Julie and I all bright and shiny before our Follow the Sun trip started in March last year

Julie and I finished the third continent of our Follow the Sun journey with almost four months exploring the northern and southern corners of Europe – plus a few points in between – and finished the journey with some great times in the UK.  So where did we go and what were the kilometres, countries, costs, facts and figures of this great experience?  Well, glad you asked because here’s the scoop from our maps and spreadsheets!

As a refresher, our original idea of Follow the Sun was to move from continent to continent from a northern summer to a southern summer to a northern summer and so on through six continents and six continuous summers.  Here’s a look at how we envisioned this kinda whacky three year trip, starting with North America.

Follow the Sun means six consecutive summers across six continents – easy to draw up…a bit harder to execute

We completed North America and Central and South America before shipping Tramp from Uruguay to Antwerp Belgium.  From there we started our European leg.  Here’s a map of where we went across Europe.

Our north-south travels of Europe, starting in Frankfurt, up through Scandinavia, Russia, the Baltics, Poland, into western Europe and a great loop through Spain and Portugal before finishing in the UK

The numbered waypoints are not overnight stops, they just help me accurately track our travels.  If you want to drill down into this map and see more interactive detail of our travels click here –  Europe Map. 

Maps – I mean the old fashion paper fold-up maps – have always been a bit part of our travels, even on Follow the Sun

And yes, I love spreadsheets.  I’ve kept track of just about every numerical aspect of our trip, to the point I suspect Julie thinks I’ve gone a bit nuts.  Never mind, here’s some quick facts about the European leg of our journey:

• Days – 108
• Kilometres – 22,583 (209 km) or in Miles – 13,924 (129 miles per day)
• Fuel – 4,256 litres or in gallons – 1,120
• Mileage – 18.8 litres/100km or in miles – 12.4 mpg

Fuel made up 39% of our daily running costs, by far our most expensive item on the trip, thanks to the outrageous cost of fuel in Europe.  Try this:

• US$6.33 per gallon
• AU$2.35 per litre

So how did these high fuel prices affect our overall cost in Europe?  If you look at our daily running costs, so not including flights, shipping and other big one-off items, our costs were about 51% higher in Europe than they were in both North America and South America.  That’s pretty ugly.

No matter how you add it up, spreadsheets are very cool

So how was Europe so different to blow out our costs? Fuel in Europe is more than double the cost in the US and about 70% higher than Central/South America.  That’s a killer, no matter what else happens.  To make it worse, unfortunately it is more difficult to find legal (or legal-ish) free camping spots in Europe so we paid for more nights and in some cases had to pay up to 50 euros (US$57 or A$80) for a night in a crowded high season campsite.  On top of that, we had more entrance fees, some skyhigh road tolls and expensive consumables during our time in Scandinavia.  It all added up to some very painful stuff.

It may be snowing outside but Julie still whips up some beautiful meals in Tramp

Having said that, we never planned to live off dry biscuits and brown water during our trip.  We know of other travellers who will literally camp on a beach for multiple days until their average daily costs come down, but that’s not us.  We enjoy buying good local food for Julie to cook and while we are careful with what we spend we don’t hyperventilate over the costs.  Doing so would take some of the fun out of our adventure.

Bottom line, if you’re looking for good value-for-money in your long distance travels, stick with the Americas – Europe is great but you pay extra for it!

After a hot Christmas in Sydney with family and friends we will head off for Africa and the fourth continent of our Follow the Sun journey.  And for sure there will be more maps and more spreadsheets to help us cover the distance.