My Frugal Travel Tip ~ Pack Your Own Snacks
At Small Cents, Kelly is traveling very soon and wanted people to contribute their best travel tips. She’s even running a contest giving away The Tightwad Gazette Parts 1 and 2 to encourage more tips! Although I don’t think my travel tip will help her out too much because she is traveling between different continents, hopefully someone will find it useful. If you’d like to enter to win her copies of The Tightwad Gazette, check out her post!
My biggest money saving travel tip is to pack your own snacks. As a family, we do a fair amount of traveling. Before we were in major debt-reduction mode, we did even more, because I was generally competing in taekwondo tournaments at least two weekends a month. But with family that lives about 1000 miles away, we still travel now usually at least twice a year. By car. A long distance. Ugh.
The most cost-effective thing I have found is to pack our own snacks. Vending machines are usually full of junk, and over a 15 hour drive they can really add up! Packing meals is a great idea too, and we have had some success with this (depending on the trip and the ages of our kids) but packing snacks is a must. You don’t want to blow your entire vacation budget on the way to your destination! We generally pack two bottles of water (that we refill at drinking fountains at rest stops), a caffeinated beverage for the driver if necessary, and a backpack with all of ours and our kids favorite snacks - cut up fruits, animal crackers, rice cakes, cheese, granola bars, crackers, and anything else that is on someone’s favorites list and easily transported. A small mini-cooler can be used for the refrigerator items with some ice inside or an ice pack if you have one.
It’s easy to do, it doesn’t take up too much space (and takes up less space as you eat things!) and ensures you have food with you that you want to eat. That is a win-win for me!
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March 17th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Oh man, I have never had tasty water from a rest stop drinking fountain. LOL.
March 17th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Oh man, I have never had tasty water from a rest stop drinking fountain. LOL.
Of course, I try not to drink on car trips if possible because that leads to more stops if you know what I mean
March 17th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Hey Paid Twice,
Great tip! Although I am able to pack some snacks- as long as they’re light and easily consumable, like applesauce pouches and cookies.
March 17th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
On our last trip we took waters, cheese sticks, crackers, and fruit. We were able to go 8 hour with one 10 min pit stop.
March 17th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
My frugal travel tip: Ride a motor scooter. I rode my old one from south central PA to Orange County NY last summer. One and a half days of partying and heavy drinking cost me a grand total of $15… plus $9 gambling, and whatever it cost me for two packs of cigarettes. Of course, it’s also fun, as well as extremely cheap, to just randomly ride around the area for a couple of hours.
March 17th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
My mom always did this when I was a kid. It was one of my favorite things about going on vacation because she’d pack all of the snacks that were too expensive to buy on a regular basis. Our favorite was always those Kool-aid Kool Bursts (at least I think that’s what they were called!).
Even though it was more expensive than regular snacks at home, it was a lot cheaper than buying junk along the way. The special treats kept us from desiring anything you’d get out of a vending machine!
March 18th, 2008 at 8:53 am
This is a great idea. I try to make sure that I avoid going in the shop when I take a toilet break or else I always end up being tempted by an overpriced snack. If it is a long journey I try to take sandwiches too and then you do not waste time waiting for food to be served or eating it!
March 18th, 2008 at 11:02 am
On our honeymoon we were well-stocked with water bottles, trail mix, and some sandwiches from our wedding (in a cooler). Definitely saved money on stops.
March 18th, 2008 at 11:51 am
This is such a good way to save money wherever you go/however you get there. Last spring break, my friend and I traveled to Europe with one suitcase between the two of us. We bought granola bars, peanut butters, minimuffins, mini cereal boxes and dried fruit in our suitcase. Before we left our hostel each morning to go sightseeing, we’d grab a few snacks and have those as breakfast and snacks. It saved us lots of money we would have spent on food (in euros!) to go do other things.
March 18th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
This is a regular thing for our family of five. When we flew to Disney World a few years back, we brought along an entire suitcase filled with snacks, water bottles, drink mixes, crackers, granola bars, etc.
One hint, make sure that suitcase is hard-sided! And bring along plenty of small backpacks that you can carry the snacks around. Nothing worse than a crushed pack of crackers in your pocket…
March 18th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Hello,
What a great money saving tip to share. We always try to pack our own snacks. It is still cheaper to do this yourself even if you treat yourselves to special individual serving sizes and things you wouldn’t normally eat at home.
I wrote about what we packed when going on an outing last summer.
http://farmhomelife.blogspot.com/2007/08/planning-day-out.html
Here is a list of all the cheap/healthy meals we like to make for traveling.
http://farmhomelife.blogspot.com/2007/11/cheap-healthy-traveling-meals.html
Take Care,
Trixie