Tag: budget

Tears of travel anxiety

Well, it is here. The day I’ve been rattling on about ALL year long. Mr W and I are embarking on a fifteen day tour of Scotland. It is the longest trip we’ll have ever taken together and the most intricately planned one too.

We will be staying in 14 hotels, travelling over 1800 miles, drinking copious amounts of tea that have been made using our car kettle, going wild swimming for the first time and we are taking you with us!

Yes, to add to the 12-14 hour days, the miles upon miles of hiking and the basic meals of oats and pot noodles, I will be writing every single evening. I’ve often wondered if this will put too much strain on the trip and whether I should wait until after. But truthfully, this is the chance to get every emotion and opinion down as it is on the day without inference of the delay of time.

If you’ve been following this blog so far you’ll know I’m either bordering on OCD or already a fully fledged member of the OCD Club of Organisation Addiction Awareness. So you may not be surprised that every blog going forward already has a template from which I will be able to work from. I also have a notepad that’ll be with me in the car and a printed itinerary I can edit along the way. I really want to learn as I go along on this trip, which means if something I have researched (albeit meticulously) does not work out, I want to find the answers and tell you everything. You may have gleaned by now that I’m passionate about travel beyond measure and if I can inspire (ick word) you to take the trip you’ve been putting on the back burner well that’s just a beautiful thing.

So today, we are driving up to Thirsk in order to break up the mammoth drive to Edinburgh from Essex, our very first and brief stop on Saturday morning. We’ve stayed in Thirsk a number of times now and it works perfectly for us as it’s small enough to not have any traffic and it has a big Tesco and petrol station. It has made the perfect overnight pitstop previously and there’s nothing better on your first night than familiarity. It also helps that our hotel has a restaurant, a budget one, so we don’t need to dig into our food reserves and can be at full energy for the longest start of the trip.

We have an exceedingly early morning tomorrow because we still have a 3 hour drive before our first stop, so we will be up before the sun and on our merry way.

As ever, my nerves about leaving home have started hitting me. This has been happening in its worst form for about three years now. It is hard to pinpoint the exact time it happened but I think it has a lot to do with the time we had to leave our home without a housesitter in 2019. Although we had various people coming in and out at least three times a day, I was incredibly worried about our dog and cats and don’t think I’ve ever really recovered from the guilt. Since then we have secured a housesitter every single time we have left for longer than two days. My dad will always say it’s not an issue but really his doing this enables us to really go out and live.

I literally can’t sit still the days leading up to when we travel and I dare say a lot of that is down to nerves. I love to come home to a clean and tidy home and before we leave I’ll often remember tiny little jobs I’ve been putting off , for instance I’ve been pottering in the garden getting it ready for autumn and reshuffling photos in the hallways.

This week that has been made a darn sight harder due to the flare up of my back condition. Oh yes, we have a 30 page itinerary for a 15 days trip and now is the time my back doesn’t want to play ball. I’ve tried movement, stretching, walking, sleeping, sitting and resting and so far sod all is working. It’s been over two weeks and I am slowly but very steadily getting pissed off. I am determined to keep to the plan for the trip as this has been so long in the planning and even longer in the dreaming.

Putting the final touches to everything this week has definitely kept my mind busy but I know I’ll be a blubbering mess as we leave in a short while. It’s ridiculous really for someone who lives and breathes to travel how much it makes me nervous. You’d think I’d be used to it by now. It catches me off guard and I feel my breath catch in my chest. It’s like a wave of worry washing over me. An anxiety avalanche if you will.

Mr W asks if we should cancel and I know that I can’t stay here forever, holding down the fort, protecting what I can’t while I’m away. Therefore it is off to the horizon we go, me and him, finding the next adventure and praying my anxieties get lost along the way. Maybe I’ll tie them to the rear bumper and give them a good chance of joining us, if they can hold on that is.

Right, here we go. Scotland 2022. Let’s see what you’re all about.

