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-When we left Dallas a few months ago our plan was to be gone six months. We were going to spend the winter down here, improve our Spanish a bit and go back to the bus. We had plans to travel the southwest, see some areas of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah that we hadn't seen yet, and then head up to Wyoming, Idaho and Montana when it got to hot to stay in the desert. Then we'd swing south again when it cool off and do the west coast of Mexico for the winter. It was a pretty good plan I thought. It still is a pretty good plan.
+I like airports -- liminal zones between worlds fascinate me even when those zones are only between national borders -- but I really dislike flying. I dislike the process of it the way that everyone dislikes it, but I also dislike parachuting into a place, so to speak, without any context of how you got there. Airplane travel also is far worse for the environment[^1], and, to me at least, feels gratuitous in a way that buses, trains, autos and RVs do not. As I've written before, I like the planning process, I like driving in, I even like traffic sometimes because it teaches you something about the place.
 
-As the man said, it's important that you make them, but in truth, plans rarely work out. And that one is not going to work out. At least not on the timeline we'd envisioned.
+We spent most of December at our friends' house while they were back in the states for the holidays. Aside from saving our asses from homelessness, it was a really nice house and had a lot of books. One of the books I read while we were staying at their house was called Gringo, by Chesa Boudin. I was not a huge fan of the book overall, but Boudin captures my dislike of plane travel in one rather tidy little sentence: "Airplane travel predisposes us to superficial, compartmentalized knowledge of a country, while land travel forces us, often uncomfortably, into contact with more everyday realities".
 
-There are a variety of reasons it's not going to happen, one of them is money. It's not the only reason, but, while it's a tad boring for most people, talking about money is super helpful for anyone who's thinking of doing what we do. I know this because I searched high and low for anyone willing to talk about how much it cost to travel the U.S. by RV and came up with very few hard and fast numbers.
+Arguably, you can go further. Bike in and you'll understand it that much better. Walk and you'll know it rather well indeed. Since walking more than a few miles with a three year old isn't a lot of fun, we effectively parachuted in, as you do. And despite having been here three months I still I feel like I do have a superficial, compartmentalized understanding of the area. That feeling is compounded by the difference in language and culture. It's relatively easy for us as Americans to go from Georgia up the UP, spend the summer there and come away with reasonable understanding of the area. It's impossible to do the same when spanning cultures and throwing in different language for good measure.
 
-We track our spending to the penny. I can give some pretty accurate figures, but they're averages and that doesn't actually reflect what you're really going to spend because the real answer is that it really depends where you are, and how you travel.
+When we left Dallas a few months ago our plan was to be gone six months. We were going to spend the winter down here, stay warm, improve our Spanish a bit and go back to the bus. Then we were going to spend the Spring traveling the southwest, see some areas of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah that we hadn't seen yet, and then head up to Wyoming, Idaho and Montana when it got hot, to spend the summer at higher, cooler elevations. Then we'd swing south again when it cooled off and come back down to Mexico and work our way down the west coast of Mexico for the winter of 2019/2020. 
 
-But here's a rough number for a family of five, barring unforeseen expenses, which is euphemism for if the bus doesn't break down, we spend about $4500 a month on average traveling the U.S. Of that roughly 30-40% tends to be food, depending on where we are in the country (the west is much more expensive in nearly every regard, relative to the midwest and south, but especially food). Lodging is extremely variable
+It was a pretty good plan I thought. It still is a pretty good plan. But as the man said, it's important that you make them, but it's rarely to actually follow a plan for too long. And that one, much as we still like it, is not going to work out for us. At least not on the timeline we'd envisioned.
 
+There are a variety of reasons it's not going to happen, one of them is money. To get where we want to go in the bus, we need to rebuild the engine. We need more power on hills and the only way I've come up with to do that is to either drop in something bigger, a 440 or the like, or rebuild the 318 to get better compression, which means boring out the engine, new pistons, new manifolds on both ends, probably a new transmission and quite a few other things that are not cheap. It's all doable, but it takes money and we lost about 50 percent of our income earlier this year. 
 
