1 night in a hostel in Jackson $50
Bozeman – 2 nights in a hostel in Bozeman $30
Billings – Conference hotel with a shared room for 5 nights – $140
Minneapolis – stayed with friends $0
Iowa – stayed with family $0
Kansas City – stayed with friends $0
Total cost of lodging: $250
Solo Road Trip: Cost of Food
Grocery run #1: $47
Grocery run #2: 53
Other food such as snacks at gas stations: Budgeted $6/day or about $200, but didn’t spend it
Dining out and drinks with friends: probably about $600 over 6 weeks (my family and friends treated a bit, and we did lots of at-home fun)
Beer runs: $150
Total food and beer bill: about $1000
Other Fun Things
10 States visited (TX, CO, WY, MT, ND, MN, IA, IL, KS, MO)
2 other states crossed (NM, OK) but no stops so they don’t ‘count’
2 side trips to NE Iowa and Wisconsin with family
Returning to the ‘not a numbers person’ thing, let’s say my car was in 13 states total
13 different beds/couches/tents
37 days away from home
2 weeks with family
5 nights in hotels
4 National Parks/forests visited $80 park pass
Total Solo Road Trip Cost Breakdown:
$1693 spent, plus some petty cash here and there
Averages to about $42/day including gas, lodging, food, fun, etc.
Doesn’t count the $340 plate ticket I purchased for later because I’ll pay it off with points
About $1100 on living expenses at home such as insurance, rent, etc, but not including investment/retirement accounts
Total home expenses + travel spend – money earned = $2180
Getting some work done while on a press trip
What the Numbers Mean
I’m still deciding what I’ve taken away from these numbers. My first thoughts are this:
If I didn’t have expenses at home such as rent, my loss would be significantly less. I’ve run these numbers several times over the last few years, and it’s what’s led me to decide that I’ll take next year off of having a home base. I can build my business and brand while on the road, thus marrying my living and travel budgets.
I spent 37 days traveling on less than $3000 – and could have done it for less. Even though I’m in the negative, I knew I would be and planned for it. Still, even if I didn’t make a little bit of money, I’d come in below $3k. This comes to less than $36k/year, which is a lot less than most people I know live on. Not bad, right?
Additionally, these numbers help me to realize what I spend in the US – one of the more expensive places that I spend time. If I spend time in cheaper places, I’ll have lower expenses.
Finally, it proves that I can work while travelingand that I can increase what I make on the road every month until I find a surplus. To that note, I have enough set aside to last me for a year, but every dollar made while traveling extends the amount of runway that I have before going back to the corporate world. My goal is to never have to go back, and that’s why I’m working to build my income up now rather than just traveling aimlessly.
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Where would you go if you had a month to spend on the road?
You know those things you know that you should pack, but choose not to and then kick yourself later? I notoriously pack light, but sometimes leave out the essentials. Like these other travel mishaps, I now know that it is essential to buy travel insurance.
For example, ‘I’m going to Texas in September, I’ll never need this umbrella.” or “It’s warm in Spain in June, I won’t need the extra jacket.” My personal favorite: “I’m going to travel for several months in Southeast Asia. What could possibly go wrong that I would need to buy travel insurance for?” *Rolls Eyes
I have always had a similar attitude toward whether I should buy travel insurance. You know, the ‘for all the times I don’t need it and pay for it, then I’m losing the money I could spend on an incident when I do end up needing it’ mentality. But here’s the thing: I have been stuck paying for last-minute international flights twice in the last 4 months after unforeseen cancellations.
What would I do differently? Probably pay for travel insurance.
Does insurance save you from falling?
Why Would I Buy Travel Insurance?
Let me be clear – when I say travel insurance, I don’t mean the add-on that pops up when buying a flight. That is typically extra assistance from the airline in the case that you have issues making your flights or need to change them. The instances that I ran in to were completely out of my hands, and that’s where travel insurance would have saved me over $1500 this year.
Here are the two stories:
Beirut:
I was flying Cyprus Airways from Beirut to Larnaca. They operate one flight a day. However, due to a small number of travelers between the two countries, flights often get canceled. In this case, the flight was canceled and I was not notified until I arrived at the airport. With only one flight per day, there were no airline representatives working. I asked around to other airlines and the service desk, and nobody could find the Cyprus Airways desk. In fact, several employees told me that Cyprus Airways didn’t even fly out of Beirut. That wasn’t true, but I couldn’t make an international call to Cyprus to work things out, so I was stuck.
