Money, Money, Money

Believe it or not, it’s coming up to our eighth month on the road. And all along the way, people have asked us how we can afford to do this trip in the middle of a recession. We’ve decided to include a special topic blog, just for you, readers. Here we go: this one’s about frugality in transit.

Firstly, let us emphasise that we do not generate money using crime, ingenuity, or magic. In fact, we are not generating money at all at present. The truth is that we worked our butts off last year in preparation for this trip and are making it last in a variety of simple ways.

Accommodation Costs

Before we left, we calculated the cost of staying in hotels. Horrified, we looked into the cost of staying in hostels. Horrified, we bought a van with a foldout bed. 

Having our home on our backs while traveling has enabled us to stay months longer than we would have, had we been forced to pay for our accommodation along the way.  

As you know, the WWOOFing component of the trip is over. While WWOOFing was almost completely free (and thus an excellent way for travelers on a budget to explore unseen lands), we’ve been fortunate enough to have a safe place to stay almost every night since then. We both have many friends and family members living in North America (a crucial factor for us in deciding just where to go). Not all of our hosts have have had guest bedrooms, but we tell them it’s no problem. “We’ve brought our own!”

Facebook, surprisingly, has been a useful resource for finding a place to crash. We have met a good many people after posting the status update: “Ahoy, friends! Does anybody know anyone in _______ who we could stay with? All we need is a driveway and a toilet!” People we have stayed with have also, helpfully, gotten in touch with friends of theirs to help us find places to stay. Then, if none of these options work out, as a last resort, we stealth camp.

It turns out that graveyards aren't the best places to stealth camp. Despite the fact that this one had its own port-a-loo, we found ourselves awake at 2 a.m., anticipating a Living Dead-style ordeal. 

Stealth camping is a fine art, one that we have slowly honed since White Rock, B.C. Essentially, stealth camping involves pulling surreptitiously into an area to sleep, and slipping away unnoticed in the morning. Many websites recommend arriving at your stealth destination late and leaving early. There are merits to this method, but there are also challenges. For example, it is difficult to get a feel for a neighbourhood when it is dark. What we prefer to do is to scope out an area before dark, locate the perfect spot, then find a large, nearby parking lot (ie. for a mall or a supermarket). We park in the lot, cook dinner, and use the bathroom just before the store’s closing time. Then, when darkness falls, we return to our selected sleeping place. The ideal sleeping location is a quiet, suburban family neighbourhood. We look for bicycles, toys in yards, expensive cars, or families out walking their dogs as a marker of suitability. Optimally, the chosen location is also close to a shopping centre, which you can visit in the morning to use the facilities before departure (as much as we despise Walmart and McDonald’s, these are the most likely to be open 24 hours, in case nature makes an inconvenient house call at 3 a.m.).

Feeding Ourselves

Crazy potatoes!

Continuing with our theme of convenience, humans, most inconveniently, require constant feeding.

This was initially a challenge for us, as we discovered soon after our arrival that VW Westy fridges rarely work. Ours may work, but nobody thus far has been able to figure it out. Instead, we use a chilly bin (a “cooler”, for our North American readership), and our fridge as a dry storage area. Ice for the chilly bin can typically be found for free at marinas. Failing this, we have saved large juice bottles, which we fill with water and store in people’s freezers when we visit. We have yet to stay with anyone who has refused to let us freeze our “ice cubes” in their freezer. But if we’re desperate, ice is sold relatively cheaply at most supermarkets and gas stations.

Having a cooler means that we can consume a few perishable foods, like yoghurt, cheese, eggs, and milk. Because vegetables don’t keep long in the cooler, we typically buy them fresh every few days. Preferably, we stop at farm stalls and farmers’ markets along the way, to buy local produce direct from the farmers. We also keep what we feel is an admirable store of non-perishable foods, like pasta, brown rice, canned fish and beans, dried mushrooms and wakame, and dry pulses (a nutritious and delicious source of protein when meat is difficult to keep). We have garlic--clearly, we weren’t about to go ten months without garlic!--onions, and a variety of spices to make our meals interesting. We’re literally ready for the zombie apocalypse. Most of our main meals involve either potatoes, rice, or pasta with an elaborate veggie stir fry, beans or eggs. We typically make enough dinner so that we have leftovers for lunch for the next day.

Guacamole! Avocado, garlic, onion, lime. Poignant. Simple. Delicious.

