On traveling frugally vs extremely frugally.

This is basically just a WhatsApp conversation I had with one of my previous hosts that I edited and adapted to a post. 

First an aside:

Here's a picture of an abandoned building in Switzerland. There are so few abandoned buildings in Slovenia, Austria and Switzerland. When I tour in the United States and even in Japan, I went into a lot of abandoned buildings and houses. Becky gets annoyed because I'm always pulling off the road to jump through a window. 

Ok, back to the original post:

So I went around a month dirtbagging it --spending no money on lodging or transport, sleeping under bridges, park benches, even one rich person's ski condo balcony when they weren't home etc-- I'm now being much more proactive finding warmshowers hosts and infilling with inexpensive Airbnbs and hostels.

I even booked a train to allow me to get further and see more things....gasp.

This was is much more pleasant and still frugal! But, I had fun trying the former as sort of a challenge for myself.

The real problem with the 100% free wild camping for me is:  it is so hit and miss whether you're going to get a good night's sleep.  If you get really backlogged and sleep deprived, it's kind of miserable and your mileage suffers and it's even harder to start planning effectively and dig yourself out.

I had some two or three-day stretches where I didn't get more than three or 4 hours a night. Oof. It felt a little more like being on a Marine Corps field op than a tour ☠️🥵

Of course, I was doing a lot of things wrong and towards the end I was getting better sleep, so this isn't to say this is how it would be permanently or for everyone that tried it.

An aside: Airbnb is so much cheaper in rural France. The tax was only €1 and change and there were no other fees like cleaning fees and platform fees like the USA. So I could get a room in a rural area with with limited warmshowers hosts for $36.