France 2010

We drove 8,900 km. Almost everything broke down. At the beginning of the trip, in Berlin, we bought a new battery. The mountain serpentines of Switzerland were hard going.

We refueled, as usual, with gas. The average consumption was 7.78 l per 100 km. By the way, gas had become noticeably more expensive compared to 2009.
We spent the night wherever we could :) We stopped worrying less about finding hotels.

We got an ACSI card. With the card, for all months except July and August, campsites cost from 11 to 15 euros (for two people, a car, a tent, and electricity). This despite the fact that we stayed at four-star campsites, whose price without the card is over 30 euros. There are quite a lot of campsites participating in this offer, and the card comes with a booklet listing all the campsites. The card cost about 12 euros. The problem was that through their website you couldn’t order the card to our country (Ukraine). So we wrote them a letter, asking them to send us their miracle card and we would somehow pay them. They sent it, along with an invoice. Unfortunately, we never managed to pay the invoice. Although we really wanted to. But our banks wanted to charge an extra 20 euros for the service, and in European banks we never managed to find common ground.

As a result, we stayed in 9 hotels, 17 campsites, and 3 times we had to spend the night in an open field (because we arrived at the campsite too late). The thing about campsites is that most of them close the barrier around 8 p.m., or even earlier.
We ate on our own, bought food in supermarkets, and in the evening cooked on a grill or in a frying pan. We bought the grill in Kyiv. By the way, we also brought the charcoal from Kyiv. And we did the right thing, because it’s rather expensive there. Once, at a campsite in Switzerland, we found an open large bag of charcoal, half full, left behind by someone before us. We took the bag of charcoal with us — why refuse it? And later, on the bag, we read that the charcoal was from Ukraine.

From the statistics:
30% spent on gas
25% spent on accommodation
22% spent on food
16% spent on admission to attractions
7% trip preparation (visas, insurance, etc.)

Total money spent: 1,830 euros for 29 days.