Typically the cost of walking for two weeks along one of the UK’s long paths has cost me about £1,000, give or take a few quid. The last couple of walks I’ve done; the Pennine Way in 2010 and the Coast to Coast in 2011 cost me approximately £1,300 and £1,100 respectively. This year, however, it’s likely to cost considerably less than that. The major part of my previous walks has been accommodation, with B&Bs or Hotels costing anything from £25 to £50 per night. Multiply that by 14 and you can see how that can soon add up. It doesn’t help of course that I tend to walk alone, so there’s a single-supplement attached to most of my room bookings. The accommodation this year has cost me just £220 for two weeks – we’ve rented a small croft on the nortern-most tip of the island, but more of that on later pages.
The cottage we have booked is completely self catering, so food and drink are likely to be the biggest expense, depending on how much we cook ourselves and how much we succumb to the lure of the numerous pubs and restaurants.
There are of course no costs for baggage transfer or train fares as we’ll have to rely on the car to get to Skye and to get us around on the island. There will be some reliance on bus services once my brother has returned home, but the island is well supported by them, and that will be a minimal expense. I have a company car and average about 35,000 miles a year, most of which is business mileage, so I’m provided with a fully funded fuel card – I hasten to add I pay a significant amount of tax on this, as well as a monthly contribution to my employer for the private mileage I accrue – but this is taken no matter how many miles I do, so I tend to think of fuel as being paid for already. This means I don’t need to add anything to my expenses for what will probably end up being about 2,200 miles of driving.
I love my car and I love driving, so that number of miles is not a hardship, it’s an absolute pleasure. We’ll be travelling up on Friday night; leaving Cheshire about 18:00 and arriving at the cottage, 500 miles later at about 02:00.