Lazy Man and Money

The Ultimate Disney World Hacking Vacation?

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There are millions and millions of people who LOVE Disney.

I’m not one of them.

I’ve got nothing against Disney, but I don’t understand the big draw. What’s your memory of Mickey Mouse? Mine is the Christmas Carol remake and The Brave Little Tailor. If Apple still marketed itself with an Apple Newtown or an iMac desktop from 1998, you’d consider it strange, right?

Disney World Castle

I know some of you are saying those are fighting words. I actually do like a lot of Disney stuff, but it’s mostly all Pixar and Marvel, which isn’t the Disney that I grew up with.

To each their own, right?

Disney World is different than Disney itself. I went a couple of years for the first time since I was around 7 or 8. I gave a grade of mixed bag, especially since even Make-A-Wish kids had to wait three hours to get in just as we did. (Though some people tried to get them up towards the front of the blob of people as best as possible.)

Despite what I wrote above we’ll be bringing our 4 and 5 year old kids to Disney World for the 2nd time.

We did enjoy EPCOT Center though. There weren’t any crowds and there was a whole sustainability section of the park. Even my 2 and 3 year old (at the time) loved it. And the part where you travel from country to country sampling food and drink, well, that’s a lot more fun at 40 than it was at 7.

Why go back? The kids really did have a great time overall and it’s certainly worth a second shot. The park apologized for the 3 hours to get in and said it’s never like that. From a sampling of friends it seems like most of them agree.

Another key consideration… we are able to do Disney in-style and on the cheap.

Active Duty, Credit Cards, and Frugality For The Win!

Tickets

Due to my wife’s active duty status, Disney gives us a discount. It looks like they don’t make it public on their website, so I’m not sure I should publish the deal. That’s just as well, as my wife went to sleep and I’m writing this in hopes of publishing tomorrow. In other words, I don’t have exact pricing. What I can tell you is that I made a spreadsheet of costs a couple of years ago and it was $196 per ticket. I think that’s a 4-day Park Hopper Plus, silver-edition, with cherries. I honestly don’t know what it’s called these days, but I know the normal price was around $274 at the time.

I expect the prices have went up since then. So let’s call it $215 a ticket or $860 for the 4 of us.

Tickets: $860

Lodging

This is another active duty perk. However, before you shoot me, it’s probably cheaper to stay at other places. When we went to Disney a couple of years ago, we had a week of timeshare that was expiring, so we used that. (That’s also part of the reason why we brought a 2 and 3 year old to Disney World. The other reason is that we were meeting friends who lived in California.) There is a lot of cheap lodging in the area though.

The active duty perk allows us to stay in the park at a military resort called Shades of Green. The price is on par with the very cheapest places to stay in the park (such as the All-Star Sports Hotel), but the rooms are bigger and nicer, up there with some of the premium hotels on the park. In fact, from the Shades of Green FAQ:

How does Shades of Green compare to the other Walt Disney World hotels?

Shades of Green would be comparable to the Disney Deluxe Resorts such as Disney’s Polynesian Resort. We have the largest Standard Rooms on property, and a variety of restaurants, as well.

I’m not familiar with the Polynesian Resort, but Mouse Savers says it would be $649 a night for the time we going.

Staying in the park should be a big upgrade from a couple of years ago. Maybe our wait times to get in will only be a couple of hours? We might also be able to stay later. I heard this is a real thing, but we’ve been so busy that we haven’t done much research. I did some 6 months ago, but it’s long been purged from my memory.

You can look at this two ways: 1) a luxury upgrade from some of the cheapest places in the park or 2) a price discount from some of the most expensive places in the park. I think it’s probably a savings of around $150 a day if you take the later.

We’ll be staying only 5 days due to some other commitments my wife has in the area around the same time.

