Did You Stay in a Lot of Nice Hotels?

We think this is a pretty nice place to sleep, don’t you?

We were in the middle of a “Desert Safari” in Dubai, a state in the United Arab Emirates. A “Desert Safari” really means that someone in a four-wheel drive takes you out into the middle of the desert and leaves you there for the night (with a barrel of water) and you hope that they can find you again in the morning. To answer the hotel question, the answer is that we really didn’t have the budget to stay in “hotels” at all. We did our best to keep costs down, and often that meant camping.

Budget Accommodations

We became very flexible about our sleeping arrangements , and eventually learned to just sleep wherever we happened to be. In this picture we are on an overnight ferry from Italy to Greece. We couldn’t afford to say in one of the ship’s cabins, so we just set up camp between two rows of seats. We draped our tent footprint over the seats for a bit of privacy.

Staying in Hostels

When we were cycling in Europe we camped every night, but after we were done with the cycling portion of our trip we mainly stayed in hostels. A hostel is like a hotel, except instead of renting a room, you rent a bed. The bathroom is typically down the hall, and some hostels have shared kitchens so that you can save money by cooking your own food. Because we are a family of four we usually filled all the beds in a room and therefore got a room to ourselves. In this picture we are all working on our journals