Tour expenses.
Dec. 22nd, 2006 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ewtMusing about how much this is going to cost, if I can pull it off.
Rent - £450/month (inclusive)
Landline phone - somewhere around £10/month
Internet - £12.50/month
mobile - £30/month, although more if I decide to use it in Canadia
So, that's £1000 of living expenses I can't get out of in London while I'm away, if I'm away for more than a month (likely) and less than two months.
The only realistic way of changing this would be putting all my stuff in storage, moving out of Isle of Cats and finding somewhere to live when I get back. I don't really want to do that. Also I fear the cost of moving van rental etc (so few of my friends drive that moving is at some point going to involve my spending some money) could possibly be a problem.
On top of that, there will be actual cost-of-living while I'm on the tour. This is difficult to predict as I do not live in Canadia any more, and there are regional price variations as well.
TRAVEL: $750 for a 60-day go-anywhere Greyhound bus pass. This will be okay, I think, as long as I don't try to travel more than 4-5 hours in a day. I do better on coaches than in some vehicles, especially if I can sit near the front and don't try to read. Still, to be on the safe side, best to double that amount of money - in case I do end up taking some flights for longer journeys.
I'd love to do train instead but there simply aren't enough trains to enough places that I think it'll be workable for visiting lots of underground indie bands.
FOOD: I'm looking at, oh, $20CAD/day for food if I'm having to eat out (closer to $10/day if I can get packable things from grocery stores, down to $5/day if I have cooking facilities). Let's assume 30 days that I'm not staying with parents (at which point food costs etc. drop dramatically because they feed me), that's still around $600 if I'm unlucky (and I ahve to plan for being unlucky!) and have to eat out a lot. This includes other comestibles like sunblock and bugspray.
SHELTER: I plan to use couchsurfing as much as possible. Are any of you dear readers members there who could verify that I'm not an axe murderer, particularly if you have met me in person? If so it would make life much easier for me.
Failing that, my next option is youth hostels. Booking the one in Banff for tonight would have cost nearly $35. Let's say couchsurfing doesn't work out at all - it'll then cost me $1200 in accommodation. I'm going to add $800 to that, so that I can spend one night a week in a hotel (with accompanying good mattress and space to spread my stuff out and sort and re-pack and do any required mending and not have to talk to anyone if I don't want to, oh yes, and having the option of a long, leisurely bath - not the height of luxury, just some slackspace for me to recharge my batteries), for a grand total of $2000. Yes, I'm hoping to spend much less than this, but it would be stupid to have to call off the whole tour for want of a few nights' accommodation.
MISCELLANY: If I bring my horn (and really it would be kindof horrid to leave it behind) I will need to get a horn case that is more sensible. That will be £300-ish. Also, I'm not willing to do this without a good suitcase that my horn case will fit inside, so I'm looking at possibly another £200-ish, if new horn case doesn't fit inside existing (and wonderful otherwise) expensive Timberland suitcase. No, I'm not willing to go cheap on bags - past experience has told me that they either fall apart or hurt me, and I can't risk either of those things happening on this trip.
Insurance? £100 or so? What's standard? I'm not going to be doing extreme sports and I think as a Canajan citizen I can get a certain amount of healthcare for nearly-free (but drugs cost money). On the other hand, if someone steals the laptop or the horn I will be WAY pissed and WAY screwed, so those definitely need to be insured up to the eyeballs.
There are some things I don't know if I can get easily in Canada (or won't have time to search for) that I do rather like. A certain brand of tea. Crystallised ginger. Possibly, re-fills of shampoo and conditioner that doesn't make my head itch (still experimenting with the No-Poo Method at the moment, which has the advantage of being very cheap). Rather than attempting to carry 7 weeks' worth of these things with me, I'm thinking once I have my itinerary sorted it would be good to send 'care packages' to some of the people I'll be staying with. So I guess that's £50 or £60 worth of stuff, by the time I've posted it.
Of course, if someone runs off with the laptop, or if it breaks, and all my data from 28 days' worth of touring is on there, I'm going to be mighty annoyed. Also, I'm going to be spending quite a bit of time in transit no matter what I do - Canadia is BIG. So I think that an mp3 player with a decent amount of space, and which can be used as a backup hard drive, would be a very good thing to have with me. Not sure how much that will cost. I'll definitely want a decent pair of headphones, too - and probably need to start experimenting to find something that works for me pretty soon, really. Also, I think it would be good to have a camera (other than iSight and whatever is in whatever phone I am using). Possibly I could borrow one, possibly it would be better just to buy something. I'm not a photographer, but if I take a zillion pictures then maybe 2 or 3 will be worthwhile.