Breakfast is a nice, simple meal for us. We make our own granola, in vast quantities. Here’s how we do it:

Ingredients:

-rolled oats 

-a variety of seeds (sunflower, pumpkin, sesame, poppy, and flax)

-nuts (almonds, walnuts or pecans, macadamia nuts, and hazelnuts)

-chopped dried fruit

-oil (we’re indiscriminate. We used olive oil last time, and that worked really well)

-honey or molasses

-cinnamon

 We like to buy our nuts, oats, fruit and seeds from the bulk bin section of a supermarket. We opt for whatever’s fresh, because often bulk-bin supermarket nuts are rancid. Steff can attest to this, being our official taster. Anyway, on with the show.

Method:

Coat oats in a generous amount of oil (but not so much that there’s excess at the bottom of your mixing bowl). Toast oats until lightly browned. This can be done in the oven or in a skillet. Put to one side. Toast nuts and seeds until lightly browned. Set to one side. Mix and gently heat oil, honey/molasses, and cinnamon in a pot, and add to the nut and seed mixture. Make sure the nuts and seeds are properly coated in the honey/oil/cinnamon mix. Combine browned nuts and seeds with toasted oats. Add chopped dried fruit. Store in a cool, dry place (like what used to be a refrigerator).

Tadaa!

The ratio of oats to nuts is up to you. We like to a 60/40 oats to nuts mix, because nuts can get quite expensive.  We calculated, however, that our granola comes out at about $0.80 (USD) per serving (and our portions are generous!). A bowl of our granola keeps us fuller for longer, is far cheaper than the fancy-schmancy store-bought brands, and is customised.

Snack foods were something we had to deal with from the get-go. Our maiden voyage was a bit of a disaster, in retrospect. We stocked up on gummy bears and root beer, and were fairly sick about an hour in. Yes, we reasoned afterwards, we’re on a road trip, but it’s a ten-month road trip, and we can’t justify snacking on junk food for that long. So we started to make our own snack foods. Nuts and fresh fruit are excellent road snacks, but one of our favourites is homemade salsa. Behold:

Ingredients:

-3 tomatoes

-half a brown onion

-juice of one lime

-2-3 cloves of garlic (more if you’re Steff)

-a generous bunch of coriander/cilantro

-salt and pepper to taste.

Method:

Mince everything that can be minced. Mix in everything else.

It’s delightful with organic blue corn chips. It’s also a great sauce for cooked dinner meals and for huevos rancheros.

At the start of our trip, someone advised us to eat out on the grounds that it would be cheaper. Firstly, it’s definitely not cheaper to eat out--cooking from scratch generates meals that rarely cost over $2 per serving. Most importantly, though, we do not cut corners when it comes to food. We certainly aren’t frivolous in our food spending, but our policy at home has always been to pay now for healthy food rather than pay later in medical bills, and it still applies while we’re traveling. Sure, processed food and conventionally-farmed fresh produce is often cheaper, but we’d prefer not to contaminate our bodies with growth hormones, antibiotics, high-fructose corn syrup (or whatever they’re calling it now), or anything else in that vast array of unidentifiable food chemicals. While we’d prefer to be growing our own, it’s difficult to keep a garden in a van. We do, however, grow fresh sprouts. We’re told they’re uber-nutritious. They’re also tasty in sandwiches, stir-fries, and salads. We can’t grow much else in the van, but we’re willing to pay for the next best thing, which is organic supermarket food, or produce bought from organic farmers. 

Entertainment

Obviously, this trip hasn’t been all sleeping and eating. We have entertained ourselves besides. Entertainment can be expensive, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be. 

Steff entertains herself in New Hampshire. Ride, Sally, ride!

When we arrive in a new area, the first thing we do is go for a walk (don’t worry, it gets better!). On our way, we usually come across local papers, which list events, like poetry slams, lectures at universities in the area, or local live music. These are often free or very cheap.

Yelp.com has been an excellent resource for us (thanks to Nancy’s uncle Wes for introducing us to the website). For those of you who aren’t familiar, Yelp is a site on which you can search within a town or a city for anything you might be looking for, be it a VW mechanic, an Ethopian restaurant, good espresso, or, in this case, “fun things to do”. The site lists items according to your search criteria in order of ranking by other users. It also features reviews, again by other users. We have found some true gems through Yelp.

Seeing the sights (famous landmarks, churches, city halls, libraries, etc.) rarely costs money and makes fabulous photo fodder. Museums are often free. If not, many have free days or a suggested donation (read: they’re free). All of this information is on the Internet.


Here are some sights we have seen along the way:

Sanders Theatre at Harvard University. Thanks, Deva, for smuggling us into your class!

Steff outside the Basilique Notre-Dame de Montreal

Horseshoe Canyon, Alberta. This tour courtesy of close family friend Janice!

