traveling on the cheap

With everything happening last summer (car troubles, a furnace that had to be replaced, a lot of trips – together and just the husband on his own) we were a little doubtful that we would even be able to take a vacation. We knew that we needed to go see my dad and stepmom in Florida (they moved there almost two years ago, and we used to travel to New York once a summer to see them.) I kept brainstorming ideas of places we could stop along the way.

Kenny has been to Savannah once before, and absolutely loved it. We used to have photos hanging that he took on that trip to Savannah. (When we moved into our house, we never got around to hanging any of our photos up, but I promise that will change in 2011.) I remembered my stepmom talking about being so close to Savannah and realized that since it was on the way to Jacksonville, maybe we could stop over for a few days?

I started looking into hotels and things to do, plotting out several days for us….and then our furnace decided to take a turn for the worse. And we realized that Kenny was going to be traveling a lot for work this summer. And my car decided it wanted to wreak havoc on our finances. So I had to come up with a cheap plan.

I scored a really great hotel room right next to the river on Expedia. I’m what you might call an Expedia-stalker. I dream up trips and then watch them for weeks months on that site, just to see what kind of deals might be out there. This can really help to save money. I realized that the Doubletree was $100 per night, with breakfast included. Some might think that $100 per night isn’t cheap, and it really isn’t, but it included all amenities that I wanted, valet parking, it was in a safe area, and was close to everything. Plus it included breakfast. I booked two nights in the hotel…and started plotting out our other meals.

I’m a huge fan of Restaurant.com and found a couple of certificates to use on there. We managed to get dinner at Moon River Brewing one night and it was pretty amazing. We saved about 50% on food and drinks. Lunches were at hole in the wall places (that we’d heard about from friends). And the day we left Savannah, we stopped in Tybee Island with our sandwich stuff for our lunch. It broke up the trip and didn’t break us.

This week we’ve been traveling again. We stayed at a bed and breakfast the first night of our trip (which my husband won a free night’s stay at – and they included breakfast) before heading to the beach. We’re staying at a resort, which we found a deal for on groupon.com. Three nights for $159. Yes, please! Even better is the fact that we have a kitchen in our suite – so we brought some groceries. We made plans to eat out at two restaurants that we had heard great things about. The rest of the nights may or may not find us eating in.

We don’t often take trips that don’t involve family visits, and this trip may be our last one before the baby arrives in August. We do have a weekend trip to New York scheduled for June. Any tips you care to share for us to save even more money? (We’re not going to the city – we’ll be in Rochester for a wedding.)