Budget Travel Blog

Ugh. I just found out that my husband wants to go away for Thanksgiving this year. I’m not too happy about the idea to be honest. I prefer to do a quiet dinner with just us and the kids here at home. We do a lot of stuff with the extended family for the Christmas holidays so I like to keep Thanksgiving pretty low key. Apparently this year everyone on my husband’s side of the family is going to his parents’ house though and he doesn’t want to miss out. We debated and he won and so we’re going to take the trip to see his parents in a few weeks.

I’m definitely concerned about how much this trip is going to cost us. I had not worked any Thanksgiving trips into our holiday spending budget this year so now I have to do some rearranging. I think I’ll be able to work it out though. Here’s some of the things that I’m doing in order to keep the cost of this trip down:

• I insisted that we drive. We usually fly to my in-laws house because the drive is on the long-ish side and the kids get really bored in the car but it’s a lot cheaper to drive. Our car gets great gas mileage and there are five of us so that’s a lot of savings compared to buying plane tickets.
• I’m packing our own food for the drive. We won’t be stopping at any fast food joints or spending money on snacks at gas stations. That is such a waste of money on a road trip!
• We’ve committed to only enjoying free activities while we’re there. This one shouldn’t be too hard since most of the time there is going to be family time anyway. His family loves to go to the movies though so we’re going to have to beg out of that one if it comes up. Maybe we can convince them that we should all watch a DVD at home instead.
• I’m using our Thanksgiving dinner money to pay for the trip. The one nice thing about all of this is that I don’t have to do any cooking this year. I like to cook but Thanksgiving is a pricey holiday to cook for. I’m going to use some of the money that I would have spent on dinner to buy a nice bottle of wine for the in-laws and the rest is being put towards the trip.

Okay, now that I wrote about how to save money on this last minute Thanksgiving trip I feel a lot better about the whole thing. I just hope it goes smoothly! Are you traveling for Thanksgiving? Have you already made your plans?

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