That taboo subject: money. Here, have a spreadsheet.
I know people get weird when it comes to talking about money, but when I was planning this trip, that fact made my life difficult. While I could piece together the cost of certain things (train tickets, hostels, etc.) I really had no idea how much people were spending on an average basis on a trip like mine. That was frustrating, to say the least, when it came to trying to budget this. It didn’t help that travel guru Rick Steves deemed the $50/day Europe trip a thing of the past. Now, he could have been factoring in airfare… I have no idea. But it still drove me nuts.
Because I’m mildly obsessive and a geek to boot, I’ve been tracking our trip expenses in a spreadsheet (cash expenditures) and an expenses app on my phone (bank withdrawals.) Because I CLEARLY need to get a life, I decided to dump all of them into a spreadsheet for your viewing pleasure. I’m holding nothing back here — this is what we’ve spent, and on what we’ve spent it, for this trip to date. The only things that aren’t included in this budget are our plane tickets ($630/person for San Francisco to Dublin and Dublin to Dubrovnik — we don’t have return tickets yet) and our rail passes ($700/person, which are good for 10 days of travel in 5 countries.) I didn’t include these because I paid for them ahead of time, so it wasn’t an amount that I needed to keep an eye on during our trip.) I’m actually already thinking the rail passes may have been a mistake, because there aren’t really that many long-haul train trips we’re taking that would need, say, a full day of travel… but live and learn, I guess. Ugh.
Essentially, our budget is $50/person/day (or $100/day total.) That includes meals, lodging, transportation other than what was mentioned above, and any sightseeing we want to do. We’re trying to keep it under budget right now because we know Germany and Belgium will be expensive — there will be no $15/night hostels! (Er, at least probably not ones we really want to go near…)
With regards to the “dining” and “food” categories, “dining” is anything we bought that was prepared (from a restaurant/cafe/whatever) and “food” is anything we bought to prepare ourselves (from a grocery store, mini mart, etc.) Picky, I know… but I wanted to make that distinction so I could see just how much we waste eating out. I do this with my regular budget at home too.
I was going to make a lovely pie chart of how much we’ve spent in each category, but Google Docs decided not to play nice with the =SUMIF function, and after 45 minutes fighting with it, I decided it’s not worth it. It’s 3:40 AM and I have to be up for church by 8:15. I need to get some sleep.
So yeah, here’s that spreadsheet, up to date as of the last Euro we spent yesterday. I’ll try to update it every 2-3 days. Feel free to ask any questions you might have — I’m more than happy to answer them. Bedtime now. :thud:
Quintessence of a spring evening in Sacramento
The Capitol at sunset, again
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Scenes from tonight’s run
First Capitol lap
Kids in identical t-shirts
Racing on the lawn
Taking pictures of the dome
Castle and children vivid gold in the setting sun.
Second lap
Kids herded to their bus
Waiting at my end of the block.
A few bolted to it
I sprinted toward them
We slapped hands as we passed
Laughing in the gloaming ether
Faces luminous in the fading light.
What a piece of work is this
The lovely quintessence of a spring evening.
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Before and After
I don’t usually do much Photoshopping of the pictures that I take. I shoot in RAW and I post-process, but that’s only using Canon’s free Digital Photo Pro app, and usually the only thing I really do in there is sharpen and tinker with white balance.
But for the photo shoot I did of my coworkers grandkids a couple of Fridays ago, I knew I’d need more than just a couple of quick adjustments in DPP to get anything I was really happy with. The shoot’s conditions were less than ideal (rain caused a move indoors, I didn’t have a wide enough angle lens to capture two small moving objects in a small living room so I spent a lot of the shoot with my back pressed against the wall, and I suck at using my flash, but I didn’t have much of a choice since I was indoors and the lighting wasn’t great.)
Photoshopping these things was fairly time-consuming. I’m not that great with Photoshop to begin with, and I’m stubborn and picky, so a job I thought was going to take 3-4 hours instead took around 8. (But hey, I finally understand what curves are in Photoshop and how to use them! Go me!) in At 4:30 this morning I finally hit submit on the blog post prior to this and turned off my laptop, more or less happy with what I had (and slightly paranoid that I’d look at the pictures in daylight and realized I’d over-processed them… Hey, I’ve done that before!)
But as the day wore on, I glanced at them a couple of times, and I was still satisfied with what I’d come out with, so I decided to post a few before and after pictures just so y’all could see just how bad they were when they came off the camera compared to the final product.
