January 26, 2014

Back to Reality

Our plane got in at 4:15 yesterday afternoon.  We went from beautiful California weather to a major snow storm.  The hour drive home from the airport took us almost 2 hours in scary weather conditions.  But we made it home safe and sound and today will be a nice stay-at-home recoup day.  I got to sleep till almost 1pm.

The last 2 nights of vacation were spent at a hotel near Disney.  There were trains nearby that went passed every hour and blasted their whistles all night long.  I'm the only one that seemed to be bothered by this; I barely got any sleep the last two nights.

I had great plans of really tracking our spending on this trip but it didn't happen. Over all we spent: $1427 while we were gone.  We have $395 left of California Vacation Money that we didn't spend.  I'll be adding this to our savings account to go towards our savings goal for 2014.

Vacation Spending Round Up:
  • 1 Day at the San Diego Zoo 
    • Budgeted $160, Actual Cost with Coupon $144
  • 1 Day at the Scripps Aquarium - 
    • Budgeted $130 for Queen Mary and Aquarium (ended up being farther away than I thought, so we went to Scripps Aquarium), Actual Cost with Coupon $51
  • 2 Days at Disneyland - 
  • Tasting Wine at our First Stop on
    the wine tour.
    • Budgeted $674 ($392 was Disney Rewards $'s), Actual Cost with California Resident Discount $516 
  • Wine Tour for Mr. R and I -  $125 for the tour, plus over $200 for wine tastings at 3 wineries, 4 bottles of wine, plus lunch, snacks and deserts
  • We only ate out once per day except the last day at Disney where we ate out twice. Averaging around $45 per meal out.  We usually didn't buy the girls their own meals, they just shared what Mr. R and I ordered.
  • My Dad and his wife did buy us lunch for our first meal in California and Breakfast for our last meal.
  • Went grocery shopping the first day for food for the week.  I spent $130 on groceries.  My Dad and his wife wanted to buy the groceries but I insisted on paying for some.  The $130 wasn't even half of the grocery cost. But they buy almost everything organic, so if I had done the shopping myself we wouldn't have spent near as much.  I mean, I really don't care about organic mustard, ketchup or peanut butter.  Especially when its 2 - 3 x the cost of non-organic items.

3 comments:

  1. I'm happy for you that you had a good trip. You did very well with your budget. That's not easy on vacation.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm with you on the lack of tracking during vacations... who wants to do that? I've had all the best intentions at the beginning of a trip, but mostly it doesn't happen. Not even close. I do try to keep a maximum allowed, and a loose mental note of how much more I have left before I meet that max. If I go over, I keep mental track of that too, and try not to spend any more. Things on vacation are so much more expensive. But glad you guys had fun and came back safely!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. At Disneyland I bought a hotdog for the girls to share. It was $6.75 and came with a small bag of plain potato chips. I couldn't believe the prices there.

      Delete