Miles: 232

Planning for the NC500

It has been a while since I’ve given an update on the big trip coming up for us in late summer. As of midnight tonight, our mega busy month of June will be over and it is just as well as Mr W has caught covid. So this weekend of planned ‘time-out’ truly will be a stay at home event. No plans. No house stuff. Not even sharing a bed or a sofa at the moment with the fella so it is truly a time-out event. He actually seems okay at the moment which is a huge relief. So yes, June has been a tad mad. A weekend away in Norfolk. A long weekend in Northumberland. Family parties. Errands galore. Life. And finding time to run this house. But hey, we made it through!

And here we start the countdown to Scotland! The NC500 is calling and I cannot believe we are so close. The house is starting to look like a doomsdayers shelter with boxes piling high for all the food and supplies we are taking. The itinerary I have (so far) is crazy long and it is still not finished. 

Granted there are minor things left to be done now, a few payments, adjustments mainly to the Isle of Skye section and a couple of reservations to be made. Otherwise it’s the behind the scenes stuff. I need to get my organising head on and tackle all the food boxes. I really do not want to spend my days digging through boxes of food to find a meal. So I want our car to be like a pantry, all food that will be eaten in the car, will be in one or two boxes in the rear footwells. This goes for the travel water bottles, drinks, kettle etc. Food in the back of the car will be for meals in the evenings and mornings, so ideally easy to grab as we arrive at hotels along with our essentials such as clothing and toiletries. 

We need an easy system for our clothing so we don’t have to haul our luggage out every night. We have 12 hotels in 14 days, that’s a lot of hauling! 

It feels like the car is basically going to be a home on wheels for 15 days without the bed. 

I’d also like to sort out some kind of bin system for while we are between hotels so we’re not mixing up recyclables with rubbish. Today, I spent some time contacting all of our hotels and I have to say it’s been an unexpected surprise. I’ve heard back from 8 or so, so far, and they have all been super friendly and understanding of our mission to be sustainable while on our trip. A few have said they pick through the bins from the guest rooms themselves and divide up the rubbish. Where I commend this, I couldn’t necessarily let someone do this on our behalf. So I’m aiming to use sustainable brown paper bags to put our recyclable waste into and our hopefully very minimal rubbish will be binned in the hotel as provided. If I manage to find the time, I want to find some recycling points along the route too. It just takes the pressure off of us emptying the car at the end of the day. This gives our sustainable mission every opportunity to be fulfilled and definitely makes all the planning worthwhile. 

In the ‘Sustainability on a budget’ and ‘Out of body experience’ blogs from April and May (links below), I spoke about how we had been testing out the idea of tinned food and it’s proved quite successful. All tins but the ravioli and meatballs were really tasty, packed with the protein we’ll need and give us a much needed break from oatmeal and noodles. It’s also saving us a tonne of money. Usually when we go away we can spend anything between £10 on a budget sandwich or £40 for a meal out. These tins and a few crackers are going to cost between £0.90-£2.00 for each of us and where we’ll be in the car constantly or walking it is the most logical way of eating. There are also very few restaurants on the West side of the highlands so this really is a win-win situation. 

Recyclable. Tick. 

Budget friendly. Tick.

Longlife storage. Tick. 

Tasty. Tick.

Sustainability on a budget
Out of body experience number 342

Something I’ve realised from our Northumberland trip is how much space we will be working with in our car. Four of us squeezed into the car for a four day trip. Which is insane, as the two of us need to fit all of our stuff for 15 days! That’s food, luggage, photography equipment and blogging necessities. Next on my to-do list is finding a laundrette so we can take a week’s worth of clothing to cut down on the space our luggage takes up. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of possibilities to wear the same trousers for a few days in a row or I’m sure Mr W could do the ol’ underwear flip, but the fact remains, we need to wash our clothes. So far I’ve found one laundrette and it’s on a really busy day for us that we’ll be in that area. I’m sure I’ll find one. My initial search was made when I was fighting to stay awake, one eye open and drained by hayfever. There’s a good chance my brain wasn’t functioning at full capacity!

Little triumphs like the bladder bags and kettle have arrived since I last wrote about this trip. And they have been trialled and tested. They’re not too shabby to be fair and I’m convinced after our water intake in Northumberland that our two 5 litre bottles, that we use for our main water supply on a day to day basis, will save our bacon when it comes to hydration and budget. They will be the only plastic bottles on our trip and the fact that we have been using them for over 2 years makes me really happy. Eco-warrior or eco-geek? 

