There was frost on the CR-V's windshield when we got back to the carport this morning, and the trip envelope on the dashboard was thinner than usual. One night at an inn in the Pinehurst area, home before ten on a Saturday. I added it up before I took my coat off.
The answer was $232. What made me sit down and write this post is that I'd priced the exact same trip back in June, and it would have cost us about $331.
Why I'd priced it in June
The Sandhills are only about 40 miles from our place near Maxton, so Pinehurst and Southern Pines have always been on the list for a short one-nighter. In June I looked up an older inn with a big porch and rocking chairs, wrote the price in the margin of the road atlas, and decided to wait. That margin note is what let me compare the two line by line instead of guessing.
Same inn, same type of room, same Friday night, same roads. The only real difference is the month.
The line-by-line
Here's what the June version would have cost, using the prices I wrote down then, next to what we actually paid this weekend.
- Room: $169 plus tax in June (about $190), $118 plus tax in December (about $133)
- Gas: about 90 miles round trip, 3.2 gallons. At $3.05 in June that's $10; at $2.85 this week it was $9
- Food: about $131 in June, $90 this weekend
Totals: about $331 for June and $232 for December. That's 30 percent less.
The room is most of it. In June the Sandhills are full of golfers, weddings and families on summer break, and the rate goes up with them. The first weekend of December is quiet. The lady at the front desk said the busy stretch for them starts again around Christmas week and doesn't really slow down until after the spring golf season.
Gas is almost nothing on a trip this short, but it went the right way too. Prices around here dropped from about $3.05 a gallon in early summer to $2.85 this fall.
This one surprised me more than the room. My June estimate wasn't made up. I'd looked at menus and figured what we'd actually do on a hot June weekend: a patio supper with cold drinks, ice cream after, cold drinks again in the afternoon, a bigger lunch because it's too hot to picnic.
In December we did what we do when it's 45 degrees out. We had a real supper in the village on Friday night ($62 with the tip), coffee and two pastries Saturday morning ($16), and split a sandwich at a deli on the drive home ($12). No ice cream, no afternoon drinks, no second round of anything. Cold weather turns out to be very good for my budget and very bad for Wes's dessert habit.
The village was decorated for Christmas, with wreaths on the lampposts and lights in the shop windows. Walking around looking at that was free, and honestly it's what we'll remember.
One more piece made this trip cheaper on paper. We put our gas and groceries on one no-annual-fee cash-back card that we pay off every month, and I had let the rewards pile up all year. I used $186 of it toward this trip. So the trip account only paid $46. I'm still counting the trip as $232 in my totals, because the cash-back is money we earned from spending, not money that fell from the sky, and I don't want to fool myself about what a trip really costs.
What we're taking from it
We've been doing one cheap weekend a month since March, and the summer trips have been the expensive ones every time. Not because summer is bad, but because summer is when everybody else goes too. Rooms are higher, beaches are crowded and we spend more on cold things.
For next year I'm thinking about it differently. The places that are busy in summer (the beach, the Sandhills, the mountains in October) are the ones to visit in the off months. The places that are good in summer and quiet anyway, like the state parks and lakes, can take the hot months.
Wes, when I showed him the numbers over coffee this morning, said, "So we should only travel when it's cold." Not exactly. But I wrote "December = the Sandhills again" in pencil on the inside cover of the atlas, and next Friday we're driving up to see the Christmas lights in McAdenville, which should cost a little more than a tank of gas.
