{"id":193477,"date":"2015-06-29T04:00:28","date_gmt":"2015-06-29T11:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/getrichslowly.org\/blog\/?p=193477"},"modified":"2020-12-12T19:42:25","modified_gmt":"2020-12-13T03:42:25","slug":"ideas-for-a-cheap-vacation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/ideas-for-a-cheap-vacation\/","title":{"rendered":"Ideas for a cheap vacation"},"content":{"rendered":"
It’s been a long time since my wife and I had the luxury of thinking in terms of vacation. When we came to America more than 30 years ago, we also discovered two things:<\/p>\n
People in America work very hard, probably harder than anywhere else in the world. Two weeks’ vacation seems to be the norm here, while in Europe and the rest of the world anything less than a month is inhuman, insane, or both. (I am not convinced they’re wrong, by the way.)<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
With all our family on other continents, we needed to spend those two precious little weeks every year with them. That led to employing all manner of strategies and devices — like accumulating as much vacation time as we could and squeaking out an advance on the coming year — so we could spend two whole weeks with our family and another week just for travel, there and back.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
The upshot is that, every year, we saw the people around us “take vacation.” Some went to Jamaica, others to New York, Washington or France. It’s like when you go to the movies and you see millionaires stepping from a private jet onto a yacht on the Riviera: It sure looks nice, but I guess it’s not for us.<\/p>\n
That doesn’t mean we didn’t get to travel. Don’t get me wrong. We were fortunate to be in a business that did things around the world — and we got to see places most only dream about, but only for two or three days at a time. Every now and then we would tack a day or two on at the end of a work trip and steal what we came to call micro-vacations. Most of that was free for us because the travel and accommodations had already been paid. But it wasn’t like having a real vacation.<\/p>\n
That all changed last year when my wife retired. I had been kind of semi-retired<\/a>, which means I stay busy doing things I like doing (like writing this post). For the first four or five months she caught up with the garden and spent nearly every day having lunch or tea with the long line of friends who had never gotten the time of day from her, what with her American work schedule and all. But that eventually wound down and we realized, “Hey, we have time to take a real vacation! What are we going to do?”<\/p>\n Surprisingly, that turned out not to be an easy question to answer. To me at least, it is a lot like the other related question facing everyone when the big day arrives and they retire: “What do I want to do when I grow up?”<\/p>\n I had lunch recently with J.D. Roth as he and Kim visited some family in Colorado. As you may know, they are on a tour of the country in their motor home. As we talked, he admitted he is wrestling with that exact same question: What do I want to do when I grow up?<\/p>\n We thought about taking a cruise. When you consider the fact that it is a hotel and all meals are included, cruises are not unreasonably expensive. I don’t know. We may eventually take one, but I just can’t help feeling it will be boring, being confined in one space like that. Some of the latest ships are enormous, with lots of stores and stuff, but still.\u2026<\/p>\n When you’re trying to figure out what you like, most of us only have our past experiences to draw on. We know what worked and what didn’t. Both my wife and I, growing up, loved road trips. Family summers at the beach was second, but that would have to wait until Christmas. (Our families live where Christmas is in summer, like the 4th of July here. Last year that didn’t work out because everyone had different plans, but it looks like we might pull it off later this year.)<\/p>\n So we decided to take a road trip, simply because we could. Then we discovered how expensive accommodations are. We typically stay at budget motels because we’re only there to crash for a night before we move on. And anyway, it’s of more value to us just to pull up to our room than to have a concierge, bellman and a plethora of other people attempting to serve us.<\/p>\n We discovered that you can stay at nice-enough hotels for around $70 a night or so, at least in the places we like to go in the West. But on a two-week trip even $70 a night adds up too quickly. Every now and then you can’t hit that budget and, on a ten-day trip, you are out a thousand dollars. That’s just too ouch for frugal, old us.<\/p>\n<\/span>The all-inclusive vacation<\/span><\/h2>\n
<\/span>Vacations reflect your situation<\/span><\/h2>\n
<\/span>Cheap vacation ideas emerge<\/span><\/h2>\n