Lodging: $775 (included taxes)

Airfare

Fly to Orlando from Warwick, RI (PVD) was around $265 one way. I had signed up for a Southwest Credit Card last year and hit the minimum spent (due to some condo assessments) to get 60,000 miles. Southwest values their miles at a flat 1.5 cents per mile (I think). So it was 13,700 for each of us to fly down. So we cashed in 54,800 points to get there.

Southwest requires you to pay for certain flight taxes in cash, so we did have to fork out some money. You’d think I’d have a receipt in my email, but I don’t. I think it was probably about $100 in total.

On the flight back, we found a $190 fare from American. Me and the kids are flying back for $683.37 with taxes/fees. (Note: American gives much better email receipts.) My wife is flying to her next commitment before coming home. That’s partially a business expense, so it’s hard to put in here. However, we could easily presume that she would be coming back with us under normal circumstances. It seems fair to call it $1000… $683.70 + $190 + $37 wife’s American taxes + $100 Southwest taxes.

When it was just my wife and I traveling, things were much cheaper. This is one area where kids really double the cost.

Airfare: $1000

Food

This is one cost that’s difficult for us to dodge. However, it might not be impossible.

One of the great perks to staying at a timeshare was that we could shop at grocery stores and make a lot of our own food. However, we’ll be “trapped” in Disney without a rental car. Shades of Green does have a convenience-type store at the property. I haven’t seen a review of the prices and I’m a little worried that they might be sky high. Even so, it would be cheaper than eating every meal for 5 days. Everything is relative, right?

We might be able to go shopping before we check in, but I’m not sure. I’ll have to review our travel itinerary which is not very organized at this time. If we do have time to go shopping, we’ll have to plan what we buy carefully. The rooms at Shades of Green do have refrigerators, but the standard rooms don’t have microwaves.

I really didn’t know what to make of this. If we don’t shop, we could bring canned tuna and/or chicken, mayo, and make some sandwiches? We can (and probably will) also bring lots of mixed nuts. We could bring some cereal. Just for a fun exercise, if you wanted to be super frugal, what would you bring on a plane for food? Since we are flying there on Southwest, we’ve got plenty of checked luggage space, so that’s not a big concern.

If we do shop, we could buy some deli meats, cheese, milk. We wouldn’t need to think about packing food with us, because we could buy all the things above.

However, as I’m writing this article, I came across a game changer. I was reading this extensive Shades of Green review from my friend Ryan and he says:

“To save time and money, we brought breakfast items to eat in the room before we hit the parks for the day. Each morning I took some microwavable breakfast sandwiches up to the 3rd floor laundry room to heat up for breakfast. This allowed us to save quite a bit of money during our stay, and we were able to get out of the room more quickly in the mornings as opposed to sitting down at a restaurant for breakfast.”

With the possibility of a microwave, we can do canned soups and Easy Mac (kids’ favorite). It’s a mini-fridge, so frozen foods might not work out so well. However, I wonder how bad they’d go if they were still kept at refrigerator tempature and allowed to thaw a bit? It might change cooking times, but I don’t think it would cause a food safety issue, would it?

Here’s another fun question. What kinds of foods would you bring with you into the park? Presume that you aren’t going to bring a cooler to keep food cold.

Now we’ll certainly be eating some meals at the park. We aren’t going to try to pinch every penny. However, the more can we plan quick and easy meals, the more rides we can get on. Also, if I’m eating at a restaurant every meal of every day, I’d probably be sick by the 5th day. I think I’d just eat too much junk, fast food.

I don’t know what to put down for the cost of food. I’m going to go with $400. That’s $80 a day for the 4 of us. This isn’t really a budget, it’s just a guess. It will have to do.

Food: $400?

Adding it All Up

With $860 in Disney tickets, $775 in lodging, $1000 in airfare, and $400 in food, it looks like we’ll spend roughly $3015.

I didn’t include ground transportation because we won’t be renting a car while we are there… except to maybe get there and do the grocery shopping. If you are staying outside the park as we did last time, we had to pay car rental costs too. Those are somewhat reduced by the cheaper costs of the grocery shopping.

