New Year Rumination

Things I miss:

1. Charmin
2. Privacy
3. Potable tap water
4. Sidewalks
5. High speed internet
6. My bikes
7. Freeways
8. Heaters
9. My own bed
10. HBO Now, Netflix, programming in English
11. Amazon Prime

Budget to date:

We did an accounting of our travel spending vs. our plan and we’re over-budget by 20% so far.  Making up the excess is our unplanned trip to Tijuana, our excess time in pricey La Paz, and splurging on $100 hotels and expensive dinners too frequently.  Also, we’ve found that while most of the time we can stay on track for lodging and dining, buying wine at restaurants, or even beer, can easily blow a budget.  And we like wine!  It’s so sad that it’s expensive!

To get back on track we plan to pay less “idiot taxes” in 2018, opt for more hostels and camping (when safe) than hotels, opt for more budget-minded food options (although you must pay more to get decent vegetables and fruit), and participate in “dry-uary” which is abstaining from alcohol consumption in the month of January.  We’ll see how this goes!

Observations:

1. Showering daily is overrated
2. Showering every few days is not at all overrated
3. Spending 24 x 7 with people, even the ones you love the most in the world, is a LOT
4. Camping extensively with other people brings you to a whole other level of intimacy
5. What takes 30 minutes to unload/unpack takes 2 hours to repack/reload.  1:4 ratio.
6. High-quality food makes an enormous difference in our energy and attitudes
7. Baby sea turtles are the cutest things in the whole world
8. In the brush, cows both look and sound like bears
9. 400-year-old haciendas are so beautiful and SO DAMN COLD
10. I never thought I could experience such unmitigated joy from shopping at Wal-Mart or dining at Chili’s
11. I’m stunned at the amount of time I spend in public bathrooms waiting for my child to poo.  At home this waiting provided a welcome 10-20 minute break for me to do something else around the house, but traveling and needing to stand in the stall and just wait is excruciating.
12. Almost never has having the time to blog corresponded with having the necessary internet bandwidth to add the media and publish anything