Phone - phone! Looks like I can buy a Rogers SIMcard for $50 USD. No idea whether the network supports text messaging, argh, and it doesn't seem wonderfully set up for going cross-country. I need to check what the Orange roaming rates are like. Previous trips to Canada I haven't needed to do much more than turn my phone on every few days to check for text messages, but this trip I'll be attempting to organise my life. I should talk to my brother about this, since I believe he still works for Rogers.
I'll want a Canajan-compatible cord for my laptop, and for my phone charger - using the car-charger for the phone won't work for periods of time I'm, um, not going anywhere near a car. The solar panel is way too big and heavy to carry around, and no good for laptop anyway. So I guess I'll be spending £50 on cables. Due to the short-ish battery life of the MacBook it might also be a good idea to get the airplane adapter thing. I'm also considering the possibility of a second battery, so that when I am in a place where I can charge, I can charge up two batteries and keep one as spare. I don't know how necessary this will be, or whether positive effects would be negated by the weight of the spare battery.
Recording equipment? I'm not sure what I'll need. I need to have a play with the stuff that is already on kitten and see if the sound quality is good enough for what I want.
Probably/hopefully people will be giving me CDs/I'll be burning CDs along the way. These have the potential to get big and bulky, and I don't want to be carrying too much stuff. So I'll be making copies on the hard drive and then sending the actual CDs back to myself, or to someone else in London (so I can do recorded delivery).
If I'm going to get my father to do the campervan thing with me I may have to pay for some of the running costs of the RV, especially if we go far out of the way. I'll have to speak to him about how much this will cost and whether he is willing to absorb that. I think it could be fun. I will need to make sure I do actually do some work, and see other people every 2-3 days. The trip in 2005 was quite good except that only talking to one person for a week drove me batty; I love my dad but it was just too intense.
Hopefully I'll be getting things like tickets to gigs for free. But let's throw in $500 spending money, and another $500 emergency money (to fly me to Regina or Petawawa if things go horribly wrong at some point, or replace luggage and clothes mid-journey if something goes amiss).
I need to total this up and make all the currencies talk to one another, but it looks like £4-5K.
What have I missed out? What costs are going to bonk me over the head once I'm there? Have I set aside enough emergency money?
Any idea how I'm going to raise £5K in the next two months? Legally?
Rent - £450/month (inclusive)
Landline phone - somewhere around £10/month
Internet - £12.50/month
mobile - £30/month, although more if I decide to use it in Canadia
So, that's £1000 of living expenses I can't get out of in London while I'm away, if I'm away for more than a month (likely) and less than two months.
The only realistic way of changing this would be putting all my stuff in storage, moving out of Isle of Cats and finding somewhere to live when I get back. I don't really want to do that. Also I fear the cost of moving van rental etc (so few of my friends drive that moving is at some point going to involve my spending some money) could possibly be a problem.
On top of that, there will be actual cost-of-living while I'm on the tour. This is difficult to predict as I do not live in Canadia any more, and there are regional price variations as well.
TRAVEL: $750 for a 60-day go-anywhere Greyhound bus pass. This will be okay, I think, as long as I don't try to travel more than 4-5 hours in a day. I do better on coaches than in some vehicles, especially if I can sit near the front and don't try to read. Still, to be on the safe side, best to double that amount of money - in case I do end up taking some flights for longer journeys.
I'd love to do train instead but there simply aren't enough trains to enough places that I think it'll be workable for visiting lots of underground indie bands.
FOOD: I'm looking at, oh, $20CAD/day for food if I'm having to eat out (closer to $10/day if I can get packable things from grocery stores, down to $5/day if I have cooking facilities). Let's assume 30 days that I'm not staying with parents (at which point food costs etc. drop dramatically because they feed me), that's still around $600 if I'm unlucky (and I ahve to plan for being unlucky!) and have to eat out a lot. This includes other comestibles like sunblock and bugspray.
SHELTER: I plan to use couchsurfing as much as possible. Are any of you dear readers members there who could verify that I'm not an axe murderer, particularly if you have met me in person? If so it would make life much easier for me.
Failing that, my next option is youth hostels. Booking the one in Banff for tonight would have cost nearly $35. Let's say couchsurfing doesn't work out at all - it'll then cost me $1200 in accommodation. I'm going to add $800 to that, so that I can spend one night a week in a hotel (with accompanying good mattress and space to spread my stuff out and sort and re-pack and do any required mending and not have to talk to anyone if I don't want to, oh yes, and having the option of a long, leisurely bath - not the height of luxury, just some slackspace for me to recharge my batteries), for a grand total of $2000. Yes, I'm hoping to spend much less than this, but it would be stupid to have to call off the whole tour for want of a few nights' accommodation.