There are certainly going to be some extra costs, so it might be fair to add a couple hundred for miscellaneous stuff. I’m not going to try to be perfect, so

Total Disney Trip: $3015

How Does that Compare?

I decided to put together a table of what I thought we might pay if we didn’t hack the flight and/or couldn’t use our military connections. Here is our vacation next two possible vacations:

ExpenseOur CostEveryone Cost (All-Star)Everyone Cost (Polynesian)
Hotel$755$755$3,245
Park Tickets$860$1,184$1,184
Airfare$1,000$2,000$2,000
Food$400$750$750
Total$3,015$4,689$7,179

However, you don’t have to trust my assumptions, which admittedly may be less than perfect.

As fate would have it, Money Magazine reviewed 4 levels of Disney World vacations. They crunched the numbers for 4 nights, which is pretty close to the 5 nights that we are planning. I’ll let you read the article, but the conclusions were:

Bare-bones: $3,564
Value: $4,885
Average: $6,360
Deluxe: $9,781

* Note: Some of these are my categorizations of the levels. This was because they put them out of order and “cheaper” doesn’t make sense when the order is changed.

I would say that we are getting a vacation that is closer to Deluxe than the others. Like the Money article, ours is aiming to be 5 days at a premium-level hotel. We won’t be spending near the Deluxe food budget or the $800 on souvenirs and extras. At the end of the day, the Deluxe budget is is worth 3 separate vacation trips with our plan.

This highlights one of my biggest conundrums with Disney. It triggers ALL the happy feelings of saving thousands of dollars. At the same time, it triggers a few of the reality feelings of spending thousands of dollars over a few days. At the same time, I realize that spending money on experiences and family is a better use of my dollars in many, many areas.

My Seven Tips for Traveling Productively

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I’m usually not one to travel. It’s been hard with my wife’s career. Now that we have kids in school, we can travel only during certain times of the year.

This year is shaping up to be a little different. It looks like we’re going to be Orlando twice… once for a family vacation and another that’s a business blogging trip with the family tagging along. In addition we’ll go to two of our favorite islands: Aruba and Block Island. It feels strange to go to another island when you live in an island. However, if its one thing I’ve learned, it’s that vacation doesn’t feel the same if it’s your home all year.

Beach Dog
Woof! This is my favorite place to travel

Whenever I go away, I have this sinking feeling that I’m going to forget something. I tell myself that I can always buy whatever it is at the destination, but it’s not always so easy. It’s not always to find a custom computer charger. Phone chargers are a lot easier as the standards seem more clear-cut there.
 
So even though I’m an amateur at-best travler, here are my seven best tips for improving productivity when I travel. I’d love it if more experienced travelers (i.e. almost any breathing person) can add their top tip in the comments.

1. Plan Ahead

So far my traveling has plans have worked out well. I think that’s more of a factor of the small sample size of trips rather than strong planning.

One thing I’ve found is that this great travel checklist from Eagle Creek helps a lot. We have a box in our office that includes typical travel stuff: neck pillows, travel luggage weight scale, ninja stars*, spare chargers.

2. Make Yourself Comfortable

I have never been able to make myself comfortable on a plane. I don’t blame myself, I blame the system. The business model isn’t for airlines to compete on how much comfort to each person. It’s getting as many people from point A to point B. It’s also about creating tiers of comfort from the big spacious chairs and free food and drink in first class to the ever-shrinking spaces and leg-room in the regular class of seats. When was the last time you read about them increasing the leg room?

My wife seems to have much more success than I do at making herself comfortable. The aforementioned neck pillow is her comfort item.

As for technology, I find my 13-inch laptop is still capable on an airplane. If I went back to the 15-inchers I had in the past, I certainly could do work without encroaching on my neighbors’ space.

