Originally Posted by
Erick L
I can easily spend 50-60$ a day or more, not including transport to start and from end. I tend to have one restaurant meal a day, usually breakfast. Campgrounds in Canada costs 25-30$. I toured in southern Ontario this spring and all campgrounds were 40$+ for crappy sites among RVs. I got sick of that and ended up staying indoors for 60-80$. I free-camp occasionally but then a couple of nights in a downtown hotel more than makes up for it. Add C-store food, ice cream, ferries, entertainment, etc, and it cost goes up quickly. It's easy to keep cost down if you want to, but when the campsite is 10-15km out of town and I'm dead tired, riding on a street lined with motels and restaurants, that extra 10km is just too much.
I don't know what is happening with operators' thinking with camp sites, but we have found in Australia and North America that they are pricing themselves out of existence. We more often now are looking at indoor accommodation which is cheap and comfortable and the price differential between many campsites and indoors is narrowing enough to make it a realistic option on short tours, at least.
Australian campgrounds/RV parks also have self-contained cabins that are quite cost-effective, and depending on the location, we can get one for $60 a night, which when lined up against a tent site for up to $40, make it an attractive proposition.
Of course, we still take a tent, just in case...
As a footnote, even on our driving trip north-south and back again across North America last year, we stayed in cheap motels ranging between $45 and $80 a night. They were accessible, the quality wasn't brilliant but acceptable and consistent among the chains, and the cheapest were about par with any of the campgrounds we encountered for a site. There were two motels we found entirely "icky" -- one in Texas and the other in Oregon -- and they weren't the cheapest...