Living Small

Position: 39° 51′ 24″N 4° 1′ 28″W

After two years of living in the same clothes for days on end, our packing for a road trip is efficient to the point of parsimony. Our luggage is 50 euro-cent reusable shopping bags. The kind you buy at your local supermarket. With no room on Aleta to store more traditional luggage, these bags are invaluable. They hold plenty and fold up flat when not in use. Plus, when the bags wear out, we can buy replacements anywhere we buy eggs.

We occasionally draw sidelong glances from hotel staff as we do our best crazy bag people impersonation on check-in. Accompanied by our emotional support dog, we make it clear we are living a life of adventure on the high seas. That’s our excuse for the bags. Besides, in our sailing jackets and hiking boots, we’re dressed for any occasion these days.

The advantages of living small are myriad and Europe figured out most of them centuries ago. Here, we rent tiny cars for seven euros a day. They are cheap on gas. They also fit in the tiny streets in tiny hilltop towns built a thousand years ago. We see so much more from the front seat of a SEAT Ibiza than we could in a Bugatti Veyron*.

Our telecommunications budget has shrunk, too. Pay-as-you-go phone cards cost about half of what they do in America. Competition is rife and EU rules allow members to roam freely and without surcharges from country to country. And with introductory incentives for more Gigabytes ratcheting up, swapping SIMs has become a monthly ritual.

After more than two years on Aleta, we have finally settled in. Gear we thought would never fit on the boat has migrated to places where it’s never seen again. Guests, especially those with little to no luggage, squeeze in and we find room to accommodate them.

Marlon is small. The smallest dog either of us ever imagined owning. Until, that is, we thought about moving onto a boat. Then our criteria changed. We wanted a dog we could get on and off a boat easily and still have a big personality. Marlon more than fits the bill. Plus, at less than 10kg, he scoots under many hotel’s size cutoff for pets as guests. Carol has recently mastered the phrase, ‘we have a small, well behaved dog, can you make an exception?’ In the dead of winter exceptions come our way much more often than we expect.

We also significantly downsized our wine budget in the past couple of months. Decent wine is much less expensive in this part of the world. Not an order of magnitude less, but a half magnitude, at least. The other day we went crazy in a restaurant and bought the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu. Our waiter naturally assured us it was an excellent choice. It was delicious. In the United States, the same wine sells in shops for $28 on average. It cost us 30 euros in a very good restaurant in Toledo, one of Spain’s tourist hotspots. Thriftiness be damned! Occasionally, we like to live large.

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* way too wide according to my daughter, Emma