If you’ve been following our unscripted, spontaneous European adventure, you’ll know it’s been a whirlwind. One of our followers asked a bunch of questions. How did we do it? I’ll do my best to answer.
First off, my wife is the queen of travel planning. She enjoys it and we’ve traveled enough together to know each other well. We are adventurous by nature. She does her best planning and then we are happy with however things turn out.
1) We are not extravagant. Hotels are a place to sleep. They were however much more expensive in Europe than we expected. We booked budget hotels close to the city center to use public transportation and/or walked to various sights.
Clean, safe and basic is our motto. We’ve averaged about $200 US or so a night which is more than we’ve ever spent sleeping. We have had to modify our travels due to aging bodies and disabilities. We walk when we can, take hop-on-hop-off buses to get the lay of the land and boat rides when they’re available. We also take tours which mostly work well and are not expensive.
2) We tried to eat one meal a day, usually lunch, at a nice restaurant. (Our Paris and Munich hotels included a great breakfast.
We looked for little grocery stores and purchased pre-made meals for dinner and fruit and granola for breakfast and snacking.
We hardly drank alcohol so that’s a big savings. Also there’s no suitcase room for souvenirs. No Olympics t-shirts were bought in Paris.
3) As to whether we just “put it all on plastic,” the answer is yes and no. We had money budgeted for a water softening system for our house. I guess soft water will have to wait. The credit card will get paid when we get home.
Next week’s blog will be from home in Bacalar. We are currently in Salzburg Austria. There are no words for how much fun we’ve had. Until next week,
DOS TORTAS
We were robbed again this week. While we are certain of the culprit, there is little definite proof. We have increased the security with bars on my MIL’s house and two of our vulnerable windows. Sad, but necessary.
the adventures of dos tortas 
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