We’ve been on our world tour for less than a week now, and we’re very quickly learning what’s easier and what’s harder than we expected.

Case in point: one of the things we were most curious about is turning out to be one of the hardest to track. Before we started, we were curious how much this trip would cost. Traveling can be expensive, but I’ve always thought that it doesn’t have to be as expensive as people think it is. Years from now, we want to be able to look back and say, “We spent x dollars going through y country. Maybe we should go back and try to do it cheaper.” To do that, we have to track every single expense. If we’re driving on the highway and we pay 2 Euro in cash for a toll, we’ve just spent money without thinking about it! If we stop in at a convenience store to grab a bottle of water or a bag of pretzels, we’ve got more travel expenses that we’ve got to track!

Luckily for Charley, I’ve been pretty good about tracking so far. You can even take a look at our expense logs here. I’ve been stopping to write down all the money we spend so that we have the chance to go back later and know where there were potential savings because we overindulged a little. We’re not planning to stop and give a play-by-play account of every single thing we do during our travels, but if you head into our financial logs, you might just be able to tell anyway!

Just take a look at this cost entry on May 14:

We went to a cathedral and saw a play at the Abbey Theatre on May 14

The Abbey Theatre in Dublin debuted a new play called Tina’s Idea of Fun, and we got ourselves front row seats to take it in. Seeing live theater (plus visiting some cathedral crypts earlier in the day) for under sixty dollars sounds like a worthwhile expense to me! Keep an eye out in this space for more thoughts on our budgeting as we go along!