It’s been an odd year to say the least. COVID has certainly curtailed our travel in Bertie the motorhome, but I think I can take that on the chin given that it seems to be the least of the troubles that have blighted people this year. We’ve ended the year with jobs and our health so I’ll raise a glass to that.
While we were full time travelling I used to share our living expenses on this Blog. Now that we are living a ‘normal’ life I won’t bore people with our general living costs, but I thought it might be interesting to see how much Bertie has cost us to run as a vehicle for weekend breaks and short holidays.
This year we have managed to get out on 6 trips for a total of 26 nights, not bad for a year of lockdowns.
- January: Lake District 3 nights (of an 8 night trip)
- July: Cornwall 5 nights
- August: North Devon 3 nights
- August: Dorset 5 nights
- September: Peak District 8 nights
- October: London 2 nights
Our total costs of £2406 have broken down as follows:
Some observations:
- £2406 would have bought us a pretty decent foreign package holiday or longer self catering break(s).
- At just over £90 a night, this year a motorhome has not been a cheap way of taking holidays, especially when compared to a camping or self catering holiday. But…
- …when you consider we don’t run a car, and would have to factor in public transport or car hire into any other holiday then that makes Bertie a slightly more cost effective holiday machine.
- We have stayed in campsites every night we were away. This is not usual for us, but as discussed in out last blog we didn’t want to be seen as part of the ‘dirty camper’ problem.
- If we’d been away as much as we’d originally planned, the cost per night would have reduced. However it’s difficult to say how much it would have reduced by. We probably would have spent a couple of weeks abroad which would have had a higher fuel cost (but probably a lower campsite cost).
- If lockdown had been more stringent during the year or holidays had not been possible for any other reason then we would have paid £1418 just to keep Bertie in storage.
- Possibly we could have SORNed Bertie while we were locked down to make this cheaper
- We haven’t included the costs of eating, drinking or other activities that would just be part of our day to day life. If we eat out more while we’re away it’s usually taken from our everyday budget during the rest of that month.
- It’s difficult to factor in depreciation of Bertie, so we haven’t even tried to calculate a value. But we do need to take into account that Bertie is worth less than we paid 5 years ago and one day will be worth nothing, hopefully a long way away. Motorhomes depreciate slowly.
We are hoping that the world gets COVID under control in 2021 and we get to spend more time with our family and friends. As an added bonus it would be fantastic if we could get more nights away in Bertie between work and lockdowns. We’ve started to make tentative plans and have even booked a couple of short breaks. Hopefully we’ll have something to report on this blog.