Wednesday 12th October - splashing the cash

First job of the day was a call to NatWest in the UK (no, they provide no option of finding the answer to my payment query on-line or to getting a response via email apparently).  Having gone through the security rigmarole and getting to speak to a human being it turned out that there was literally nothing more I could do to speed up the payment.  I would have to wait until 24 hours ticked over to make my next payment and do the same again for a third day.  There was no option to move a large quantity of money any faster.  Campers Inn wouldn’t receive our payment for the RV until Friday at the absolute earliest but it would more likely be into the following week.  We decided to keep Campers Inn in the dark about this… in case it meant that they delayed getting our camper ready.  We couldn’t collect our RV until next week anyway so by then hopefully all this would be resolved.  Until then I tried to keep calm about spending such a large chunk of our cash.

Talking about spending cash….. Today turned into a major shopping day.  We may not have to look for an RV anymore but we had to equip it for us to live in for the next nine months.  One of the most important things for our sanity would be getting a good night’s sleep on board.  The queen sized double bed came with a not very luxurious or particularly deep mattress.  Tash came to the rescue with some money off vouchers and recommendations for stores to try and bag a bargain.  Well, I never knew how much choice or scope of pricing there would be for memory foam mattresses!  Check out how much this is....!

We traipsed around several stores and eventually invested in a 2” memory foam mattress AND a 1.5” foam sponge topper to give us an extra comfort ‘boost’ instead of shelling out what seemed like a ridiculous amount on 3” memory foam – we’re talking hundreds of bucks.  We then spent many more dollars on replacing many of the items we had given away or taken to the tip back in England!  Bedding, pots, pans, cutlery, mugs, crockery, tea towels, cleaning stuff... the list goes on. We bought the cheapest but hopefully user-friendliest stock we could find without resorting to paper plates etc.  (Being house-proud we tried to keep it on a colour theme of course, so the main colour of our new home is red.)

What to do about mobile phones and internet?  We had researched some options for getting mobile wi-fi in our RV but even when the cost was a couple of dollars a day, that adds up to a fortune on top of everything else, it was just going to be too much.  I had thought we would get pay as you go phones and only use them sporadically but we ended up taking out $40 per month SIM contracts with AT&T (not sure what that stands for folks) – which gave us free calls and texts within the USA as well as 3GB of data so that we would have some internet access when we needed it, and had a signal.  This seemed like a reasonable compromise and we definitely needed some way of communicating that would be cheaper than using our British phones.  Straight away it was apparent how useful having a US cell number would be for a prolonged visit such as ours.  We use them almost daily to call campsites, insurance companies etc so it was a good idea.


I am not very good at spending money.  That may come as a surprise to you having just read the first sections of this blog!  But I am naturally cautious when it comes to spending (healthy) and a bit tight with cash too (miserly?), so I may spend it… but then have a panic attack about it.  Together with Simon, who doesn’t seem to think twice before splashing the cash, I think we balance each other out quite well. Within the last 48 hours of this trip we had haemorrhaged money, all on things that were ‘essential’ to this trip but also seemed quite frivolous in the grand scheme of things.  Simon and I had budgeted for the US section of our trip to cost a certain amount whilst leaving another chunk of our travel funds alone for our other plans.  We refused to start using the real budget yet.  We put all this expense down to ‘set-up costs’ so we ended up using our savings to cover these instead; in denial because the real adventure doesn't start until we hit the road does it?!