+I don't want to sound like I'm complaining or asking for money, I'm not doing either, we're very fortunate to be able to do this and there isn't a day that goes by that I'm not grateful for everything we've been able to do. If we had to sell the bus and go home tomorrow I would have no regrets. Even Marco Polo went home eventually. We're not ready to do that yet, we're not even sure that means anymore, but sometimes you do have to adjust things if you want to keep going.  
 
+It's a tad boring for those of you just following along, but I'm going to get into the subject of travel and money because talking about money is super helpful for anyone who's thinking of doing what we do. I searched high and low for anyone willing to talk about how much it cost to travel the U.S. by RV before we left and came up with very few hard and fast numbers. Consider this digression my contribution to anyone searching for information on how much it cost to travel the United States in a 1969 RV.
 
+We track our spending to the penny, so I can give some pretty accurate figures at the monthly level. However, that's really not going to tell you what you need to know. The real answer is that how much is costs to travel the U.S. by RV really depends on where you are, how many of you there are, and how you travel.
 
+That said, here's a rough number for a family of five, barring unforeseen expenses -- which is a euphemism for months where the bus doesn't break down -- we spend about $3000-$4000 a month on average traveling the U.S. 
 
-We spend just over half that in Mexico, sans bus. 
+Yes, that's a big spread. The reason is that roughly 30-40% tends to be food, which varies tremendously depending on where we are in the country. The west is much more expensive in nearly every regard, relative to the midwest and south, but especially in food. Generally speaking the $4000 a month areas would be California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, etc. The midwest and south are cheaper for us because food is cheaper there things rounded out to just over $3000/month. 
 
-Part of it is that some things are cheaper here. Though really, not that much cheaper. I'd say food, which makes up the largest part of our budget, is about 30% less here. That's nothing to sneeze at, it helps for sure, but it's not the real reason it's cheaper to live in Mexico.
+On the flip side of that equation boondocking tends to be easier out west -- there's lots more BLM land, which means you can find a free place to stay much easier -- so you spend less on camping (except in California, Calfornia is just expense). If you're on the Gulf Coast it's going to cost you upwards of $30 a night in most of Florida (unless you know where to look). 
 
-When I take a hard look at the spreadsheet, and then rotate it sideways to get a new perspective, what really jumps out is the "miscellaneous" category. I don't get real fine grained with categories so miscellaneous holds everything that is not gas, food, lodging or vehicle repair. Basically it hold the non-essentials.
+Another thing worth noting is that throughout the course of our trip we've spent less and less per month (except for last winter in California, which puts an irritating bump in the nice downward sloping graph I generated). There are two reason for this I think, first, we're getting smarter about boondocking and finding cheap camping, and two, we went back cross the country to the south and midwest where food is cheaper.
 
-Why is the category larger for us in the US? After spending some time meditating on this I have a very simple answer: in Mexico you are not bombarded with advertising. Mexico has pretty much everything the United States has, but it's no in your face 24/7. Shops do not have windows, most do not even have a way to browse through stuff. Instead you walk in, tell the person what you need, the person asks small medium or large and then goes rummaging around to find what you want.
+Final point -- we do it for less. We could probably cut our food bill by 30 percent if we dropped the organic meat and eggs for conventional and changed our eating habits a bit (in fact we have by necessity here). We don't, or we didn't in the U.S., because we didn't need to. As I noted in the post on food, food is one of life's most important elements to me. Not that good food has to be expensive, but good quality ingredients in the U.S. are going to cost you even if you do what we do and mostly shop at Asian and Hispanic grocery stores.
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+So what's the point of all this money talk? The U.S. is considerably more expensive than Mexico. We spend just over half our U.S. monthly spending here in Mexico, sans bus. You probably could have guessed that, what you probably would not guess is why.
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+Part of it is that some things are cheaper here. Though really, not that much cheaper. I'd say food, which makes up the largest part of our budget, is about 30% less here. That's nothing to sneeze at, it helps for sure, but it's not the real reason it's cheaper for us to live in Mexico.
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+When I take a hard look at the spreadsheet, and then rotate it sideways to get a new perspective, what really jumps out is the "miscellaneous" category. I don't get real fine grained with spending categories so miscellaneous holds everything that is not gas, food, lodging or vehicle repair. Basically it hold the non-essentials. That category doesn't exist in Mexico. After spending some time meditating on this I've a very simple answer: in Mexico you are not constantly bombarded with advertising. 
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+Mexico has pretty much everything the United States has, especially here in San Miguel, my wife brought home duck fat yesterday for crying out loud, we're not in the boonies, we're not just eating beans and tortillas. The difference is that it's not all in your face 24/7. Shops here do not have windows, most do not even have a way to browse through stuff. Half of them you can't even get to the stuff yourself. Instead you walk in, tell the person what you need, the person asks small medium or large and then goes rummaging around to find what you want.
 