I don’t normally openly solicit comments on here, but if you wanted to comment on this particular post about what you thought worked and didn’t, please do. :-) After this post, I’ll have one more post with pictures from this shoot, and I have kind of a fun one planned for that. So stay tuned… whenever I get around to it. :-)
Click the link for more…
Amish quilt at the DeYoung Museum
Amish quilt at the DeYoung Museum, originally uploaded by Kari_Marie.
The DeYoung Museum in San Francisco: King Tut, with a side bonus of Amish quilts. So awesome. :-)
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Reflection on the outside of the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco
Reflection on the outside of the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, originally uploaded by Kari_Marie.
Today we went to San Francisco to see the King Tut exhibit at the DeYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park, then we met up with Carrye and Aron for dinner in Half Moon Bay. Such a nice day! :-)
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I think I’ve covered all the bases–correct me if I’m wrong
I was mulling over my love of transportation and transportation-related pictures (please read that in a Hank Hill voice, if you know what I’m talking about) and realized that I think I’ve pretty much covered all of the bases with regards to transportation.
I mean, I have:
Trains
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Planes
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Automobiles
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Subway
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Ship
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Horse and cart
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Hot air balloon
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Bicycle
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Skateboard
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Skiing (and chairlift!)
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Snowboarding
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What else am I missing? Help me out here!
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Kari’s cheap travel tips (aka how I travel so much on a charter school teacher’s salary)
As I was writing up the post for day 2, I started to write a list of cheap travel tips. After I’d finished, I took a look at it and realized that it was really long enough to be its own post, so I figured I’d post it as such, and I’ll get the day 2 post up later today.
Incidentally, this was by far my most expensive vacation since the last time I went to Italy a couple of summers ago. As trips to Europe go, it was still fairly cheap. Not counting airfare, it ended up being around $70/day, but that’s still a lot for how I usually travel. So here are tips 1-3:
1.) Be prepared for hassles/snafus, and be prepared to be patient with hassles. Yeah, my plane ticket was cheap (almost half of what I paid two summers ago to fly to Italy) but I also had two layovers (6 hours total) on the way there, three airlines, and five itinerary changes. We waited until the last minute to book hotels, hoping Couchsurfing connections would come through, which they unfortunately didn’t. And because I’m mildly Type A, not knowing where I was going to stay before I got on the plane was a bit unnerving, to say the least. As far as hotels, we didn’t stay in any truly hideous ones, but cheap hotels mean you don’t always get a bathroom in your own room, so if this sort of thing bothers you, you might want to pay extra for one that is “ensuite”.
2.) Find out when it’s cheap to travel and travel then if at all possible. That’s why I ended up in Rome in November — I had a week off of school, and this is the low season for European tourism. I really think it was the best time to go! The weather was PERFECT–low 70s and sunny until our last day there, when it was overcast/threatening rain and low 60s. And nothing was really hideously crowded. Contrast this with when I went two summers ago and it was during one of those heat waves you read about in the newspaper where all the elderly people are dying across Europe (100+ and 95% humidity) and shoulder-to-shoulder crowds for everything (and the amount we paid for a hotel was easily double what we paid this trip!) and, well, forget it.
That said, I’m really lucky to be at the school I’m at. The “high season” for travel coincides with most school breaks, so usually it’s more expensive to travel, but where I am now, we get a week for Thanksgiving, a week in February (new this year, and I’m not complaining!) and a week at Easter. Yeah, a week’s not a whole lot for a trip (most people, when I mentioned my Thanksgiving plans to them, responded with some form of, “You’re going to Rome for a WEEK?!?”) but it was totally worth it, because if I had gone during either Christmas or the summer, it would have been a LOT more expensive! That’s also why I’m hoping to go to Cuba, er, Mexico City, in February. (Cuba? Me? Never! That’s illegal!) Still not sure if that’s going to work out, but I could do that trip (airfare included) for less than this Italy trip cost… so it’s really really tempting. :-)
Incidentally, I’m also really lucky in that jet lag rarely bothers me, so it’s not an issue of needing to be there longer in order to get over jet lag and enjoy myself.
3.) Search for plane tickets early and often. I have an account set up with Yapta.com, a travel site where you can put in where you want to go, when you want to go, and how much you want to pay, and it’ll send you an email alert when the tickets get to the price you set. That’s not actually how I found my ticket to Rome, but it is still a cool site, and I’ve got other searches set up with them for other trips I want to take. For my Rome tickets, since the dates were set as to when I needed to leave and return, I used Kayak.com, which is my preferred site for looking up air travel (that’s also how I found my $450 ticket to Dublin for next summer.) You can’t actually book through Kayak–they’re just a fare finder, so I booked through Orbitz, which I’m not entirely thrilled about (since they changed my itinerary, including length of layovers and number of stops) FIVE times before our trip… but I wanted the cheapest tickets, and they had them, so oh well. In the grand scheme of things, it was worth the hassle.
