Well, we're back, and I've done a casual, approximate accounting for our trip.

The total trip cost was about $3,000. That includes 48 days for Randy, 19 days for Nancy, and Randy's flight back home (but Nancy got hers free).

When we were travelling together at the beginning and end of the trip we spent about $65/day. There were some hotels and more than average restaurants and the like.

When I was travelling alone from Gunnison to the Pacific coast, I spent about $1,000, or about $30/day.

I just went back and compared these numbers to our Mexico trip in February of 2003. In our month in Mexico we spent about $20/day/person. So I think that spending about $30/day/person travelling together in the US is not too bad. I thought it was a little high when I first looked, but it doesn't seem bad now.

Of course, these are pretty rough numbers, but it's good information for us as we budget for the BIG Americas trip from Inuvik, Northwest Territories, Canada, to Ushuaia, Patagonia starting in 2006. If our spending there on that trip is similar to these two trips, we'll need about $30/day/person in the US and $20/day/person south of the border, declining a bit after Mexico. So if our trip is to take 2.5 years (our estimate), we might need about $40,000 for the big trip (figuring 150 days in the US/Canada to start the trip, and lower costs to follow). That's actually less than the $50,000 I had estimated earlier, so hurrah!