MISCELLANY: If I bring my horn (and really it would be kindof horrid to leave it behind) I will need to get a horn case that is more sensible. That will be £300-ish. Also, I'm not willing to do this without a good suitcase that my horn case will fit inside, so I'm looking at possibly another £200-ish, if new horn case doesn't fit inside existing (and wonderful otherwise) expensive Timberland suitcase. No, I'm not willing to go cheap on bags - past experience has told me that they either fall apart or hurt me, and I can't risk either of those things happening on this trip.
Insurance? £100 or so? What's standard? I'm not going to be doing extreme sports and I think as a Canajan citizen I can get a certain amount of healthcare for nearly-free (but drugs cost money). On the other hand, if someone steals the laptop or the horn I will be WAY pissed and WAY screwed, so those definitely need to be insured up to the eyeballs.
There are some things I don't know if I can get easily in Canada (or won't have time to search for) that I do rather like. A certain brand of tea. Crystallised ginger. Possibly, re-fills of shampoo and conditioner that doesn't make my head itch (still experimenting with the No-Poo Method at the moment, which has the advantage of being very cheap). Rather than attempting to carry 7 weeks' worth of these things with me, I'm thinking once I have my itinerary sorted it would be good to send 'care packages' to some of the people I'll be staying with. So I guess that's £50 or £60 worth of stuff, by the time I've posted it.
Of course, if someone runs off with the laptop, or if it breaks, and all my data from 28 days' worth of touring is on there, I'm going to be mighty annoyed. Also, I'm going to be spending quite a bit of time in transit no matter what I do - Canadia is BIG. So I think that an mp3 player with a decent amount of space, and which can be used as a backup hard drive, would be a very good thing to have with me. Not sure how much that will cost. I'll definitely want a decent pair of headphones, too - and probably need to start experimenting to find something that works for me pretty soon, really. Also, I think it would be good to have a camera (other than iSight and whatever is in whatever phone I am using). Possibly I could borrow one, possibly it would be better just to buy something. I'm not a photographer, but if I take a zillion pictures then maybe 2 or 3 will be worthwhile.
Phone - phone! Looks like I can buy a Rogers SIMcard for $50 USD. No idea whether the network supports text messaging, argh, and it doesn't seem wonderfully set up for going cross-country. I need to check what the Orange roaming rates are like. Previous trips to Canada I haven't needed to do much more than turn my phone on every few days to check for text messages, but this trip I'll be attempting to organise my life. I should talk to my brother about this, since I believe he still works for Rogers.
I'll want a Canajan-compatible cord for my laptop, and for my phone charger - using the car-charger for the phone won't work for periods of time I'm, um, not going anywhere near a car. The solar panel is way too big and heavy to carry around, and no good for laptop anyway. So I guess I'll be spending £50 on cables. Due to the short-ish battery life of the MacBook it might also be a good idea to get the airplane adapter thing. I'm also considering the possibility of a second battery, so that when I am in a place where I can charge, I can charge up two batteries and keep one as spare. I don't know how necessary this will be, or whether positive effects would be negated by the weight of the spare battery.
Recording equipment? I'm not sure what I'll need. I need to have a play with the stuff that is already on kitten and see if the sound quality is good enough for what I want.
Probably/hopefully people will be giving me CDs/I'll be burning CDs along the way. These have the potential to get big and bulky, and I don't want to be carrying too much stuff. So I'll be making copies on the hard drive and then sending the actual CDs back to myself, or to someone else in London (so I can do recorded delivery).
If I'm going to get my father to do the campervan thing with me I may have to pay for some of the running costs of the RV, especially if we go far out of the way. I'll have to speak to him about how much this will cost and whether he is willing to absorb that. I think it could be fun. I will need to make sure I do actually do some work, and see other people every 2-3 days. The trip in 2005 was quite good except that only talking to one person for a week drove me batty; I love my dad but it was just too intense.
Hopefully I'll be getting things like tickets to gigs for free. But let's throw in $500 spending money, and another $500 emergency money (to fly me to Regina or Petawawa if things go horribly wrong at some point, or replace luggage and clothes mid-journey if something goes amiss).
I need to total this up and make all the currencies talk to one another, but it looks like £4-5K.
What have I missed out? What costs are going to bonk me over the head once I'm there? Have I set aside enough emergency money?
Any idea how I'm going to raise £5K in the next two months? Legally?
