Words!

I was trying to think of how many languages I know even just a single word in while I was bored driving from Atlanta to Little Rock today. Here is what I could come up with:

American English
British English
Spanish
Arabic
French
German
Russian
Italian
Norwegian
Swedish
Latin
Hebrew
Brazilian Portuguese
Vietnamese
Japanese
Korean
Mandarin

Yep, 17 languages in which I know at least one word.

Road Trips

I have a lot of road trips for matches now through Sept where I'll have to start flying again for the USPSA Nationals then in Utah. The beginning of the year I had to fly to like 4 matches. Flying is almost always about $450 a ticket, $250 for a rental car, $300 for a hotel. So right away just the three basics of it are a thousand dollars.

But now that I have a big string of ones I drive to I have to run the numbers again and see if it's cheaper. So I still have the $300 for the hotel. Unless it's close enough I can cut a day off but that only happens about 1/3 the time. So I'll leave it as a value. Zero for rental car. So that leaves gasoline as the equivalent to the plane ticket. Say I have to drive 400 miles to a match one way, at 18 miles per gallon that I get in my truck that is 22.2 gallons of gas at $2.25 a gallon for a total of $50 each way or $100 total.

Fly to major, $1,000 at least. Drive to major, $400 at least. That's a big difference!

As I think about reducing costs for 2018 I might have to go to only one fly away match during the year. And I'm thinking of cutting my amount of major matches to like 5 instead of 12-14 like I do now and maybe adding in two training trips instead. So I'd go from a travel outlay of about 14 grand a year I had in 2015-17 down to around 7 grand. Also coupled with the resultant savings in ammo, entry fees and so on.

So yeah, unless a major sponsorship thing comes along it looks like 2018 will have to be the year of only 5 majors with only one of them being flown to.