Post date: 18-Mar-2009 05:30:46
A few weekends ago as we were planning our trip, I said jokingly to Colin “This is going to be the 6 month trip to bankruptcy.” He laughed, but I am beginning to wonder if there was more truth than joke to my statement.
We have spent the past 21/2 months spamming numerous people all over the world trying to do home exchanges. However, no one wants to come to Edmonton. We gave up on the exchange and searched for hospitality exchanges instead. We managed to secure hospitality exchanges in China, Italy, and France. We had herds of people in France opening their homes to us.
We’re still overwhelmed by having more nights with questions marks for where we are sleeping than nights where we know where we’re staying. We started researching hostels and even hostels are $50.00 to $100.00 per night in quite a few cities. Crazy. It seems like every trip now costs at least a $1,000 for a week anywhere. We’re trying to travel cheaply but in reality we will splurge on some things for our trip even if it takes us a few years to pay them off when we get back. We have to keep our house running while we are gone which is going to be expensive. Does anyone want to rent our house for 6 months? We’ll include two cuddly, furry cats for free.
Speaking of lots of money, between our bike trip and our sailing in Greece we’re spending almost $10,000 and that occupies less than 3 weeks of our total trip. I know I sound like a rich person complaining about money when we’re lucky enough to be doing this trip, but our whole trip is going to range from 40-50 grand. As Colin said, we can go on a diet by not being able to afford three meals a day.
Our other form of accommodation that we are trying is a homestay where we pay to rent a room in someone’s house for a week or two. Sometimes this includes meals, laundry and the Internet and sometimes it does not. We’re using www.homestayweb.com and www.homestaybooking.com. So far, we have had 3 couples email us from England and we’re learning to judge people by their emails. For example, if you say “we’re normal and we hope you’re normal too” as one person did then I am not going to be tempted to stay with you. Whereas if your email sounds friendly but doesn’t list rules and restrictions and you must clean my house daily etc, then I will be more tempted to stay with you. You can gain first impressions from emails. We have homestays booked in Osaka and Tokyo Japan too. If we can’t find hostels or B&B's in our other cities then we will use couch surfing as our last option. We’ll probably also use couch surfing if we’re only staying somewhere for a night our two. At least we’ll get to meet tons of people along the way and we’ll get to absorb a variety of cultures. We’ll see which category has the largest number—the different types of accommodations we stay in or the different forms of transportation we take.