Wayfaring Day 5

July 5, 2025 Saturday

David made an uneventful drive to join the family and was able to have some left over shrimp boil. Our son and his wife left for a wedding a few hours away so we were going to have our grandson for the next couple of days. Having been away from any connection to media for a couple of days David had no knowledge of the flooding that was going on in the state so he was a little surprised that our son and daughter-in-law returned to our nephew´s house after finding out how severe the flooding was in the area where they were heading for the wedding. So we had even more time with our son and his wife while we spent another full day in the area.

Although we had not really made any travel decisions David had been cooking up some plans for the coming year and had made some reservations without telling Amy. This isn´t too uncommon and Amy really enjoys most of David´s surprises. David had really just been waiting for the two of them to get a moment away from the move and in a more relaxed setting. It was finally time for David to reveal the first plan that would meet some of the criteria they had discussed before the move.

The criteria we discussed was more of a loose framework of ideas of how to make it through a month on about $3000. In other words, we suggested the idea of living on $100 per day on as many days as possible or to average living on $100 per day. This is a somewhat ambitious endeavor but keep in mind we are not paying a house payment or rent. We still have some debts but spending time with family allows us to keep our expenses low enough to maintain our ability to pay our debts while living frugally.

A little backtracking in our thinking might be good at this point. We had read about and talked to people about the idea of taking cruises as a means of living cheaper than renting an apartment. The idea is intriguing but finding a cruise with a cost per day of $100 for two travelers is pretty rare and tend to be on shorter cruises.

However, David had been researching repositioning cruses that are near the $50 per day per person price point. One such cruise had reached a point where it was only $47 per day per person. This was tempting but with European airfare and other expenses it was difficult to pull the trigger. But, when the price reached $37 per person per night David could no longer wait and made the call. His thought was that if we are going to follow through with the wayfaring idea then we should just do it. So he quickly booked the cruise and started looking for airfare and hotel stays to supplement the trip.

We had now entered wayfaring territory in earnest. It was time to commit to the lifestyle experiment and we set our sites on a one year time period to pursue the idea.

Here are the details on how we set up our first wayfaring trip but without specifics for security concerns.

We will drive to a major airport to fly to the city in Europe where our cruise begins. We will spend a few days in the port city before leaving on our repositioning cruise back to the states. The cruise has several ports of call and will reach its conclusion in a port city not too far from the airport from which we begin the trip. Keep in mind David did a considerable amount of research and repeatedly searched cruises at repositioningcruises.com.

What are the costs of the trip?

Total Cruise without any excursions or gratuity is $1,178.00 for 15 days.

Hotel in the port city is $504.45 for 5 nights

Airfare for 2 is $1178.80

This is a total of about $2860 for 20 nights. Or about $143 per day.

That is a bit more than the $100 per day we are shooting for but when you also consider this includes meals for 15 of those days you can see that we are doing a decent job of stretching our monthly salary while enjoying what we expect to be a great vacation and adventure. Will we really like being at sea for so many days? Well, we are going to find out.

How did Amy react to the news? She was completely on board and not really overly surprised by David´s head first dive into wayfaring.