Some people may find that a Bluetooth travel keyboard can turn their tablet into a practical work computer. I have some problems with that, which I’ll cover right now…

3. Be Ready to Work in Varying Environments

I have an old Nexus 7 (also 7-inch) tablet and an Amazon Fire. They are both best just for watching media. The Nexus operating system is around 4 years old now. The Fire seems to be designed NOT to be a business machine. My phone is 5.5 inches, but I’m not sure I’m getting a lot work done on that. It’s great for phone things, but I’ve found my time is best used reading articles that I’ve saved in Chrome tabs… but they often don’t load without an internet connection.

Getting an Android OS to sync with my Windows computer is not easy. I typically can’t be productive working in the cloud, so getting access to all the updated documents I need is a difficult exercise.

I do have a Windows tablet, which you might think could work. However, I swear that the processor is run by an ant-farm… in the Artic buried in 20 feet of ice. It’s just a theory that I’m working on. I can’t believe real electrons flow through real wires.

In-flight Wifi is expensive and slow. Sometimes it may be worth it. However, as a blogger, I can probably get more work done by reading a book like Your Money or Your Life. By the way, I appear to be the only person not in love with this book. I think the bar was set a little too high and I have some nit-picks that drag it down in my view. I’m hoping to finish it and write a review… but that might have to wait until my next flight.

If you are not flying and driving a long distance, maybe you can listen to an audio-book or schedule some calls. Being a blogger, I don’t have a lot of calls. Also, my kids greatly prefer the SpongeBob SquarePants Movie CD to any calls I can schedule. That’s why environment matters.

4. Rest

Consider NOT working. Part of being productive is knowing when to stop working. You can’t work all the time.

If you push yourself past its limits, it’s just going to ruin your productivity when you finally arrive.

I almost sleep for an hour on any plane trip. That might be more because I fly at crazy times to save money, but I think it’s just a good use of time. Fortunately, I don’t need to be that comfortable to fall asleep.

5. Get to the Airport in Advance

You might be tempted to leave for the airport at the last minute so that you can get more done beforehand, but this is actually counterproductive. If you’re like me, you’ll find it hard to concentrate when you know that you need to leave in a couple of hours. You could end up spending your time double and triple checking that you packed everything like I do.

I find there’s always a lot of stress of driving to the airport, dealing with the parking, shuttle bus, security… all while lugging around a few suitcases. (Packing light isn’t always an option with a couple of kids.)

We usually travel very early in the morning (it’s not unusual for us to get up at 3AM). I look forward to the Dunkin Donuts breakfast. I don’t mind splurging, because it’s just a couple of extra dollars… and it’s hard to save a lot of money on airport food anyway. (Though this is one area that I’m willing to explore… bringing my own food.)

6. Grow Your Skills

I covered a lot of this in #3 above. One of the great things about flying is that you often have uninterrupted time. If you don’t pay for an internet connection, there are no emails or text messages coming through.

I used to have an application called Blinkist. It was like a Netflix subscription of book summaries… usually great non-fiction books. It was great when I had time to use it. It probably does need an internet connection, but that kind of thing can go a long way.

It might be better to do a deep dive into an area that you feel can really help. As I look at my bookshelf, I see Getting Things Done and Stephen King’s On Writing gathering dust as if to say, “We’ve been here for years. What are you waiting for?”

7. Check in to an Airport Lounge

This is actually one area I CAN talk about with some experience. Because my wife is active duty, we get two big perks when it comes to airport lounges. One of them is the USO. It’s an organization (non-profit I believe) that exists to give a little comfort to the military when traveling. (That’s probably an over-simplification, but this is a long article). We are always sure to donate $20 when we spend time there.

The other big perk we get is that my wife has access to some premium credit cards… the kinds that charge hundreds per year in annual fees. Her active duty status allows us to avoid those fees (thank you credit card companies). It’s free airport lounges for us… at least some of the time, depending on the airport lounge itself.