Mr W also found a bargain the other day that he is rather proud of. A pair of work out leggings? Like the gym ones? I have no idea what they are called. But basically they’ll be worn under his trousers and act like thermal/longjohn type things. He’s very pleased with himself. 

He also *drum roll* bought our first fully capable drone and I’m sure once covid has left this household we’ll be doing lots of test flights. It is a smaller model which means we don’t have to apply for a special incense but we do have to register it. I am really excited about this part of the planning as all you ever see with Scotand are aerial shots and I want to see it from land and air. So I am raring to go!

There is one more thing I’m tempted to add into this trip and that is geocaching. I don’t want it to add any locations to our already bursting itinerary but if there are any geocaches in the places we’ll be going that will certainly make things more interesting. Solving some puzzles along the way will make the long walks just that bit more entertaining I think and it’s also so great to be a part of the journey of others by writing in those little logbooks. This will be one of the last things I look into but I hope we can join in wherever possible. Mr W introduced me to it back in 2013 and I really enjoyed the problem solving part of it all. So as long as it’s fun I don’t see the harm in adding it to this powerhouse of a trip.

One thing that hasn’t worked well, and this is me being totally transparent because you have to be honest about these things, is the ponchos we bought on ebay. They can be used as a ground sheet, strung up to make a temporary shelter or worn to keep dry while walking. They have a hood with a drawstring and are ENORMOUS. Absolutely perfect for covering our backpacks and most of our bodies should we get caught out, which is most likely going to happen, on one of our big walks. Unfortunately, while walking in Kielder this past weekend, nature called and demanded the ponchos be worn. After a 25 minute walk my clothes underneath became a little soggy. My chest, arms and the top of my back were damp on our return to the car and this does not bode well when considering we may be walking in rain for over four hours if we are very unlucky. It’s not so much back to the drawing board on this but a fail-safe backup may be needed. I’m thinking, extremely sturdy umbrellas AND ponchos. This is all to avoid paying the extortionate amounts of money for completely waterproof coats and trousers and using what we have instead. Something we cannot risk, me particularly, is sitting in damp clothes. Especially on my chest. I get ill really easily with colds and chest infections and it may stop the trip in its tracks. So we plan, plan, plan to stop this happening!

My what a lot to do in such a short amount of time. I’ll spend more time as we move closer to the departure date detailing some of the tips I have for the hurdles we’ve come up against and any other purchases we make to help us out. 

For now, night night!

Sustainability on a budget

Covid changed a lot. That is a fact. It disrupted every single life around the world. It’ll be a saga that is told for decades to come. 

I have touched upon how life changed for us in previous blogs, check out ‘Changes to how we saw the world’ and ‘A hop, skip and a fracture’ to learn more. It has changed how we view money, travel and single use purchases. It’s surprising to think that they all go hand in hand. So with that in mind, welcome to,

Sustainability on a budget! 

*play the riotous jingle from our sponsors (there are no sponsors)*

Our biggest trip this year will be 16 days travelling from Essex, up to Inverness, over the top of Scotland, following the NC500, pausing in the Isle of Skye and heading down to the Lake District. It’s a lot of mileage to consider and plan ahead for. It’s a lot of everything. 

Food. 

Accommodation

Rubbish. 

Luggage.