4.) Work your connections for lodging. Ok, so Couchsurfing failed us this trip, but between staying with friends and staying with Couchsurfers, I didn’t pay a thing for my last couple of big trips (London in August and Washington DC last Thanksgiving.) Usually when I travel in the US and have to stay in a hotel, I hit up Priceline.com, and I usually have a fair amount of luck — when I went to the Reno balloon races, I think I paid $40/night for that hotel. This time around, since the three of us were splitting lodging, it ended up being the same amount (if not cheaper) to stay in a hotel vs. staying in a hostel, so that’s what we did. Which leads me to #5…
5.) Travel with others to split the costs. I’m lucky in that I had two awesome traveling companions, and while it was great to be able to split the cost of everything three ways, this trip definitely went past that in terms of funness and companionship. It’s a real treat to travel with your two best friends. :-)
6.) Bring your own food and drink as much as possible. I always travel with a reusable water bottle. That way I can empty it out before airport security, fill it up afterwards, and keep it filled on the trip. Usually restaurants charge for water, and buying soda in a restaurant is EXPENSIVE (€3 on average!) and not refillable like in the US, so if you’re cheap like me, it’s best to bring your own water, and have some before and after dinner (or when the waiter’s not looking, if you absolutely can’t wait until after dinner.) For lunch, I always travel with cheese, crackers, dried fruit, and chocolate. This time we also had trail mix, but we ran out of both that and the dried fruit on the first day, and didn’t find any at the small grocery store we went to. We also made the mistake of buying saltines at the grocery store… Let me just point out that those don’t travel particularly well! Heh.
As far as the cheese goes, unless you’re keeping it somewhere really warm, as long as you keep it well-wrapped in paper, it will keep for at least three days without refrigeration. If it’s already prone to being a stinky cheese, it may get a bit more pungent, but it’s still safe to eat. (And oh how I love my stinky cheese… much to John’s chagrin on a plane coming back from Amsterdam to London this past summer, when I unwrapped my already-stinky-made-stinkier-by-two-days-in-a-backpack cheese lunch.) We found a couple of cheese shops over the course of the week and bought cheese for our lunches, and when we were in Sorrento the guy at the cheese shop talked me into a small loaf of bread (what can I say — I’ m a sucker for good bread.) The loaf cost almost as much as the entire box of crackers, but it was SOOOO good… and hey, it lasted the three of us two days of lunch, so that’s still cost-efficient. Oh, and in a pinch, dental floss and a couple of pens make a great travel cheese slicer (thanks for the dental floss, Joel!) :-)
That said, I’m not always cheap when I could be.
Things we did on this trip that weren’t cheap:
1.) Took the express train in from the airport (€11/$16.50) when we could have taken a local (€5,50/$7.25) or a bus (around €3/$4.50 total, if I remember correctly.) We took the express because it took 30 minutes (whereas the local would have taken 1-1.5 hours and required 1 transfer, and the bus would have taken at least 2 hours and three transfers.)
2.) Ate out at a restaurant almost every single night. I definitely don’t usually do this while traveling, but geez, who can resist Italian food in Italy? Well, actually, by the end of the week, I could… I was pretty burnt out on pasta and pizza, so I was really happy on our last night there when John and I found a lunch counter that served 1/4 plain roasted chicken with a side of roasted rosemary potatoes (OMG those were SO GOOD.) It was €3/$4.50 total for the two of us, and was plenty of food. That said, when we did eat out, we stuck to the trattorias, so it was still fairly reasonable… if you can call €6/$9 for a plate of pasta reasonable. It adds up after a while.
3.) Went to expensive tourist sites, booked tickets ahead of time online, and paid extra for the audio tours. The three places we went to that really weren’t cheap were the Colosseum, Vatican Museum (where the Sistine Chapel is) and Pompeii. We booked online for the first two because I didn’t want to have to waste time waiting in line (two summers ago I stood in line for 2 hours for the Colosseum and 3 for the Vatican Museum), but they do charge a fairly steep service charge (about €4/$6 per ticket.) Once inside, we paid extra for the audio guides, which, depending on the place, were between €4/$6 and €7/$10.50 apiece (at Pompeii, John and I shared one and just split the headphones we’d brought specifically for this purpose… although it’s kind of awkward trying to walk and share headphones.) But in my opinion, the audio guides are worth it — what’s the point of spending all that money to be there and then not knowing what you’re looking at? I suppose we could have just bought a guidebook, or, even cheaper, checked one out from the public library and brought it with us, but since we traveled with only carry-on luggage, space and weight were at a premium.
