Travel Log: Day 111 (10/16), Guam

We were all up pretty early today, 4:30am for me. Due to that we got school started on time and had a mostly normal school day. We did take a break before the final two subjects to go walk on the beach. It was really nice in terms of temperature, although it was still overcast. I have spent years looking at pictures and watching videos of Guam, so it was a bit surreal walking on that beach I have seen digitally so many times. Snorkeling right there at the nearest beach is going to be great from what I can see.

Groceries

As we continue to settle into Guam today, we are spending a lot of money in the process. We made a run to a different grocery store, and this time a true grocery store called Pay-Less. It was every bit as big as the King Soopers we go to in CO. If only it had the same prices. While the prices were better than Kmart, they were still far higher than we’re used to. As we discovered in Costa Rica, the first major grocery run in a new location is especially expensive due to all of the one-time things that have to be bought.

The grocery haul checked everything remaining on our list, and cost $363.68. That’s easily double the first big haul in Jaco Costa Rica. It’s not all food though. Alcohol was $33.84 of that, and other non-food was $87.31. The non-food items are things like trash bags, toilet paper, toiletries, etc. That leaves $242.53 of food spending. Time will tell how many days and meals we get out of that, but it should be 4-5 days. If this settles out going forward to just the food expenses, we should end up spending a grand total in the range of $1.8K to $2.2K for things purchased at a grocery store. The wildcard in there though is my mom will be joining us in a few days, adding another dynamic to the groceries.

Kmart Again

To round out our spending for the day, we made a run to Kmart with the main purpose of finding water shoes. We don’t normally wear those, but we’ve never been somewhere with stonefish. Since those things will kill you, we decided something on our feet was better than nothing. These shoes may not do much of anything as they aren’t puncture proof, but I guess at least if we get stabbed in the foot we can be pretty sure it’s bad and not just a rock poking us. Those ran us about $80, and we threw in some aluminum foil and band-aids for a total of $92.94.

Adding all of our initial purchases together is a two day (one day really) spend of $589.96.

Rental Car

Transportation costs are also a killer here, especially coming from Japan where public transportation is efficient and cheap. We rented a car for the first week just so we could feel out the area and determine whether or not we need a car for the whole trip. The answer is becoming clear that we will need a car.

I price checked the ride share app here which is “Stroll”. It looks like we can easily find cars, but to go somewhere nearby (a couple miles) costs about $18 without tip. Tipping 20% is customary, so that’s about $22 for a one way, and $44 for a round trip, just to a local grocery store. We would do that a few times per week even if we planned our trips well. Then we would probably do it a couple more times at least to go see things around the island, and those will be much farther on average and even more expensive. That will quickly eclipse the $290.71 we spent on one week of rental car.

We had factored in a week of car rental for our anticipated spending in Guam, but we will have to quadruple down on that. The one week plan was a still-born idea in hindsight. My mom is going to join us, and five people can’t ride in a normal size Stroll/Uber anyway. We would end up paying an even higher rate of $30 with tip for the XL option. That’s a one way trip the distance of the local grocery store. Besides that my mom is old and she has a tendency to overheat. I don’t want to be at a far off outdoor attraction when she starts to get heat stroke. At that point I would pay anything to have a car with AC we could retreat to.

More Surprises?

Between groceries with likely a $1K overrun, and the rental car with a $1k overrun, we are already $2k beyond original spending plans. There’s a trend developing here that points to an estimation failure for Guam in general. I guess at least our lodging is locked in. Groceries, transportation, and discretionary spending are the variable categories in each location we visit. We’ll see if discretionary holds any surprises, but at least we have control over that one.

The failure here isn’t completely unexpected given this is the one location where numbeo just doesn’t have good data. We have relied on that heavily for projections, and when it has enough data, it has been spot on. I’m happy to discover that I find these negative budget surprises just as interesting, intriguing, and fun to analyze as the positive budget developments.

More to come on this topic when the final budget calculations for October are posted.