We knew early on that we didn’t want this trip to cost the earth. So, from the moment I started planning the route, our stops were allocated due to low cost accommodation. Luckily enough the NC500 takes you through so many small and remote places that a cheap bed for the night wasn’t too hard to come by. There are places I’ve booked in the Isle of Skye and Fort William that have cost almost double our £40-£50 a night budget, but this is to be expected in the more ‘touristy’ areas. Fort William itself has many shops, the popular ‘Harry Potter’ steam railway and is the gateway to Ben Nevis, the Uk’s highest mountain. So it is understandable that our hotel here is costing £80 for the night. It’s an understanding I’ve talked myself round to. Especially as it’s a room with bunk beds! Although it does have a private bathroom, which the diva that lives in me is so grateful for. Other hotels where cheaper do have shared bathrooms and as someone who doesn’t pee in public bathrooms, I’m definitely going all out for this trip! If I remember correctly there are 2-3 hotels on the trip where we won’t share a bed but the room will be private. For the sake of one night, we will survive the separation. Ha! I think after our full days of driving, hiking and exploring, we’ll want nothing more than our own bed, covers and comfort. All hail a return to separate marital beds. I’ve found that when trying to save money, it’s easier to look for hotels that don’t include breakfast, in fact there are only 3 hotels on our entire trip that offer breakfast to be included. One of those hotels is in the Lake District and was booked using a voucher and is our only luxury accommodation on the trip. When it comes to the accommodations we have booked it’s not easy to see how they are sustainable. When one thinks of sustainability it’s often of eco-hotels and the like. However in regards to sustainability and our hotels, it is more of a need to sustain a budget. This budget is important to us, because it means for the first time, travelling in the UK can cost as little as travelling abroad. Too often have we booked a trip to Spain for a week because it is almost one third of the price of a week in Cornwall. This is one of the huge changes covid has brought about. Our need to stay in the UK, but not pay out of the proverbial arse to do so. So far our budget for 16 days in the UK, is at £1086. 92. We have more food to buy, so this amount will increase, but it does include the more expensive items such as the bladder bags and portable kettle. Something that is really important to us this year is stretching the almighty pound coin. It was important when we started planning the trip in December 2021, and we find now in May 2022 it is even more crucial. The cost of living has increased enormously. So if we can minimise the output in terms of vacationing in the UK and learn more about living sustainably in the process I’d call that a win-win situation. 

One of the biggest budget saving hacks I can share with you, is to make your money work harder for you. Something I’ve been doing for years is using our Tesco clubcard points to book our hotels. It is possible to triple up your points in order to do this. It’s easy to do online and I’ve found plenty of hotels that take the vouchers. It means for every £5 of vouchers you potentially have £15 towards a hotel booking. It takes some getting used to as taxes and vat aren’t covered by vouchers, but ultimately it gives you a huge saving! For instance, the hotel I have booked in Fort William cost £85 for the night. I used a £60 voucher and paid £25 cash. However the vouchers I used were originally worth £20. So that means I’m paying £45 for the room, which means a saving of £40! BUT, if you really want to push the thinking, you did nothing but buy your food shop to gain these points, they take time to build, but don’t waste them on your food shop. Boost them! Even a small amount can be boosted and buy you a great dinner at a restaurant along the way. We’ve exhausted our vouchers as of January this year, however by the time we head to Scotland we may have enough for a cheeky pub meal. Not a pot noodle in sight! All in all, we have used £195 of vouchers for this trip, which has cost us £65, that is an enormous saving of £130. Not too shabby eh. And honestly we haven’t compromised on hotels. They are budget, but you do your research. Clean, not a shed and towels included. On this trip, I’ll be happy for a bed and 10 hours out of the car! It may seem complicated, but I assure you it’s easy and it’ll make the trip you take that bit better when you’ve chopped a budget clean in half. 

Mr W and I have spoken for hours on the best way of tackling a budget when it comes to the food for this trip. To add a challenge into the mix, we want to buy food that we can take with us, that won’t spoil and has recyclable, and therefore sustainable, packaging. 

As discussed in ‘Out of body experience number 342’ we’ve decided to take tinned food such as curries and stews to give us the much needed protein and vegetables we need to consume to keep our energy levels up. The best part being that the tin can and paper label are all recyclable. Along with these food items, we have stocked up on packet soups and breakfast oats. All with sustainable packaging. We hope that every few days we’ll be able to buy loose fruit too. To suit eating these packaged foods on the road, we’ve bought a small kettle that can run off of the car’s electric supply. We are lucky to have a hybrid SUV that will turn into a car/kitchen for the trip. We’ve invested in large, lightweight soup mugs for our car meals, have reusable cutlery and have kept two 5 litre bottles to reuse on the trip for water. These water ‘reserves’ will help us fill our bladder backpacks for our long hikes and our metal water bottles for the shorter ones. It would be easy to buy a huge stock of 500ml water bottles to take on the trip, but we’ve become accustomed to using our metal and 5L bottles in order to use less plastic and save a lot of money! In fact, the only other drinks we’ll be taking on our trip are a small variety of canned drinks when water just won’t cut it. Again, I like to think that the sugary treats will taste better when I know the can will be recycled. I plan to send out emails to our accommodations and ask of their recycling methods, as this is important to us and also in regards to our eating habits on the trip. It may come to me finding recycle points in some of the larger towns, so our efforts to be as sustainable as possible does not fall at the second hurdle of the mixed hotel rubbish bin. 

