Thinking out loud

I thought it would be useful to work out the actual cost of our trip in case it could be of help to others.

The airfares from and to Australia plus insurance and the Intrepid Tour of Morocco used up $5604 each while the rest of the holiday cost $6896 each. So a total of $12500 each for 90 days travel. Lonely Planet Shoestring suggests allowing $100 a day for travel in Europe and we came it at $77 a day. This would naturally depend on the strength of the Aussie Dollar/your currency at time of travel. Obviously having a free bed in Lancashire for approximately 3 weeks helped enormously. We used Ryanair from London to Madrid, EasyJet from Madrid to Casablanca and Jet2 from Nice to Manchester: all much cheaper fares than the national carriers. (Purchases, sometimes fickle of course, are not included in this calculation).

The plan to use accommodation with kitchens didn't happen as often as we would have liked so the cost could have been lower. I must say though that often there was very little difference in the price of a hostel and the price of a cheap hotel

We enjoyed our choice of mode of travel but the obvious disadvantage of travelling without a car was always being in towns and cities and therefore missing the prehistoric caves in Spain, mountain walks and visiting the "white" villages between Granada and Rhonda, to name a few.

We took GBP (Great Britain Pounds) and EU (Euro) on a CBA cash card and some cash in both currencies as well. The cash card was really convenient and there was never a time when I couldn't use an ATM to withdraw from the card. Our purchase price for GBP was .59 and for EU was .70.

Travelling with a Netbook certainly helped with booking accommodation and researching transport and we found that all but one hotel had wi-fi. We only had to find an Internet Cafe four times to print out boarding passes and to do some banking. The plan to upload photos on a regular basis so that there was more than one copy worked well and we were able to charge our batteries on a power board with a compatible plug depending on what country we were in. Also, without the Netbook, there would have been no BLOG.