Every Sunday night, wherever I am, I open the same spreadsheet. It started on a folding chair in a Lima hostel as a way to stop panicking about money, and it has grown into the most honest diary I keep. Rows for every bed, every bus, every border. A column for what I spent and, later, a column I added for how I felt about it.
I left my classroom in Denver with one carry-on backpack and a plan to travel for a year. That was a little more than three years ago. The spreadsheet now has 1,240 rows of days, and people ask me about it often enough that I decided to share the whole thing: the big numbers, the money, the mistakes, and what the numbers can’t really tell you.
In this story7 sections
The big four
47 countries. I count a country only if I slept there at least one night, so the morning I spent crossing a corner of Liechtenstein doesn’t make the list. Some I stayed in for months (Mexico, Portugal, Japan, Vietnam); some I passed through in a weekend. I’ve learned that the number matters far less than I thought it would when I started. Three slow months in one country taught me more than any six-country sprint.
182 cities and towns. This one surprised me more. It includes villages with one café and a dog that followed me everywhere, and megacities where I barely scratched the surface. If I filtered it down to places where I could now walk to the market without a map, it would be closer to forty.
About 194,000 miles (312,400 kilometers, which is how the spreadsheet tracks it, a habit from my first year in South America). That’s almost eight times around the equator. It counts every bus, train, ferry, shared van, bike, and the occasional tuk-tuk. It also counts flights, and here is the uncomfortable truth: flights make up roughly 70 percent of the distance. Long-haul hops between continents are a handful of rows that dwarf everything else.
1,240 days on the road. Not counting two Christmas trips home to Colorado, which felt like a different kind of travel entirely.
Where the money went
This is the question I get most, so here are the real totals, rounded. Over three years and change, I spent about $71,000, including flights, insurance, gear and everything else. That works out to roughly $57 a day, or about $1,740 a month. For comparison, my rent alone in Denver was around $1,500.
The average hides a huge range. My cheapest stretch was four months in Vietnam and Laos, at about $32 a day, including a shared room with air conditioning I was very proud of. My most expensive was six weeks in Iceland, Norway and Switzerland, where I averaged close to $140 a day while eating grocery-store sandwiches on park benches. The US national parks road trip in my second summer landed in between, at about $85 a day, mostly because of gas and campsites.
Broken down by category, the totals look like this:
- Beds: about 38 percent. Hostels early on, then mostly guesthouses and monthly apartment rentals.
- Food: about 22 percent. Markets, street stalls and cooking, with a long lunch splurge once a week.
- Flights: about 16 percent, which is lower than people expect. Booking one-way, flexible dates and budget carriers did most of the work.
- Ground transport: about 9 percent.
- Activities and entry fees: about 8 percent.
- Insurance, phone, gear and everything else: about 7 percent.
Budget tip
The biggest single saving in three years was the monthly rental. Staying 28 nights or more in one place often cut my nightly rate by 30 to 50 percent compared with booking a week at a time. Slow travel is not only better for the soul, it is cheaper.
The small numbers I love more
The spreadsheet has a few side columns that started as jokes and became my favorite part:
- Night buses: 61. Worst one: 19 hours across northern Argentina with a broken recliner.
- Missed connections: 9, two of them entirely my fault.
- Hiking miles: about 1,100, from the Colorado Trail to the Annapurna foothills.
- Times I got food poisoning: 4. Zero of them from street food, which I still find funny.
- Pairs of shoes worn out: 5.
- Books read: 143, almost all on a battered e-reader.
- Passport pages used: enough that I renewed early, which, for the record, you can’t do from abroad as easily as you think. Plan for it.
What the spreadsheet can’t measure
There’s a column I added in year two called “mood,” scored from one to five. It turned out to be the most useful data I have. My highest-scoring weeks were almost never the most beautiful places. They were the weeks with routines: the same café every morning in Oaxaca, the Thursday language exchange in Lisbon, the volunteer shifts at an organic farm in Hokkaido.
My lowest weeks clustered right after fast stretches. Every time I tried to see four cities in ten days, the mood column dropped to a two and stayed there. Exhaustion looks like freedom from the outside. It isn’t.
The other thing missing from the data is people. I can count the countries, but not the strangers who changed a day: the grandmother in Georgia who fed me until I couldn’t stand, the bus driver in Peru who waited twenty minutes while I found my wallet, the other solo travelers who became the friends I now plan trips around.
The number of countries matters less every year. The number of mornings I knew where to buy bread matters more.
Maya Collins
Lessons, one per year
Year one: carry less, plan less
I started with a 40-liter pack and a printed itinerary. By month four I’d mailed home a third of my things and stopped booking more than a week ahead. Both were the right call.
Year two: slow down on purpose
I cut my pace roughly in half, from about nine new places a month to four. My spending dropped, my mood column went up, and I finally started writing the stories I wanted to write.
Year three: build a home base
This year I learned that long-term travel works better with an anchor. I now keep two places I return to, Lisbon and Kyoto, where I know a landlord, a dentist and a good bakery. It makes the time in between feel like adventure instead of drift.
If you want to keep your own numbers
Start simple. One row per day, with columns for date, place, bed cost, total spend, transport, and a one-line note. Add the fun columns later. Update it weekly, not daily, or you’ll quit within a month. And track in your home currency from day one; converting three years of pesos, baht and krónur after the fact is a weekend I will never get back.
A few practical things that helped me as an American traveling long-term:
- A travel insurance plan designed for long trips, renewed in six-month blocks.
- A no-foreign-transaction-fee credit card and a debit card that refunds ATM fees.
- Knowing the Schengen 90-in-180-day rule cold, and logging border dates in the spreadsheet.
- A mailing address and a scanning service back home for anything official.
What comes next
People sometimes ask when I’ll stop. I don’t have a number for that. What I do know is that the next year will look smaller on paper: fewer countries, fewer miles, far fewer flights. I’d like the kilometers column to grow mostly by train and on foot, and the mood column to stay where it is.
Thank you for following along, reading the long posts, and sending me your own spreadsheets. See you next Sunday night, wherever that turns out to be.