Something I’ve found really useful, and I’ll admit really enjoyable about this food challenge, is the need to organise the food properly. After a long day of hiking and driving, we will find the need to grab food quickly and therefore easily. Therein comes the large ziplock bags. I have not bought these bags rather been sent them as packaging for clothing purchases. When something like these cannot be recycled, it feels good to use it again and again to prevent it becoming a single use item. In the past these bags have been used to hold dirty washing and toiletries. I have quite the collection! Therefore these will be introduced into the food organisation plan for this trip and make for easy grab bags for breakfast, lunch and dinner. 

They will also come in exceptionally handy again for dirty clothes. With the amount of walking and possibly rain we’ll encounter, there will be a great need to separate clean and dirty items. As we plan to take all of our food, the space in the car will be limited when it comes to clothing. So the plan is to pack smart and also to stop at least once at a laundrette. It isn’t ideal. But it means our budget is more sustainable food wise and the food is in sustainable packaging. The only packaging problem I have right now is the milk. It’s impossible to take regular milk on the trip as we won’t have a way of keeping it cool. But this is why I thought of the single serving milks you’ll often find in hotel rooms. The tiny ones that Mr W needs 3 of for his coffee. These are readily available to bulk buy online and I’m happy to have found last night that the actual pot is recyclable. However the lid is not. So if you have any suggestions (other than creamer) I’d love to hear them!

A huge problem we’ve been dealing with at home recently is the amount of bottles we recycle from the bathroom. I’ve been trying out some shampoo bars and Mr W has gone on step further and has a 2-1 shampoo/conditioner bar. So far there have been no complaints, although I’d like to try others due to the after effects and the health of my hair, but there are so many companies that offer these bars with sustainable packaging that I’m sure we’ll find the right ones soon! Team those up with shower gel and soap bars and I’m confident for the environment friendly squeaky clean travellers making their way along the NC500.

However, it is here I will share with you the guilty pleasure I have found in the past. And that is… hotel toiletries! We have a fair few half used hotel toiletry bottles from our travels, which we knew would be thrown out and wasted, that we have bought home and put in a box to use at other times. Now is that time. It is not desirable, considering the implications of plastic and its often found unrecyclable properties. However, I like to think as this was going to end up in the bin when we used it the first time, we are not wasting the rest of the product and moving towards a more sustainable practice of soap bars in the future. Speaking of which, we plan to keep these in mesh bags so the product dries quicker and therefore doesn’t melt away on the side of a sink and we don’t find our money literally washing away down the drain. 

The planning of any holiday can be hard. Learning about a new place, what it has to offer and what works where and when on an itinerary. Adding all of the above into the mix has genuinely been so interesting. I have enjoyed the challenge. I find the closer we get to the trip I am more thankful for the new practices we’ve developed than the experience itself. Sustainable travel is as hard as you make it. And what is sustainable travel really? Is it leaving only footprints? Is it wearing your pants for 4 days in a row? Front, back, inside out and back to front again. Or is it finding sustainable practices that give your mind a cleaner view? That makes your conscience smile. Hiking. New experiences. New places. Morning sprints into the coldest of seas. Driving for 3 hours watching the mountains grow closer and then further away in the rear-view mirror. Maybe it’s the rewards of hiking the path of a waterfall that feels so rewarding. Maybe it’s the gratification our souls need after the last few years of struggling. It’s the rewards of giving something back. Keeping the air cleaner and the seas free from plastic. It’s stopping on a dirt road in the rain, sitting in the boot of our car, tailgate up and watching the world go by. The world that has sustained us. 

Travel needs to be more than jetting off and spending money. It needs to be more than the rubbish we produce and buy. It needs to be a way of sustaining the soul.