November Expenses

I was going to wait and publish our expenses for the entire trip. And when we're finished maybe I'll do that anyhow, because it would be a good exercise to show how much we spend per day on a six week journey. But for now, here's where we stood for the month of November...

We started off the month of November in the city of Ottawa, and so I've included our travel expenses for the one way journey to get to Europe. Despite the fact that we actually paid for the tickets last June, they're being expensed in the month we use them to make it a more accurate representation of how much we spend.

(Note: The following figures are in Canadian dollars. For U.S. dollar equivalent, you can subtract about 25%.)

Fuel: We spent $155 on fuel for the three different car rentals that we had during the month of November in Romania.

Grocery: Food is relatively cheap in Romania. But when you're moving around it's difficult to buy things in the quantities you might get deals on, so you buy what you need at the time which is sometimes more expensive. Still, I think we did okay at $279 for the month. Having said that, we also ate quite a few meals out. (See "Entertainment").

Alcohol: We didn't hold back on our drinking expenses. Compared to North America, beer and wine is very cheap. We spent a total of $119 for the month.

Miscellaneous: Finally, a good month in this department. Mostly, because our internet bill for the month was only $13.25. The biggest expense was the $17 fine we got for not paying the correct fare on the bus in Bucharest. Total expenses in this category were $75.

Entertainment: A little bit higher than we expected, at $316. But, not bad. This included ten meals out for the two of us, as well as all the castles and tours we did. Not bad at all.

Overnight: This is where it added up to more than we expected. We were hoping to use more couchsurfing hosts, but we found it difficult to find suitable accommodation and the hosts were not very good at responding to our requests. I think that a lot of the better couchsurfing hosts have moved over to AirBnb where they can actually make some income, and I don't blame them one bit. We paid $760 for a total of 24 nights of paid accommodation. An average of $31 per night.

Travel: Well, when you are traveling, there must be some travel expenses! The one way from Ottawa to Bucharest cost $337 each. There was a $19 each train fare the day we went to Zurich. We took the train to Brasov from Bucharest. We spent $463 in car rentals. In hindsight, we would have been much better off arranging a rental for the entire duration of our time in Romania. The "per day" price would have been much less. And, there was the overnight train to Iasi which was $71 each.

Our travel expenses for the month were $1,367 total.

So, for the entire month in Romania, we spent $3,070 in total, which includes the one way transportation from Ottawa.

Not bad, but about $500 more than we originally planned on. Once we got into the trip, we decided that we were better off having a car rental and so we simply did it. And, the overnight expenses were a bit higher than we planned. Otherwise, we're doing fine and having a great time!

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And in Canada, the Instant Pot is on sale!

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