My wife and I also enjoy "nature, hiking, swimming, biking, and just being together". We do a lot of it in our TM, and we do it in places that we couldn't (or wouldn't) afford if we had to stay in hotels. Have you priced a hotel room for (say) a week, and two restaurant meals a day in Sante Fe, for example? But those are purely financial thoughts. We don't use our TM much near home, because if we are near home, it is cheaper and more convenient to simply stay home.
More important to us is the fact that the TM is the tool that enables us to go to places that we simply wouldn't go otherwise. When we are at home in Maine, we go to Mt Katahdin, and we go to Acadia and Monhegan. But much as we enjoy them, there is more to the world than Katahdin, Acadia, and Monhegan. In the last year, we have been to Yellowstone, Yosemite, King's Canyon/Sequoia, Grand Canyon North Rim, the Canadian Rockies, Banff/Jasper/Lake Louise, Canmore (Alberta), Rocky Mtn National Park, the Oregon coast, Whidbey Island, and more. These are places we would not have gone AT ALL if we didn't have the TM. How do you put a value on going places that you would not have gone? I don't know, but I know our TM is worth it.
Finally, returning to the purely financial, remember that the money "spent" on the TM is not money "gone". If you decide that you don't like it, or aren't using it enough, you can always sell it and get most of your money back. TMs hold their value remarkably well, so the cost isn't as much as it first appears.
Bill
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