I apologize for disappearing the last few days. We went out of state for Thanksgiving, and I'm still playing catch up.
We've been out of state a few times before, for days in a row. However, this was the first trip that I packed all our food and planned all the meals before hand. At first I was worried that it would be too much, and we would end up wishing we had just spent the extra money to eat out. I didn't know how the kids would handle eating in our hotel room, either.
This was not the case.
We allowed ourselves one meal out, and the rest we packed along. We all loved being comfortable in our hotel room, eating home cooked, wholesome food. I kept it really simple for our lunches--Sandwiches, Carrots/Dip, and Corn Dog Muffins with potato chips and salad.
You can see my dinner plan here. We packed our crockpot to cook up the soup. It was an absolute hoot to walk into the motel that evening and smell our dinner. I couldn't help but chuckle and wonder what the other guests thought! It tasted so good!
Packing along our food saved us an amazing amount of money. My conservative guess for 6 meals out is $180 for our family of 5. The cost for the food we packed, which came from our regular grocery budget came in under$50, and probably closer to the $30 mark! Packing our food enabled us to stay in a hotel, swim in the pool and enjoy our stay--without breaking our budget.
Even though my family cracked jokes about us packing our food, I wouldn't change it. As a matter of fact, it's our new normal.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
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5 comments:
We've done this on trips, too, have one meal out and pack the rest. I never thought to bring a crock pot though!
I am super jealous. We went out of town for 4 days too, only we flew. Plus DH's grandparents likes to pay for everything when we visit them. Nonetheless, we all felt miserable after 3 meals in a row eating out. I ended up buying $30 worth of food from the grocery store so we could have at least mostly decent diets. Next time I will take the crockpot and all the food we need. We will be closer so we can drive, but in hotels.
Did you get a suite or keep everything in a cooler?
It wasn't a suite, but I did request that we have a microwave and a refrigerator. A lot of hotels/motels offer them anymore, so it shouldn't he hard to get one.
We've done this on more trips that I can count. Our biggest problem came earlier this year when we vacationed in Cape Cod. We stayed in a timeshare, but found out that we were not allowed to use our crockpot. (Cape Cod rules?!) Thank goodness for the microwave steam bags. I was still able to cook all of our food -- using the microwave.
I never thought to bring a crock pot though!
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