Stepping through the doors of an airport lounge cuts off most of the noise and distractions of crying kids and frazzled parents. Comfortable chairs, high-speed WiFi, and ergonomic workstations help create an environment where I can be far more productive. Free coffee (well soda for me) helps, too! I also take advantage of the charging stations to make sure that all of my devices are on full power before I take off.

You are probably not military, so you probably don’t get the same benefits for free. Nonetheless, they are worth exploring, especially if you travel a lot.

Some frequent travelers pay an annual fee to join a chain of airport lounges. I explained some of the travel hacking benefits I got last year. They were all using a travel rewards credit card.

Those are my top seven ideas. What’s your favorite tip that I have forgotten?

* Just making sure you are paying attention. Nunchucks are much easier to get through security, anyway.

Travel Hacking with Rewards Cards (Part 1)

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I hope all the Americans had a good Independence Day yesterday. Even if you don’t live in America, now is a good time to reflect that half of 2017 is over. Hmmm, let’s be optimistic about having a whole half of 2017 left!

This week doesn’t feel like a real week. Many people weren’t working the Monday before the 4th and we’re taking a little time off on Friday to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. So exciting! It’s the busiest dog sitting time of the year, so I could use a little break.

Travel Hacking with Credit Cards
Travel Hacking with Credit Cards

Today, I’d like to write about rewards cards. I’m presuming readers here have at least a couple. I realize some people are against credit cards and that’s okay too. Personally, I like the opportunity to get some money back on something I was going to buy anyway.

For a long time, I’ve been a fan of Fidelity’s Retirement Rewards card. It’s been a steady 2% statement credit for years (once you reached 25,000 miles). Unfortunately, the last time I tried to redeem for statement credit, they changed the miles so it would only give me 1% of the value back. You can still get 2% if you transfer to a Fidelity Retirement account, which I have. I preferred the immediate statement credit much more.

Travel Hacking: The New Reward Card Strategy

Over the past month or two, I’ve been revamping our credit card rewards strategy. I’m trying to hack as many travel rewards as possible. There are two major reasons why:

  1. Our children are 3 and 4, which means we now have to pay for full seats wherever we fly. It’s hard to see our costs to fly double like that.
  2. We’ve had a few big expenses come up. For example, those surprise condo assessments. In addition, my wife is going back to school to get her Masters. She can pay that with a credit card. Finally, we’re nearing the last few months of being able to pay for pre-school with a credit card. In September the new school is going to ACH and checks only. We should have been working to earn bonus points the whole time.

For those new to travel hacking with credits cards don’t be ashamed, my hand is raised too. The general idea is to spend a certain in a certain time. Typically you need to spend around $3000 and $5000 in about 3 months. If you complete the requirements, you’ll get a tens of thousands points as a bonus. They can usually be used for cash back, but are best used for travel rewards. The travel cards tend to give you more value when using your points for travel (which is easy to remember because it makes sense!) And if we using the points for cash back, this wouldn’t be a very good travel hacking article.

I’ve found that the rewards for the best cards are worth about $500 (used cash) or $625 (used as travel). Those are rough numbers, but since we need to spend about $3000 a few times, we might as well get 20% back in the form of travel, right? And that’s just the bonus points. We’ll get regular points on the spending of $3000 itself (about 3000 miles/points). So maybe we get around 22% in travel expenses overall. That’s a lot better than 2% in Fidelity rewards. (Sorry Fidelity, it’s not your fault.)

I used to think it was a ton of extra work, but with autopay on the credit cards, I don’t miss any payments. There’s almost zero risk of incurring any extra fees. The money comes out of my bank account just like any other credit card. Setting up auto pay with Chase and Amex are very, very easy. (I haven’t tried other banks.)

The Cards We’re Using

A friend gave me a tip on credit cards which have “hot” rewards now. That said, there are always a few “old standbys” that you can usually count on.