 Everything you buy here comes from your own mind first and is found second. 
 
 In the United States everything is presented and then your mind decides what to buy. 
 
-One of these models will leave more money in your pocket than the other.
+One of these models will leave more money in your pocket than the other, full stop.
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+And I know, I know. I like to think I am immune to advertising too, that I am smarter than the advertisers, that I resist the never-ending onslaught "buy this stuff". 
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+Unfortunately my spreadsheet says otherwise. I am not immune.
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+And I don't even own a TV, how much more would I be buying if I watched television and were subjected to that much more advertising? And it's not that I'm comparing many years of life in the U.S to just three months in Mexico. Comparing the U.S. to Mexico is not what led me to this conclusion. It got me thinking about it, but it wasn't until I went back and made another comparison that I believed it. It was when I comparing the time we spent in the bus without a car, to the time we had a car that made it painfully obvious to me. It's very simple: given a car and easy access to everything, we spent more. 
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+Take away the access and we spent less. Mexico also takes away the access, so we spend less here too, but it's not the situations or places really, it's us.
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+I am not immune. You are not immune. We all fall for advertising. 
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+Advertising is a debased form of magic, which is another way of saying it's powerful and you probably are not aware of its power in any conscious way. 
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+I know I am not. However, now that I'm outside its sphere of influence a bit, I've noticed something -- I don't want anything. Maybe that's not quite true, I want much less. So much less that I became aware of it, I noticed how much less stuff I wanted. At first I thought I was maybe a little crazy, but we've talked to couple of Americans who've been down here a few months and they've noticed it too. 
+
+I think part of it is access. I can't use Amazon down here. Or I can, but it's a huge pain, enough of a pain that we just don't. And effectively that means the rest of the internet too, ordering stuff off the internet isn't practical so we don't do it. Since we know we can't do it we don't bother looking things up to see if we can get them. Interestingly I don't feel like I did this much before, but my spreadsheet says otherwise (my uncle and my wife's sister's family could also say otherwise, given how much stuff we shipped to their addresses). 
+
+A good example of this for me would be camera lenses. I use old, manual focus lenses. In the course of the trip I've bought and sold about a dozen, and there were many more I wanted to buy, but since I can't get them shipped down here I started paying less attention. I used to follow a few used lens websites and would lust after various expensive hard to find lenses. 
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+Once I started thinking about the idea that what I wanted, what I thought I needed might just be the result of constant advertising I didn't even notice, I started thinking more broadly about where my attention was and how that was affecting me. So I decided to stop reading all the lens sites, to stop reading the forums and instead starting paying more attention to the photographers whose images I admired. I started directing my focus to craft rather than gear. I spent more time thinking about things like composition, texture, tone and all the other bits of craft that actually make good photos rather than any particular lens. Not only have I not bought a lens since, I've become much more satisfied with the ones I own.
+
+This dovetails with a lesson we learned early on in the bus -- once you realize you can live without something, get rid of it. Once I realized I could live without reading about cool new camera lenses I sat down and scrutinized every website I read on a regular basis and got rid of anything that was likely to make me want stuff. 
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+If you want control over what you consume, you're going to have to strengthen your will. So long as you are surrounded by signals that are trying to get you to spend money on crap, it is going to be an uphill battle. If you can I strongly suggest removing yourself from the signals -- think about where your attention is going and how you can redirect it to craft rather than stuff. 
 