Eventually, someone at a ticketing counter sent me down a hallway, past several security checkpoints, and onward to find the Cyprus airways office. To be clear, I, a white, curly-haired, relatively innocent midwesterner with limited knowledge of Arabic, went down the long, gray, poorly lit hallways and corridors of the Beirut Airport.
It probably should not have happened. Seriously- in no way should security have let me just slide right past them the way that I did. But I suppose that if I walk like I own the place, people think I do. I did not.
I walked down cement corridors and eventually saw plaques on doors that read, ‘Emirates’, ‘Qatar Airways’, and ‘Air France’. Eventually, I noticed half of a piece of printer paper with ‘Cyprus’ written on it in pencil. This ‘sign’ was taped to a closed door. This had to be a joke. I was alone, tired, and confused as to what to do next.
Total cost to me: $350 including an extra night in Beirut and last-minute flight for the next day.
The day before my botched flight out of Lebanon
Hong Kong:
I was slated to fly from Hong Kong to Shanghai and then back to the US. I had a one-way ticket on August 12 at 8 pm. Because of the protests going on around the city, I went to the airport early. My bus arrived at the airport at 4 pm. The protests that day were in the airport, and it shut down right as I arrived. That whole story is here.
My flight was canceled and my booking website, credit card, the airline, and the consulate couldn’t tell me anything about what to do. I searched online, but had no resources. A political uprising is relatively unprecedented in tourism. The fact is, next time, I want to have someone available to ask.
Total cost to me: $1200 including a last-minute flight, additional night in Hong Kong, plus incidentals.
What I could have done differently:
This is the part where I admit that I was wrong.
In both of those instances, I could have had someone in my corner if I had an insurance policy. I could have had someone tell me the right things to do, and my trip would have been protected.
As I head off on my nomadic life at the beginning of next year, I will buy travel insurance. I haven’t purchased a plan yet, but it looks like I’m going to use Allianz Global Assistance. At $450 for the year, it’ll help me if I run into similar airline issues and other silly things like:
The one thing I hear from my W2 friends is, “I want to travel more, but I think I’m almost out of PTO.”. Every year, I travel over Thanksgiving. It has been my #1 trick to sneaking in an extra week-long vacation every year. Read on to hear why it makes sense for YOU to leverage the holiday to travel.
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Three Reasons to Travel Over Thanksgiving
PTO
Just about every company in the US gives Thanksgiving Thursday off. Most either give that Friday off or let people loosely work remotely. Honestly, very few people come into the office anyway. Therefore, you can leave the Friday before Thanksgiving and return the Sunday after. This 10-day trip would only ‘cost’ you 3 PTO days. 3 days of PTO for a 10-day vacay? YES!
Thanksgiving Day 2016 – Novi Sad, Serbia
It’s Cheap
It’s well-known that Thanksgiving is the holiday in the US that people travel most for. People who live outside of the US come back during this time as well. However, because other countries don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, the flights going to pick those people up are typically nearly empty. People tend to stay in the US during Thanksgiving week, especially business travelers. For that reason, flights out of the US before T-day and returning after the holiday are often SUPER cheap.
An example: I once flew from Boston to Budapest and back for $420. One Thanksgiving, I went from Fort Lauderdale to Barcelona and back from Madrid for about $400. Another year, I flew Miami to Guatemala City and back from Honduras for $225.
Saturday before Thanksgiving 2018 – Andorra la Vella, Andorra
Off-season
November isn’t really high season anywhere. It’s nearly winter in the northern hemisphere which usually means a high chance of rain, and in the southern hemisphere summer isn’t quite in full swing. For this reason, hostels and hotels are typically the cheapest during Thanksgiving week, restaurants are super easy to get in to, and you’ll run into fewer tourists. It’s a great way to have a low-cost time at your destination!
Thanksgiving Day 2017 – La Libertad, El Salvador
My Thanksgiving trip in 2017 in Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovenia, and Bosnia with details here.
Thanksgiving 2018 in Central America trip details here.
Have questions about Thanksgiving travels? Comment below!
Packing: You have to start somewhere, right? Here’s how to pack light.
No matter if I’m traveling to the mountains or the beach, cold weather or hot, I carry some of the same things with me.
I’ll add a downloadable .pdf packing list in the future for you to print out and check off as you pack, so refer back to this post when you
And yes, if you order through the links that I post here, I get a small portion of the total sales – help a sister keep traveling!
