As of today, I’ve been out of the states for exactly ten weeks. One way I know this is that I backed up my laptop onto an external hard drive that’s still in Florida on the morning I left. Every morning now, a window pops up that reminds me that I haven’t backed up my computer in however-many days. Today it said 69; tomorrow it will say 70. (Just so nobody out there worries about the security of my data, let me hasten to add that I have an eight-gigabyte thumb drive with me that I’m using for incremental backups in the meantime).
I’ve been very lax about money. If you’d asked me this morning how much I’ve spent in ten weeks, I would have had no idea. This afternoon, I figured it all out. In the ten weeks, I’ve spent a bit more than $4000 on the adventures you’ve read about here, or a little less than $60 dollars a day. And that includes $300 for the camera I bought the first week to replace the one I stupidly lost, but it doesn’t include a my airfare from Florida to South America or back (I used air miles) nor the travel/health insurance I paid for before my trip.
The conclusion I draw is that for a bit more than $20,000 a year, I could go on living like this until I went completely broke. But I’m not going to do that. For one thing, after covering something like 2500 miles on the ground (2350 miles point-to-point from Quito to Santiago), I’m about do some flying. Stay tuned.