Chain bookstores have provided us with warmth and outlets to charge our phone/iPod/camera batteries. Almost every mall in North America has a big box bookstore, and almost every one of these bookstores has a (Starbucks) cafe, where you can sit and read the books to your heart’s content. Or at least, until you’re kicked out at closing time (as a side note, Starbucks has free internet. As there are usually two to three of the "cafes" on any given city block, we have never had to pay for Internet on the trip).

This, predictably, leads us to books. Secondhand books are unbelievably, irresistably cheap here (we bought twenty books for $5 at a Las Vegas Library book sale back in March). We realised that having free time for the first time in years has afforded us the perfect opportunity to sit down and read books. How many times last year did we find ourselves complaining about not having time for leisure reading? Cheap books are ubiquitous--we like to check out secondhand book stores, garage sales, flea markets, and libraries (which also have free wifi--bonus!). 

If you’re traveling in summer, look out for music festivals, because they take volunteers. At the Vancouver Island MusicFest, we got a weekend pass for the festival (including the Thurs. night pre-show), free meals, and free camping in exchange for a mere 18 hours of labour in the volunteer kitchen (spread over the three days). This was without question, the best free fun we’ve had on the trip!

It's nice to have a quiet day in after days of driving. 

The aforementioned are all fun, but by and far the greatest source of entertainment is the people we meet on the way. One can plan a trip meticulously with sightseeing and tours, but we’d rather plan our stays with people and leave the rest of our time open. Our best times have been unplanned experiences with other people. Essentially, rather than spending money to get to know a place, we’d prefer to get to know the people. 

Plus, most people are happy to show visitors around their town and the surrounding areas. They also have an insider’s perspective on fun activities for their town. As house guests, our hosts have taken us on walks and hikes, to farmers’ markets and flea markets, to college reunion parties, on driving city tours, to dinosaur museums, and to friends’ homes for dinner. 

Hoodoo? You do! Do what? Remind me of the babe!

Downtown Calgary. Thanks, Ennio and Briana for the tour!

Steff and a dinosaur leg

Lastly, having a couple of guitars and a repertoire of well-known songs has not only been a free source of entertainment for us--it has gotten us through several open mics that others have invited us to. We’ve also met a diverse range of people through our music.

Our first open mic night! 

Movin’ Around

Transportation is the last item we’d like to address. We have found that owning the van has served us well. We did look into Amtrak and Greyhound before we left for North America. The former has limited lines, which would have made travel to small, remote farms extremely difficult; the latter...well, it’s Greyhound. The van was really the best option for us.

That said, it’s important to monitor one’s fuel efficiency when traveling long distances. For an old gal like our Willie Westy, it’s essential that we keep her well-lubricated: we check her oil before every voyage. We also make sure to check the tyre pressure. Having well-maintained and properly-filled tyres increases fuel efficiency (read: saves money on gas) and improves overall handling of the vehicle. We’d like to thank Phil Patch for his help with our tyres in Minnesota--we’ve really noticed the difference! Lastly, it’s good for the gas mileage (and the brakes) to avoid rapid acceleration and deceleration. Granted, rapid acceleration has never been an option for Willie, but we try to drive her steadily and not too hard. We give her regular breaks and try to keep an even speed throughout. And of course, we thank her after every trip.

Closing Words

Living in the van has taught us valuable lessons in the difference between luxury and necessity. It has been a pertinent introduction to a simple-living lifestyle. It is so important, especially in light of the recession, to be able to accurately evaluate what one needs versus what one wants. There’s nothing like living in a 7’ by 4’ by 10’ van to make this devastatingly clear. We do not shop recreationally on this trip, not simply because of the financial factor, by also because there would be nowhere to store our goods once we brought them back to the van. When we need new clothes, we make sure to donate some of the old ones, and we always replace them at thrift stores. It appears that North Americans are far more likely to ditch good clothes at Goodwill or the Salvation Army than Kiwis. Many of the items we’ve found are brand new (as opposed to Hospice Shop clothes, which have often been worn to well-loved, holey rags).

The butterfly garden at Calgary Zoo. Saving money in some areas allows us to spend it on things we really want to see or do. Like go to the zoo!

When we describe our trip to others, their first reaction is shock at the imagined costs involved. Many people have asked us about our budget along the way. When we left New Zealand, we were aiming for an average daily budget of USD$30 each. Factoring in our time WWOOFing in Canada, we’re currently well under-budget. Hopefully, with a little sensibility and resourcefulness, we’ll be able to keep up this trend. 

Do any of the readers out there have any pointers they'd like to add? If anybody has any questions, feel free to use the comment section below, and we’ll answer to the best of our abilities! 

Sundown at the cemetery

The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.