The Bag:
I LOVE my backpack/duffel combo. It is big enough to use for several weeks or months on the road, but small enough to be a carry-on. It’s lightweight, machine washable, and the zippers face my back, making it impossible to pickpocket and super easy to deal with in airport security.
Makeup – I stick to the basics – tinted moisturizer, lip color with a gloss, and mascara. I only use brands that stay on all day, because who has time to reapply their lipstick after every meal? Not I! Plus, tinted moisturizer covers the bases of moisturizer, foundation, and cover-up.
My electric toothbrush lasts WEEKS between charges, so it’s something that I bring with me, even if it’s a little more weight than it’s manual counterparts.
I also keep a swiss army knife, a fingernail clipper, and a tweezer in my toiletries case.
I typically keep tums, melatonin, and a couple of Tylenol in there just in case.
The Reusable:
Let’s do some simple math here: If you buy three water bottles a day while traveling for a week, and they’re $1 each, you’ve put 27 bottles in a landfill, plus spent $27. Then, think about the cups that they give you on airplanes, plus lids, straws, etc. Just… fill up a water bottle. And if it’s not great water, use a filtered water bottle. You’re losing money if you don’t use a Lifestraw bottle 😉
Other tips: For the love of the planet, please ask for your mixed drinks at bars without a straw. Ask your flight attendant to have the can rather than taking your drink in a plastic cup. Also, you can take your to-go food in a reusable Tupperware, or take the hotel’s breakfast food and have food for snacks later!
Chase Sapphire is by far the best travel card on the market, in my opinion. No international fees, great rewards, the whole shebang.
I use a Charles Schwab debit card. No international fees, plus they reimburse your first three ATM fees each month. It’s WAY better than foreign currency exchange rates!
It’s lightweight, packs small, has enough memory to handle photo and video editing, plus the battery life is great – I’ve spent days of writing and editing away from a wall and still had battery left over!
Have you ever planned a trip with friends, and one by one, your friends back out? Same. Which left me wondering: does anyone know how to take yourself on a solo road trip?
In this article, I’m going to give you a tongue in cheek look into how to take yourself on a solo road trip. Buckle up, and I hope you giggle 🙂
My first night camping alone, my down the way neighbors invited me over for dinner. Afterward, we had a beer, made a fire, and watched the sunset. They even saw me off with coffee in the morning and let me play with their dogs!
So, here’s the dish. How to take yourself on a road trip, a tongue-in-cheek, slightly factual guide, by me.
How to take a solo road trip:
Decide you want to go on a road trip. Possibly be inspired by someone else’s trip and think, ‘I’ll add a solo road trip to the bucket list’.
Pick an elusive time parameter. For me, I had a girls weekend in Denver, and 10 days later a conference in Billings. A normal person would fly twice it, but hey. It’s me.
Add other stops to the trip that sound fun. For me coming from Dallas, it was parts of Texas and the National Parks that I’d always wanted to visit, plus visiting friends and family on the way back from Billings.
Realize a few days before you’re scheduled to leave that you need to pack for hot, cold, parties, work conferences, hiking, sleeping, and more. Wait until 40 minutes before you plan to leave to throw it all in the car, creating a ‘homeless-hoarder-chic’ aesthetic for the Semi-Truck drivers that look down into your car. Top it off with that super cute hat you probably won’t wear at all on the trip.
Run back in the house for the phone charger, but end up grabbing a lighter, bottle opener, and the last half of a loaf of bread. You know, just in case.
Go. Nobody gave you permission, so don’t wait for anyone to tell you not to go. Thank every person who tells you to be safe, knowing full well you did not buy that bear spray.
Pretend you’re not freaking out.
Listen to all the podcasts you’ve been meaning to listen to, see all the things you’ve always wanted to see and see all of the friends you told you’d come visit.
Make new, unexpected friends along the way. The weird dude at the campsite? He and his wife will end up offering you dinner. And then a beer. And then coffee on your way out in the morning. They’ll even let you pet their dog. And offer you their couch in case it rains at night. “Just holler, ya hear?”
Splurge on a hotel after several nights of not showering and days of hiking. Watch your skin turn from dark and dusty back to pale AF.
Learn to make ‘camping food’ better than your parents. A double-decker veggie burger with cheese on slightly stale whole wheat, and a layer of peanut butter just because? You won’t have felt this ‘college’ since college. Except in college, you had amenities and this is a really mediocre campfire.
Take time to stop and grow. Think, write, read, and do the things that make your brain light up. Be grateful, because not everyone makes the time to do this. You will be a more interesting person to have a beer with after this.
