Forward | Interstate 81, Virginia | Mar 2009

Time to refresh the expenses behind the Drive-By Road Trip last reported on Feb 14th; below are the expenses behind the full “first loop” of the trip from Virginia to California and back to Virginia from Nov 30th to March 31st.

Again, this might be a bit too transparent, but c’est la vie…

Want to see the entire details? View the entire spreadsheet via HTML or Excel XLS.

Highlights:

• $47

  Yes, $47 per day. How? Great friends and simple, frugal living.

  $20 in “rent”? 33 nights in hotels, 47 nights in hostels (mainly SF and Austin), 31 nights with friends and 11 nights camped out in the outdoors.

  $21 in livin’? That breaks into $9 a day on food and eating out, $6 on entertainment and the rest on automobile, phone and general life expenses.

  Adding in car and medical insurance ups the overall to $51 a day. Still not bad.

  Full details are available via HTML or Excel XLS.

  But it comes with a price: no big purchases, no clothes, computers, electronic gadgets or the “stuff” we spend most of our time acquiring. But it also comes with a certain peace of mind and soul: “what we own ends up owning us”, and by removing stimuli and focusing on true needs rather than wants, we can re-focus on people, relationships and experiences.

  When people ask me what the trip has been about, I often explain it in different terms, but it always comes down to people. Brad Feld might have explained the core idea best: Great entrepreneurs believe in karma.

  That’s what it’s about. That kind of life isn’t expensive, but it’s certainly rich.

• 13,074 miles in 122 days.

  Compared to 2007’s road trip, this time I took more than twice the number of days to drive about 300 more miles, leaving more time to explore, experience and savor an area. I spent 46 days in California, primarily along the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and 30 days in Texas, primarily in Austin for SXSW.

  Favorite places? New Orleans (check out Sloane Berrent’s moving ode to NOLA), Durango and Austin; Reno and San Francisco are draws for very different reasons; the rest of the places I visited I just haven’t explored enough to love quite yet.

  I played different games along the trip, giving odes to cities, completing scavenger hunts and sending postcards to people for finding easter eggs in posts and responding to tweets and Facebook status messages. I still don’t have a great social media plan, but I’m having fun working on it along the way.

  Have an idea for a game to play? Drop me a line…

• And yes, I am working along the way. In addition to my strategy and finance consulting work, I’ve been continuing to dig into models for economic and entrepreneurial community development; the depth of knowledge contained in early idea-stage and seed-stage advisors, investors and entrepreneurs across the US is impressive, but we all still have a lot of work to do to spread knowledge and best practices. The Building Entrepreneurial Communities panel at SXSW (led by Frank Gruber, Peter Corbett and Nick O’Neill) was a start, but we’re still scratching the surface of a larger discussion around the strategies and tactics involved in building entrepreneurial communities and local economic development.

And the trip isn’t over. The Second Loop (name still TBD) will be through the northeast over April and May, primarily in DC, PA, NY, MA, NH, VT, MD, VA, TX and Ontario. I’d love to meet you (or other people you know), just drop me a line.

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More

• Click here to read the first summary of the expenses behind the trip covering Nov 30th to Feb 14th.