Frugal? Road Trip to New Mexico

If our finances were stretched we wouldn’t have gone to New Mexico. We are doing fine despite the advice that says one ought to retire with a million dollars in the bank. Imagine that.

1. We and, at this point, about half the nation, have had our Covid vaccines so we felt safe and ready to see something new. However, we traveled to a place where they had worked WITH the effort to fight this pandemic. This limited our choices and is the #1 reason we didn’t go to the Badlands. How we spend $ is our power.

 2. We drove our Ford C-Max hybrid which gets about 40 MPG so we spent $270 on gas for the whole 3600-mile trip.

 3. This might be hard for you to replicate because even though they like some of you very much, I think our kids won’t pop for your motels. Sorry about that. Our kids surprised us by giving us $ and travel points towards several of our motel rooms.

 4. We joined two hotel chain reward systems several years ago. We get 10% off when we make the reservation which is more than an AARP discount. Twice things were subpar. (In one place the internet didn’t work.) We obtained the name of the motel manager in both places. When we got home, we emailed those specific persons, explained the problem, and are still waiting to get travel points against future motel stays. This system has worked in the past. We will see.

 5. Coffee: We bought (two trips ago) a $20 drip coffee maker that makes one commuter cup of coffee. We make coffee in the room to get going, then two more cups for the road. This system saves a lot of money and inconvenience.

6. On vacations I usually bring several books that I think I’m going to read and then I don’t. This time I downloaded several books from our library to my kindle - and didn’t read them.

7. Brought bread, PB, bananas, and other snacks for lunches when we wanted them.

8. We have National Park senior passes. Lucky us, we bought them several years ago when one could still get them for $10 per person.

9. This was a new curveball. Motels have passwords to access free internet. At several of the places we stayed that password would expire after several hours and one would have to enter it again.

Is this a new policy in motel management? Sometimes my podcast listening went from Wi-Fi to cellular. (I should have downloaded some of my favs while I had Wi-Fi.) When we got home our cellphone bill was about $10 higher than usual. FYI.

10. We didn’t buy many souvenirs or gifts because most gift shops were still closed.

11. These things were free and/or priceless:

• Walking around Warsaw, IL overlooking the Mississippi, with Otis. We’ve been friends since 1978. Still laughing,
• Getting lost on Oklahoma City’s tangle of highways in at dusk on a Sunday evening.
• We ate ice cream cones in the 400-year-old plaza in the center of Santa Fe.
• Hiking in places that look absolutely nothing like a Wisconsin woods.
• Meeting Kay, a friend from our activist years in Chicago in the 1980’s, for dinner at a spectacular patio restaurant in Albuquerque. Remembering people whom we knew back then and crazy good stuff we did. Seeing the mountains pink for just a few minutes as we left to drive back to Santa Fe - the photo at the top of this post. 
• The evening in Alamogordo we drove up into the hills to watch the stars come out.