My first card was a Starwood Preferred card. This was directly on that tip from a friend, which I took on blind faith. It looks like this card bumped up the rewards from 25,000 point to 30,000. (I may be off on the exact numbers here, but I see 34,066 points in my account which would be consistent with 30,000.) I’m reading that Starwood points are pretty valuable and worth about 2.2 cents a piece. If true, that’s roughly around $650.

Next, I got a Southwest Preferred Card. They are running a 60,000 point promotion, where it’s usually 40,000. If you fly Southwest, this is the time to get it. My wife had gotten the 40,000 point last year and we cashed in nearly $1000 of travel rewards to go to Aruba later this year. It’s about the half off. That’s conveniently enough for the two kids to fly free. I’m 40,000 points away from a companion pass for next year. I’m hearing that some people sign up for the Southwest Plus card as well, so get that. I might try that in September or October.

I’m seeing that Southwest points can be worth around 1.5 cents, so the 60,000 should be worth around $900.

Lastly, I got the Chase Sapphire Preferred card. I should have gotten the Reserve version when they were doing a 100,000 promotion, but I missed it. Instead, I’ll only get 50,000 worth of Chase Ultimate Reward points. In the travel hacking world, these supposedly have a tremendous value in cashing in with a ton of airlines. With the Preferred card, I’ll get a bonus and the 50,000 points should be worth around $625.

My wife got a Starwood Preferred card to use. That’s another $650.

As the fourth card in a short time, this is enough spending for now!

If you add it all up, we’ll get around 200,000 points on various programs. If we spend them right, I think they’ll be worth around $3000… maybe just a little shy.

Active Duty Bonus Leads to One More Points Card

My wife got a credit card offer in the mail last week. It’s a rare 100,000 American Express Platinum card. I believe this is the highest amount of points that American Express offers. The only downside is a HUGE annual fee. I think it’s around $550. However, the card comes with $200 Uber credits (that are parsed out monthly and expire monthly) and another $200 in airline credits (for things like extra bags, food, or other fees outside of the core cost of the ticket). There are other perks as well such as a few different airline lounges and possibly that speedy pass to cut the long lines at airports. (See how technical I am with all this stuff!)

This wasn’t exciting until I learned that Active Duty get their annual fees waived at most credit card companies (except for Chase it seems). So this American Express looks to be 100,000 points and hundreds of dollars of value… for free! Why thank you for the invite, Mr. Express… or should I just call you American?

One More Card

And of course, there’s always one more thing, right? Steven Jobs wouldn’t have had it any other way.

While I was going through the research of the Fidelity card’s statement credit change, someone in some forum mentioned USAA’s Limitless Cash Back Card that pays 2.5%. That’s another Active Duty benefit (though military and family are likely eligible to join USAA). I take the extra 0.5% and phase out the use of Fidelity card.

A natural question to ask is, “Why have a 2.5% card at all, when I’m getting 22% in travel rewards?” The answer is simple. These are one time bonus rewards. We’ll have to cancel the cards, wait some time, and try to get them back in the future to get the bonus points. (Although I think we’ll just keep the American Express forever.) I’m not sure how that process works. I know that Chase has a limit a 5/24 limit which means that they’ll probably not approve you for a new card if you’ve gotten 5 in the past 24 months. I’m probably going to be close to bumping up against that.

Final Thoughts on Travel Card Hacking

There was a lot of research that went into writing this. However, you can tell that it gets so complex, I “yada yada yada” most of the details. (Although they are minor details in this case.)

I’m just starting to “build a base” of understanding the ins and outs of various programs. I’m a little torn, because there’s something nice about using the USAA Limitless card and getting an easy 2.5%. I think that if there aren’t bonus points to be earned by spending, I’ll just use that card. Then again I carry a few other credit cards such as an Amazon one (5% back for Prime Members) and an American Express Blue Preferred (6% back at grocery stores).

Have you done any travel hacking with credit cards before? What are your favorite cards?

