Mr Chiots and I just got back from week in New England and we had a great time. Mr Chiots and I are frugal people, so we try to save money when we travel. I grew up in a frugal traveling family, we spent our vacation traveling the country visiting National Parks and camping along the way. Naturally, Mr Chiots and I do this as well. We enjoy the simplicity of camping and have a great time doing it. We save a lot of money on hotels, although camping is much more expensive than it was when I was young. Some places we checked campsites were $50. Generally sticking to the state and national parks helps keep these costs down.
We also take a lot of our own food because we like to eat Real Food and that's not often available when you're traveling (although it's much easier to find in New England than in our neck of the woods). Not to mention taking your own food can save you a lot of money on vacation and make sure you feel great the entire time. We enjoyed home canned tomato soup with cheese sandwiches and a lot of veggie or BLT sandwiches a long the way.
On this vacation we ate out a little more than normal because we found a lot of wonderful farm to table restaurants. We also enjoyed buying local veggies from little farms and chatting with the farmers about their climate and the local food scene. And we wanted to make sure we enjoyed a lot of fresh seafood since we were in the area for it!
How do you save money while traveling?
I can also be found at Chiot's Run where I blog daily about gardening, cooking, local eating, beekeeping, and all kinds of stuff. You can also find me at Not Dabbling in Normal, and you can follow me on Twitter.
5 comments:
My hubby LOVES to eat out. To curb this expensive hobby when travelling, I pack food, especially drinks and snacks. A huge fuel tank (most of our travel is farm-related, pulling a big trailer)limits fuel stops with their temptations. Bathroom stops are made at rest stops if possible, again, limiting the opportunities to spend.
As a kid, we also camped out a lot! Those trips fueled some of my very best memories. As adults, we have camped out some, but now hubby is camping with our sons in the Boy Scouts and I only get to go along on special occasions. But, it gives them a chance to bond and the boys a chance to learn to be more self-sufficient.
If it weren't for out little pop-up camper, we likely wouldn't have gone on many vacations as a family.
When my kids were at home, we would pack a cooler with food for our trips and stop and eat at a roadside park along the way. This not only saved money, but gave the kids a chance to run around and play a little bit after being in the car for hours.
Traveling while the kids sleep curbs our stops and expenditures. They snooze, and we go as far (as fast?) as possible.
We usually leave in the evening, just after dinner. Having one of us nap before we leave in the evening means we can go that much further... then when we do have to stop (usually around 1-3 am), we're up to 9 hours from home, and we've not spent anything on a day's worth of travel other than gas and a hotel room. In the morning, the kids eat breakfast and/or swim with the parent who wasn't driving last, giving the other parent the chance to catch a couple more hours of sleep... then we're off again at checkout time. I'm not sure if this saves us as much money as it does aggravation, but I'd much rather pull a late-nighter driving alone in silence than driving through the day with fussy, hungry, pee-ful kids who love to have a reason to stop. :)
Here's another one: we stop for pee breaks at hotels (ones with nice enough lobbies to have designated bathrooms). This is a little tacky, but who uses hotel bathrooms? NOBODY. So they're clean. Driving Parent drops the fam off for bathroom break, and heads across the street to gas up the car; the rest of us pee and meet him back out front a few minutes later. No snack temptations, no unspeakably nasty bathrooms. I'm willing to be a little tacky for that.
Post a Comment