Camp
I don’t consider myself high maintenance, but I do have a minimum comfort level and camping does not meet it. I’m fine with hostels and seedy motels (“How do you always find the most ghetto places?!” T complained to me when we went wandering around east Berlin in search of our hostel) but I’m just not a tenting person!
Hitchhike
First, the realities. I mainly travel with T, and nobody is going to stop to pick up someone who looks like him. Even our host in Munich, who’d been urging us to think about hitchhiking around Germany, demurred once we actually turned up and he met us in the flesh.
Even so, I don’t like uncertainty, and relying on passing cars to pick you up is about as uncertain as it gets in travel. (I remember waiting for ages one day for our Couchsurfing guests to arrive and wondering if they were going to turn up at all. Turned out they were at the mercy of hitching, and didn’t have a way to contact us to inform us.) Also not super keen on standing outside for potentially hours on end in any weather conditions to save some money.
Taking flights at crazy times
Super late flights may be a little cheaper, but that’s not the end of the story. There’s nothing worse than arriving in a new city trying to find your way around in the dark! Public transport may not be running by the time you arrive, so you might have to take a taxi. In small establishments the front desk might close at 8pm. And it just screws up your schedule and body clock in general.
