If you wanted to be cruel, you could count the cost of this tour as just wasteful spending. It's the Grampies running around sampling gourmet buffet breakfasts and swanning around tourist sites like the Alhambra or birding sites like the Pont de Gau. But we would rather see it as investment - investment firstly in our health, next in our continuing education in history, geography, and lots more, and finally in forging links between Canada and people we meet in Europe.

OK fine, but this time the "investment" cost was particularly high. Let's take a paragraph from the same kind of section in our Spring 2024 blog:

"In 2018, our "Tour de France" cost about 10,000 euros (excluding airfare and insurance). By 2022, the "Iberian Inquisition" and "Cross Europe" came in about 11,500 euros, and this time as we'll see, we are at 12,000 euros. That's higher, but not insane?"  

Well, this time we came in at 15,000 euros. So is that now  insane? As readers you can not do much about our sanity, but perhaps you are reading to see how much an adventure like this could end up costing you?

At least two aspects of this are mostly beyond our control, or maybe anyone's control. The first is health insurance. For people as old as us, 90 days of insurance came to about 1500 euros - about 17 euros per day. Of course, we didn't have to buy it. Just don't ride in front of busses, right? On the other hand, I can think of at least two occasions when we did just that. Even giant busses have a way of sneaking up on you!

The second thing is airfare. If you live in Europe, you are laughing because you are already there! And if you live in New Zealand, not so much. We are in between, but we do have to cross a continent and an ocean to reach those great European cycle destinations. We generally search for the lowest fares, and we have given up checking luggage of any kind, including bikes. Airfare from our home to Europe, in general, costs 1500 euros return, for two.

These two chunks were already off the total, when we reported the  trip cost at 15,000 euros.  But wait, we have some other lumpy costs that not everyone will run into, maybe not even ourselves next time:

Trains, ferries, car rentals - we deliberately planned a trip with lots of trains and ferries. It seemed we would need them to get way out to western Spain and way back to Eastern Germany in the available time.  Why does the trip range so widely?  It's mostly about weather for a shoulder season trip. We started with bikes already stashed in warm Spain for February, and travelled north and east with the season, to ultimately leave the bikes in finally warming up Germany. 

Not planned was that now being one year older and seemingly more than a year weaker, we bailed on doing the hilly Mediterranean coast of Spain (the very same route we had pedalled last year, the route that Scott Anderson had worked so hard to optimize for us this time) and rented a car for nine days. Nine days at 142 euros per day (to have all the insurance they would sell!), plus gas, is about 1500 euros! (Yikes, we could have flown home and back for that!).

Adding in the other trains and ferries, non bicycle non air transport came up above 2000 euros. 

There is also another "non-routine" expense to add in here - the cost of bike repair. This time we spent about 600 euros on it - mostly fooling with the hydraulic brakes. Perhaps 600 euros for bike repair is almost routine, since this is not the first time we have spent that much. Our current bikes have about 25,000 km on them. Maybe the cost is reasonable. New bikes of our modest type would cost about 3000 euros each.

So that leaves us with "routine" costs of 15,000 -2,000-600=12,400 euros  or about 138 euros per day.  How does that break down?

Now that we are long past camping, a major daily expense comes from hotels. Hotel costs covered a broad range, from a low low of 38 euros, to our most expensive of 182 euros. The average was 100 euros, across Spain, France, and Germany, with that being 94, 100, and 135 in each of the three.

With the hotels we found, the bottom third (approximately) cost 90 euros or less, the next third cost from 90 to 120 euros, and the top third was 120 to 180 euros. These ranges can be very useful in booking, since they tell what kind of a rate is cheap, middling, or high (for us) end.

 There is a bit of a complication in this, because many of the hotels included breakfast in the rate. It is only reasonable to take the value of the breakfast out of the room rate and add it to food costs. Adjusting for breakfast, the average room rate was 88 euros. Over 60% of the Spanish hotels included breakfast, 56% in France, and 77% in Germany!

Included breakfast was sort of a boon, because you could load up and make that your main meal of the day. That's how we go from 88 euros for hotels to only 138 euros total "routinely" per day. We didn't eat or spend too much else, and in most cases we found food at the covered markets or supermarkets. Not many restaurants in the mix. Food, including restaurant meals, averaged 32 euros a day. The other 18 euros went for snacks (4 euros), postcards and postage (4 euros) admission to tourism sites (6 euros) and miscellaneous small things like clothing and bug spray and cell phone cost.

So in the end, this big hit to our budget - a very grand total of 18,000 euros including airfare and health insurance, or (gulp) $Can 28,000 (at $1.57 per euro), can also be boiled down to two people surviving on 32 euros a day for food, when the cost of just a mid day restaurant special, per person, runs over 20 euros, and then with 18 euros left as "mad money"!

As we plan the next trip, we already know that we left a fat wad of euros with a bike shop in Leipzig, demanding a really complete brake overhaul, and we will need a ferry on to and off of Mallorca, unless we want to pedal over the Pyrenees again, and the health insurance company will probably notice that we are older and weaker yet again. That's kind of just the way it is!