The Adventure in Numbers

In total we spent 81 days in Europe and all but 3 nights we slept in Homer which was very comfortable 😁.  The ability to take your home with you to visit places and use the app 'search for sites' to find suitable overnight stop was brilliant.  We stayed in Homer in 19 different locations (not including our Swiss stop where we didn't stay in Homer) as a result.  14 of those were also free.

Homer travelled 39 miles short of 5000 kilometres over the whole trip.  Diesel was the only item where we went over budget - we forecast £600 and actually spent €892 (about £750).  We hadn't originally planned to visit Switzerland which was an amazing trip and gave us the chance to make new friends too.

Costs included - £4624 of living costs (inc the diesel costs above), £1,050 season ski passes and £290 euro tunnel. Grand total £5964.  We weren't quite there for 3 months but I estimate costs would have been a little more than £2,000 a month if we had been.  For those thinking about an adventure of their own I've not included home/house costs from UK and neither have I included Homer depreciation costs (which I know some motorhomers do).

Of living costs only €713 (about £600) was spent on camping / aires (our budget was £1500). We also refilled gas bottles (we have 2x13 litres) 8 times during the 11 weeks.  An average of once every 10 days.  Cost of this varied but on average about 25 euros to fill up so 200 euros total.  Heating our motorhome was therefore significantly more efficient than heating our home (which was about £100 a month even though we not living there).

Some things we hadn’t budgeted for (but we would next time);

1. Because we were on a budget we weren’t planning to use toll roads at but sometimes you just have to. We spent €200 on tolls including €40 on the Swiss motorway vignette.
2. Maintenance - we hadn’t budgeted for things going wrong, breaking or needing replacement. We spent €300 on Homer things (and I think got away well with that) and had to buy a few extra warm things to help Melle with the cold in Jan/Feb - probably another €200. Not budgeting for these at the outset caused a little bit of stress while there.

We went skiing on 50 days at cost of £10.50 a day each (our season ski pass was £525 each).  This is amazing value considering a daily GM pass is approx 60 euros.  I can't find a ski tracker app for Grand Massif area to work out miles but if we ski'd an average of 4 hours a day (which is probably about right) this would be 200 hours over the whole trip which would be more than 2 hours excercise a day for the whole trip.  However I would say that skiing does become less like excercise the more efficient you become.  And I have experienced significant muscle soreness from starting running again since we've got home!!! 😓

The cost of the ski pass included 2 days in other resorts outside Grand Massif - Saint Gervais and Les Clusaz.  We did plan a third trip to Avoriaz in the last week but decided not to bother due to poor weather.  Note - we had three free days visiting other ski resorts in the Haute Savoir region as part of season ski pass. 

We had a total of 14 meals out - mostly in the evening with visitors - we had packed lunch when we went skiing and visited all 5 sal picnics in the Grand Massif region.  We also had many amazing al fresco lunches in lots of different locations on the sunny days.

This blog was written by Chris