Hmmm… I think that’s pretty much it. I mean, there are TONS of sites with cheap travel tips online, so it’s not like any of this is anything new — it’s just what I do so that I can finally satisfy my urge to travel.
So where’s next? Well, like I said, I’m hoping to end up somewhere interesting in February (somewhere interesting that’s definitely not Cuba, as that would most definitely not be legal, and I’d never do anything like fly to Mexico and then bribe a Cuban immigration official to not stamp my passport), but we’ll see how that works out money-wise. I really need to save up for next summer, which is when I’m planning to finally do the get-a-train-ticket-and-travel-Europe-for-as-long-as-possible thing that I’ve been wanting to do since college. I already have a plane ticket to Dublin, and I have a tentative itinerary after that, but it’s definitely subject to negotiation and change. There are many boxes of breakfast cereal to be consumed for many non-breakfast meals between now and then, if ya know what I mean. :-)
My tentative itinerary for next summer -- this doesn't reflect my starting location of Dublin though. I'm hoping to find a cheap flight from Dublin to somewhere close to Croatia. I'll get there somehow! And there already might be some changes -- I hosted some German Couchsurfers from Cologne this past September, and they invited me to come stay with them next summer, so I may take them up on that. :-)
My first ever blog giveaway contest
This is my 100th post!! :-) And in honor of my 100th post, I thought I’d do a silly giveaway, just for the heck of it.
It’s not anything REALLY interesting–more something I thought would be fun. Post a comment on this post guessing how many pictures total you think I took in Rome (NOT how many I’ll actually be uploading to Flickr.) When I’m done posting all of my Rome pictures to this blog (I’m aiming for next Friday as my deadline for that) I’ll reveal the actual number. Whoever is closest will get a framed 8×10 of their choice of any of my pictures I have on my Flickr (doesn’t just have to be of my Rome trip–pick your favorite.)
I’ll give you a hint–I took a LOT of pictures. Entirely too many… hence the reason it’s going to take me until the end of next week to get them all online. :-) Also, since Kim asked, I was there from 11/22 to 11/29.
(And Joel!, even though you were there, feel free to guess–I’m curious how close you’ll be.) :-)
(Edited to add: I seem to have broken whatever it is on my site that gives a comment link on each post on the front page. If any of you can help me figure out what I broke and help me fix it, I’d be eternally grateful…) :-p
More snowboarding pictures
Here are some more pictures from the ones I took on Saturday at Sierra-at-Tahoe. After spending pretty much the full day (and taking over 700 pictures) I’ve decided that I can safely strike “professional snow sports photographer” off of my list of potential careers. I spent most of the day crouched/lying in the snow with numb fingers and a slowly-soaking-through jacket and ski pants, waiting for people to come whizzing by me on the mountain, and I also spent a fair amount of time tromping through deep snow in my ski boots (contrary to the song, those boots are *not* made for walking!) and sliding down icy slopes that I was trying to climb up so that I’d have a good vantage point. I also have tree sap in my hair… don’t ask.
Over the past couple of weeks, knowing that this trip was coming up, I spent quite a few hours researching how to take good snow sports pictures, as well as going through various Flickr galleries and finding pictures with available Exif data. Exif data is information that most newer digital cameras (including my cameraphone, oddly enough) embed in the picture file. It contains various information about the camera’s settings when the picture was taken – what type of camera and lens were used, the shutter speed, aperture, focal length, what program (if any) was used to edit the image, and some other stuff. On Flickr, you have the option to make the Exif data publicly viewable, and it actually kind of irritates me when people don’t – for me, looking at other people’s Exif data has been a great way to learn how to set up pictures. I guess the photographers must be worried about some sort of artistic infringement, but I still really don’t get it. Anyway, to see it on Flickr, go to a picture’s page, and on the lower right side of the picture, under “additional information”, you should see something that looks like this:
EXIF data on Flickr.
Click on where it says “More properties”, and that link will take you to the picture’s Exif data. I always keep mine publicly viewable – click here to see an example.
As I was looking at Exif data for the pictures, I noticed a lot were taken with a wide-angle lens. Since I wanted to try one out anyway, I went ahead and rented one. I’ll post a full review of the lens in another week, after the rental period is up, but in short, I ended up using my 70-200 telephoto a heck of a lot more (and I think those pictures came out a heck of a lot better.) If I’d been a bit bolder, I might have stuck to my wide-angle lens and just gotten closer to the action, but I almost got run over once just when I was crouching on the sidelines (a woman lost control and careened off-trail and down the slope I was lying on – she was fine but it took a couple years off of my life!) so I wasn’t about to get out there in the middle of things and let people go around me.