-I like to think I am immune to advertising, that I am smarter than the advertisers, that I resist the never-ending onslaught of stuff, but my spreadsheet says otherwise. And I don't even own a TV, how much more would I be buying if I watched television?i
+What does this have to do with traveling? Well we sat back and took stock of things, what we all wanted to do, and we decided that we wanted to stay here in San Miguel for longer than six months. Not too long after that we found a house that was just about perfect for us so we signed a year lease and we're staying here. We're staying here to slow down for a while, to work on some projects that require the kind of deeper focus that's difficult to manage on the road, to get better at Spanish, to try to move beyond a superficial, compartmentalized understanding of the place we're in, and to save money, both because we can live a little cheaper and because we spend less here.
 
-And it's not that I'm comparing many years of life in the U.S to just three months in Mexico. Comparing the U.S. to Mexico is not what made me notice this, it was comparing the time we spent in the bus without a car, vs the time we had a car that made it painfully obvious. It's very simple: given a car and easy access to everything, we spent more. Take away the access and we spent less. Mexico also takes away the access, so we spend less here to. But it's not the situations or places, it's us.
+There are other reasons, the kids wanted to do somethings that are hard to do on the road, like take gymnastics and swimming lessons, and I wanted a break from crawling under the bus every other day to see what the mysterious fluid was leaking now.
 
-I am not immune. You are not immune. We all fall victim to advertising. 
 
-Advertising is a debased form of magic, which is another way of saying it's powerful, but there are things more powerful. The most important of those is your will. If you want control over what you consume, you're going to have to strengthen your will. So long as you are surrounded by signals that are trying to get you to spend money on crap, it is going to be an uphill battle.
 
-If you can I strongly suggest removing yourself from the signals. If you have the ability to travel to somewhere you don't speak the language and is outside the general sphere of western advertising then do it. Spend a month tracking your spending to the penny. Then move away for a month and track your spending again. Observe the difference. Now that you see mediate on why it exists.
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+but there are things more powerful. The most important of those is your will. 
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 If, like most people, you can't pick and move to foreign country for a month then you're going to have to try to change in the midst of the battle so to speak. While possible, this is much much harder. And again, while I like to think I have mastered this, my spreadsheet says otherwise, so take this advice with a grain of salt. Chances are good that this actually much harder than you or I think and you're going to need to put in more effort than I'm suggesting.
 
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+[^1]: This is endlessly debated on the internet by people looking to justify which variety of travel they support. Based on what I've read at the [Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies][1], as well as Michael Sivak's work for the University of Michigan Transportation Research on the energy intensity of both driving and flying, a family of 5 driving, even in the bus, puts less carbon in the air than flying. Would it be better to do neither? Yes. As for the whole climate change debate, I managed to pick up enough of an understand of energy flow and the laws of thermodynamics back in high school to realize that billions of tons of infrared-trapping gases into Earth’s atmosphere is going to fuck things up as it were. The fact that Earth’s climate has changed drastically without human interference in the past should really just demonstrate how idiotic it is to tinker with a system clearly vulnerable to destabilization.
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+[1]: https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2015/09/evolving-climate-math-of-flying-vs-driving/
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 The most important thing is to develop your will. I am serious. Start doing exercises to develop your will. For example, force your self up out of the chair right now, turn away from the computer and walk to the nearest wall. Touch it. Come back and sit down. Repeat this at random during the day. Is it pointless? Absolutely. So is lifting weights. The principle is the same. So choose a deliberately pointless thing to do, and do it. Then do another one. Then do the same thing every morning for a week. 
 
 One will-building exercise I do periodically is what I call, for lack of a better phrase, micro travel. It works like this: pick a place at random in the city you live, somewhere you've never been. Choose a time and make an appointment with yourself. Now go work out all the details of getting there, if possible use public transit or walk. Then meet yourself there and make sure you're there on time. Now enjoy a few minutes exploring the area and head home.