Weekend at Sacramento.

We had our usual weekend doing the weekly cleaning and shopping and we still had time to hang out with our buddy KoKo while beating the heat. Monday we took Diva KoKo to Petsmart to have her nails done, she has always put up a fuss about this but the people at this store had no problem sanding them down and were very helpful with some advice for us to do them in the future.

We have also been looking ahead both short term and long term; short term is a change of route off I-80 when we leave here tomorrow and long term is our schedule and route for next fall and winter. Sandy has been working hard on the planning phase so we hope to make some solid decisions soon.

We wanted to mention our May budget and a quiet weekend is a good time to devote an entry to this subject. The bottom line is that we came in $743.16 under budget so we were able to move some money into savings again.

We had several budget lines that were well under budget so that helped us out. Campground fees were $319.00 under primarily because of our savings at Park Sierra; this line has been a regular in the under budget category so we will look at lowering our daily estimate for camping fees to bring that line down. We were $141.00 under for our entertainment budget; most of last month was spent touring Sequoia, Kings Canyon and Yosemite National Parks so our National Park Pass got us in the door at all of them. The other big savings was $100.00 in clothing expense but we have been putting off shopping until we get back to Wisconsin when we expect a few expensive outings. Gas for the CRV was $69.00 under followed closely by miscellaneous expenses, dinning out and electronics expense that were all under budget; even KoKo came in$48.00 under her budget so she gets an extra treat.

The only lines that were over budget in May were groceries and maintenance for the mothership. I haven’t seen any steak around here so I can’t explain why we were over by $51.00 but we noticed that food was much more expensive along the coast than in Sacramento. We did not have anything budgeted for maintenance on the motorhome until it goes into the shop in September so the $60.00 spent to repair the air conditioner is technically a deficit but still a cheap fix.

For the most part the budget we set late last year before we set out full time has been spot on, we intend to make a few minor adjustments but we are happy that we can continue our adventure as planned with no major alteration in our lifestyle.