How I took a weeklong vacation with my family of five for $1000
One of the ways that my family is able to travel as often as we do is to stretch our travel budget. The less we spend on each trip, the more trips we can take. We also find that if we can stretch stays to a week or more, we can have a slower travel pace. This past February, we were able to take a weeklong family vacation for $1000.
The biggest spending category for my travel is flights. As a family of five, even a low airfare adds up quickly. With this in mind, we’ve based a lot of our recent trips around destinations to which we can drive. In February, we drove to Kentucky to visit Mammoth Caves National Park. We spent about $350 on gas and tolls.
The next category on which we spend the most is accommodations. We have found a fantastic way for massive savings in this category: home exchanges. (This warrants it’s own blog article.) For the past two years, we have purchased an annual membership for a nominal fee. This allows us to stay at other member homes at no additional charge. So we spent 7 nights in a lovely home in Kentucky for free!! We did stop at hotels on our drive there and back, but we tend to select budget hotels if we’re only stopping to sleep. So our hotel cost for two nights was $220.
A close third in our spending tends to be dining out. Since we stay in a house with a kitchen, we’re able to eat a lot of our meals in the home. Our normal grocery shopping budget covers this, as we would also be purchasing groceries at home. Likewise, we have restaurant dining in our usual monthly budget, and if we have a trip coming up we simply save that portion of our normal budget for the time that we are away. (In other words, we don’t do takeout or restaurant dining during the month aside from when we are on our trip.) We also opt for hotels that include breakfast and pack sandwiches and snacks on day trips. During this trip, we spent about $200 above our normal monthly restaurant budget.
Many of the National Parks are free to visit. Mammoth Caves NP requires guests to take guided tours through the caves, so that was an additional expense during this trip ($148). We also visited the Bernheim Arboretum ($15) and my husband and son went to the Louisville Slugger Museum ($40). For these tours and admissions we spent $203.
A trip like this does take some extra planning and effort. We’re cooking almost as much as we do at home, though we try to keep meals simpler. And it also requires you to be ready to eliminate or leave out activities if they’re not within your spending limit. But if it allows our family to take more trips and experience more places, then it’s a compromise we’re willing to make!