Dream: Traveling The United States

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I hope everyone is having a good long weekend. Personally, I’m planning on grilling hamburgers and hot dogs and watching baseball. Baseball season is in full swing and my favorite team, the Boston Red Sox, is off to a great start.

Every year around this time, I’m reminded of my dream to take a few weeks off and travel around the United States visiting as many baseball stadiums as possible. I’m not a big on geography, but it seems like from Ohio you can get to a number of stadiums.

I had hoped to do the road trip with a friend in my early 20’s, but we could never work it out. Now that we’ve each gotten married and started families it’s much harder. So rather than do it with my friend, I’m thinking about doing it with my family.

It’s tempting to say, “Hey, you’ve had the dream for nearly 20 years, make it happen!”, but my boys are aged 2 and 3. They simply don’t enjoy baseball, yet. (I’m hoping that “yet” is a appropriate and that it is just a matter of time.) However, maybe when they are 10 and 11 it will make more sense.

One thing I’ve been thinking about is how would I travel the United States on such a trip?

Here are a few options that have bounced around my head:

  • SUV and Hotels – Last year we drove to Pennsylvania, but stopped in New Jersey and stayed at a hotel there. If we plan the trip well, we could do the same at each stop. I’m not sure how expensive it would be. It would vary greatly on what kind of hotel we’d get. This could work if we planned something that was just a couple of weeks. However, if it went on longer, hotel prices for a month could get pricey.
  • Recreational Vehicle (RVs) – I’ve had some blogger friends get RVs and travel the United States for a long time. This would be an option if we decided to go for something like the whole summer.
  • Trailer – I’ll start off by saying that I’m not the camping type and I’m not sure if this is even feasible. However, maybe we could hitch a trailer to our SUV. We’d put everything we’d need inside and camp out of that. (I learned the other day that in Europe and Australia they are called caravans.)

One Final Opportunity (or Obstacle?)

We live in a resort town where the population in the summer seems to triple with all the tourism. The prices for people willing to rent their houses out are crazy. We’d probably be able to get $5000 a month. If we were to travel for an extended period of time, it might make sense to put everything in storage.

On the other hand, the idea of putting all the stuff in my house in storage is very, very daunting. If not for that problem, it would be a no-brainer way to finance our trip (and probably make extra money).

I guess I have 7 or 8 years to figure it out, right?

Saving Money on Food While Traveling?

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I don’t like to do back-to-back “Ask the Readers”, but today I’m going to break the (unwritten) rules.

Our family is going on road-trip vacation soon. We are hopping from hotel to hotel bringing the kids to Sesame Place, Hershey Park, Crayola World, and the Philadephia children’s museum.

We are looking to be frugal on this vacation. The idea is to avoid spending a hundred dollars a day on food at restaurants. I’m sure we are going to spend some money on them, but we don’t need to eat all three meals at them.

So the question is, “What can we buy in advance and bring with us to make meals?”

I’m going with the assumption that either a refrigerator or microwave would be a nice surprise at the hotels. We tried to research it, but got conflicting information from the pictures on the web and the TripAdvisor reviews. So we’ll bring some canned food (it can’t hurt), but we can’t rely on being able to heat it up. Also, I’m years removed from my college days of microwaving canned green beans as a snack.

Let’s also assume that for a week we aren’t too concerned about eating healthy. Bringing fruit is a no-brainer, but beyond that everything is in play… even Chef Boyardee. The only thing I’m taking off the table is peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I’m just not a fan.

So far I’ve been focusing on drinks. It’s low-lying fruit. We don’t need to pay $2 for a soda when we can bring them. I hit our local warehouse store (BJ’s) and found Horizon Milk and Honest Kids juice boxes. It’s perfect for the kids as neither require refrigeration.

I also set aside some nutrition bars and peanuts. They are good snacks, but it is hard to build a meal around them.

So what do you think? Any suggestions?

P.S. Road Trip was a greatly underrated movie. I miss those kind of American Pie genre movies.