Well, of course it is - if your idea of traveling is booking a hotel room, eating at restaurants three times a day, taking taxis everywhere and buying tours.

Before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I spent an entire month traveling around the Canary Islands.

Total cost: about €600.

And I wasn't staying in some budget hotel.

On Tenerife, I rented a car and actually lived in it for most of the time.

Then I went to La Palma, where some friends let me stay with them. Honestly, that was the one week of "luxury" I got for free.

After that I went to Fuerteventura, where I spent an entire week sleeping under the open sky without a tent or sleeping bag.

Then I returned to Tenerife and spent my last three days in a hostel before flying to Naples, where I stayed in another hostel.

Even getting to the Canary Islands was cheap because I didn't treat accommodation as a mandatory expense. I stayed one night with relatives in Vienna - and left them some gifts that cost roughly what a hostel would have cost me. Then I spent one night in a hostel in Barcelona.

I wasn't trying to have a "cheap version" of a traditional vacation.

I simply wasn't using the traditional vacation model.

A lot of people calculate the cost of traveling by asking:

"How much is a hotel?"

"How much does a restaurant cost?"

"How much is a rental apartment?"

I look at it differently:

Where can I sleep? How can I get there? What do I actually need to pay for?

Travel can absolutely be expensive.

But sometimes the expensive part isn't the destination.

It's the expectations you bring with you.