Nineteen months of trip receipts: what each mile cost
Twenty-one trips and every receipt since March 2025. Our cost per trip, per night and per mile, and the places we'd go back to tom…
Our cheapest trip yet: $74 at Lake Waccamaw
One night at a state park campsite, a cooler of food from home and 90 miles round trip. A summer overnight that cost less than a t…
Rental car or our own car: the real cost per mile
Our Beaufort rental was $164 for three days. Comparing that with gas, tires and wear on our own CR-V for the same 560-mile trip.…
Gas went up this spring, so we changed our trips
Prices crept up in April. How we shortened two trips, picked closer places and kept our gas spending under $80 a month.…
Our 2026 trip budget: $3,000 for twelve weekends
After a year of real numbers we set a new budget. How we split $3,000 across gas, beds, food and admission, month by month.…
December road trips cost us 30 percent less than June
Similar distances, very different bills. Comparing one of our June trips with a December one, line by line: rooms, gas and food.…
Eating on the road for $25 a day for two
Gas station biscuits, grocery deli lunches and one sit-down supper. How we keep road food cheap without living on chips and soda.…
Six months of trip spending, sorted by category
Gas, beds, food and admission for seven trips since March. Where the $1,488 went and which line keeps creeping up every month.…
How we find the cheaper gas on I-95 and I-74
Prices can swing 30 cents between exits. How I check prices before we leave, the cheap stretches we know and the exits we skip.…
Packing a cooler so we don't eat every meal out
Our road-trip cooler routine: what goes in, how long the ice lasts in a North Carolina May and the $46 it saves us on a typical we…
What a tank of gas really costs per trip mile
Our CR-V gets about 31 mpg on the highway. How I figure the gas for a trip before we leave, and why I always round the price up a …