No worries, thanks for contributing your expenses and costs. I love the London Eye, I’ve been on maybe 4 times, yes, it’s very expensive, but last time, as bloggers, we finally got London Eye tickets for free, along with The Shard. If I had to pick one splurge item in London it would be The Eye, so long as I can have London Zoo too.

Great read. I am always fascinated by RTW travel numbers. I tracked so many articles when we were preparing for our trip. I love reading about others travel.

We traveled for one year in 2017-2018 and kept track of every single coin by using Trail Wallet app. We were keeping to a budget of $140 a day for a family of four (two boys 10, 8 at the time). We did pretty good although some of the flights got us. So, the average is a bit more overall.

We travelled from Portland, Oregon, US (via Hawaii), to Australia (one month), SE Asia for about five months, then to Europe for six months. Then back to the US via NY then to West coast. During our time in Europe we paid for accommodation a total of 11 nights in about 170 days (in full disclosure my in-laws met us in Norway and paid for Airbnbs for six additional nights).

We did A LOT Of house/pet sitting especially in Europe and I called on all my friends in a plea for housing (I used to live in the UK and NL) and many graciously hosted us for some days or a week here or there. My husband is a chef and we would ‘pay’ with meals when appropriate. Many of our sits included a car for use for free (thanks so much, still so grateful!!).

We also did a few more expensive things in some of the European capitals on what we called ‘tourist days’ e.g. Eiffel Tower, London Eye, which I don’t regret even though our budget was squeezed on those days. Other days we world schooled at ‘home’, wandered around quiet rural areas for free and our costs were very low.

I still talk about how it was cheaper to be ‘on the road’ than to be back home due to the lower costs of having to carry everything you own and not having all those monthly costs of being stationary.

Thanks for writing this. I have been shy about writing ours all out and maybe now I can. Thanks again for sharing Alyson.

They were having fun and knew they’d be able to go back any time if there was stuff they still wanted to do. I’d take being a penny-pinching backpacker in Southeast Asia over having to go to work every day in a heartbeat. Luckily I haven’t had to go to work and be a wage slave in the last 15 years. That lifestyle is just priceless, still, to this day, it’s my favourite way to be and to live. Once tasted it’s hard to put out of your mind.

I think there will be very few flights and they’ll be super expensive. The Australian government doesn’t want Australians leaving and spending their money anywhere else. Unless Air Asia comes to our rescue. They’ll get you to KL from some of the southern Australian airports. They’ve got to open the international borders soon, this is crazy.

Yep, the budget travel way is still my absolute favourite way to go. I’m a backpacker, always been a backpacker, I just have no interest in fancy hotels really. We do stuff like that sometimes for a bit of variation but I’m happiest in the guest houses of Southeast Asia and India, Nepal, the old backpacker trail.