Overall though, I had an absolutely fantastic time – I think I had more fun taking pictures than I actually did skiing (especially after my unfortunate collision with the mountain!) and I’m really really glad I had the chance to do that. I never thought I’d take my camera out in the snow, but overall it survived (I had it and the lenses almost completely wrapped in plastic bags while I used them) and I had a ridiculous amount of fun and learned a lot. :-)
Ok, here are some pictures, and click here to get to the gallery with the rest of them.
Wide-angle lens shot. I love the sun in this one.
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I love the rays of the sun in this one, as well as the fact that this is one of the few where I managed to catch someone against just blue sky.
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I love this because it gives an idea of just how far these people were jumping. This was a HUGE jump. This wasn't even the whole thing! I also love the sense of depth perception, which is one thing I like about the wide-angle lens.
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This person did nail their landing (there's more pictures of this jump in the gallery.) Crazy.
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There's something I like about this one. I can't put my finger on it though. The sense of depth? The look on the guy's face? Or maybe it's his shirt...
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Click on this picture to see the large version--you can see the mountain reflected in his goggles!
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Did I mention that it was an absolutely gorgeous day? Because it really really was! On a side note, if I hadn't fallen, I wouldn't have seen the potential for this shot. So maybe some good came from my pain. :-)
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I love that he's sticking his tongue out in concentration.
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A skiier, a snowboarder, and someone who's apparently along for the ride. Weird.
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I'm soooo debating photoshopping out the entire ski lift in this one... I don't like doing stuff like that, but it bugs me on a fundamental level.
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I find this one amusing because it looks like he's about to land on the dude below. For what it's worth, he wasn't anywhere near close to that guy.
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New editing toy!
After muddling along with an old and slow (and small – 12″ screen!) Dell laptop, I broke down and used part of my bonus from work to get myself a desktop. The computer is a quad core running Windows Vista on 3GB RAM, and compared to my old laptop, it’s a speed demon. I shoot entirely in RAW and use Canon’s Digital Photo Pro for my post-processing, and in the past, I’ve actually fallen asleep while waiting for pictures to render. It’d go something like this: Click to next picture –> rendering….rendering….rendering….rendering…rendering… It’d take about 10 seconds for each picture to render, which may not sound like a long time, but when you shoot 150-300 pictures on a single outing (which is probably what I average, regardless of what I’m shooting) even when you’re deleting nine out of every ten pictures, it still takes a very long time.
Oh, and I also upgraded Digital Photo Pro (free with purchase of any Canon DSLR) to the newest version (3.5, I believe.) OMGSOAWESOME. There are some nice little things like a thumbnail viewer underneath the tools panel, but by far the best part is the noise reduction. They did some sort of technological wizardry with their noise reduction algorithm, and WOW what a difference it makes. With my old version, there were only three spots on each of two slider bars (luminance and chromiance) to set noise reduction (and one of the three spots was “none”, so I don’t really count that) and I really didn’t notice much in the way of difference between the settings. On this one, the degree of NR goes from 0-20 on each of the two bars, and the difference even between, say, a 0 and a 2 is definitely noticeable. It’s good stuff, I tell ya!
So yeah. The new computer is awesome. The new monitor, however… I have mixed feelings. It’s a 21.5″ Acer widescreen, 1920×1080, and while I love the wide screen, the color needs some serious adjustment. I’ve tried QuickGamma and the Lagom display tests, but I still feel like the color is off. What can I say–I’m picky. One of these days I’ll probably break down and get something like the Spyder2 Express, but for now I’ll just correct as best as I can. I, er, kind of spent my discretionary income on the computer.
Side note – WTF is it with Vista not having any PowerToys? Seriously?? Whose bright idea was that??? I miss my Image Resizer, dang it!! I’m using VSO Image Resizer now, and while it works well, I’m still hoping MS decides to bring back the PowerToys. Weak.
In any case, this computer really flies, and if I can get my color issues worked out, I’ll be a happy camper. :-)
A Life In A Lot of Pictures And Some Accompanying Words
My brain moves too quickly sometimes. It hurdles headlong from one thing to another, often faster than my mouth can keep up with it, changing focus whether I want it to or not. This blog is an attempt to slow down and preserve moments of my life in pictures and thoughts. If something catches your attention, please comment – each comment you leave gives me an opportunity to revisit a moment and see it through your eyes.
Life is a journey – thanks for stopping in on mine.
