Southern Charms: What Did It Cost?

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Now that all the checks have cleared and credit card statements have been reconciled, I am finally in a position to figure out just how much this wonderful trip cost us. There are several difficulties in deriving such a number. Clearly, gasoline is one element, but is it fair to include car maintenance? On the one hand, driving the car adds mileage which expresses itself in higher maintenance costs. But eventually, those maintenance costs would have been realized anyway. So, although the trip meant that the car had to be serviced early, that isn't exactly a direct cost of the trip. Similarly with the trailer - while operational costs, like propane, are clearly a direct cost of the trip, maintenance work on the trailer really isn’t.



What should be counted are items directly related to the trip itself. In addition to gasoline, this would include campground fees, propane usage, parking fees and tolls, restaurant charges, and all the spending we do inside the parks themselves, like books, tee shirts, and souvenirs. Food and drink is an interesting category because as we spend more time in restaurants, we spend less time cooking at home (i.e.the trailer). So grocery expenses actually went down on this trip. Should we adjust our costs of the trip to show that some expenses actually went down? And that plays out in other areas too. If we aren't at home, then we aren't spending money on home maintenance or medical needs. So, again, the net effect on the budget is not as dire as the raw numbers suggest!



But let's forget all those additional wrinkles and look at just the direct costs of the trip. The total outlay for this trip comes to $9475. At first that sounds like a huge number, but this was also a very long trip - 84 days. So actually the per-day cost is only $113, which is still a fairly big number all by itself. I've analyzed the expenses into several categories to help people who might be planning a similar trip.



In a previous post, I estimated gasoline costs at about $2000, based on a guess of an average $2.40/gallon. That estimate was close, but a little low. We actually spent $2325 on gasoline which, if we did use 837 gallons as my car computer suggests, then the average price per gallon was actually $2.78. Given that our large SUV requires mid-grade fuel, that price seems about right to me. Another way to look at gasoline usage, is that we drove an average of 110 miles per day at a cost of $28.



Direct travel expenses include, mostly, campground fees. There are a few parking lot fees, laundromat charges, and propane, but by far, the campground fees are the biggest component. We spent $2636 in this category, which comes out to about $32/night. At first, that seemed a little high to me because, as seniors, we get a 50% discount on most national park campgrounds, and we stayed at several of them. But we also had an expensive week in Key West, and several other high-priced private campgrounds. As noted elsewhere, we don't particularly like to stay in places like KOA's, but sometimes, after a long day driving, the KOA is the easiest spot to find. At both Boyd's and at the St. Petersburg KOA, the sites cost more than $100/night. So it is easy to drive up your expenses if you end up there. (By the way, finding a campsite on the Florida Keys is not easy. There are a few state parks with excellent campgrounds, but they book up as fast as a year in advance, so to grab one of these less expensive options requires a great deal of advanced planning.). At any rate, I can appreciate that, on average, we spent about $30/night on campgrounds. State parks, our favorite places to stay, are usually in the range of $20 - $30, so this expense is intuitively acceptable.



In the Entertainment category, we spent about $1100, or about $13/day. This includes books, tours, and souvenirs and a couple of pricey boat rides, like the ferry to Dry Tortugas. The nice thing about being a senior, with the park's senior pass, is that national parks and monuments are mostly free. However, we usually spend a bit of money in the bookstores on books and souvenirs. Those things can add up. Still, $13/day is not an outrageous amount to spend on having fun when traveling.



Our biggest category, dining out, came as a bit of a surprise to me. In this bucket we put all our spending at restaurants and bars. And I guess we had a great time since we spent a whopping $3122. That comes to about $37/day, which, if we had eaten out every day, wouldn't be all that much. But it seems that we only went out to eat 44 times, which comes to about $71per meal. Obviously we enjoy our food and drink. One way to reduce the costs of a road trip like this, is to avoid restaurant charges. But, then, in our book, you are missing one of the real pleasures of traveling - sampling the local food and beverages! (As might be expected, grocery expenses were less than normal because we weren't making as many, nor as complicated, meals in the trailer's tiny kitchen!)





So that's about it. Overall, during the three months of March, April, and May, we spent about two thousand dollars more than we would have if we had stayed home. But then again, this was a really big trip. We believe it was worth every dime.

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