The biscuit was $3.79, wrapped in foil, still too hot to hold, and eaten at a gas pump on the edge of Savannah at 7:15 on a Saturday morning. Wes had sausage and egg. I had chicken. It was the best $7.58 we spent all weekend.
Last month I sorted our trip receipts and found the food line creeping up every month. So for the Savannah trip I set a budget: $25 a day for the two of us, for breakfast, lunch, drinks and snacks. One sit-down supper per trip is budgeted separately, because it's the one meal we actually care about. I wanted to see if it could be done without eating chips in the car for three days.
It could. Here's how.
In the Carolinas and Georgia, a biscuit from a good gas station or a small local biscuit counter is a real breakfast. It's warm, it's filling and it's usually $3 to $4.50. Two biscuits and a coffee came to between $7 and $9 every morning. If the hotel has a free breakfast, we eat that and skip it, but our hotel near the Savannah airport only had coffee and some sad muffins.
The trick is picking the right place. A busy station at 7 a.m. with a line of work trucks out front means the biscuits are fresh. A quiet one at 10 a.m. means they've been under a heat lamp since dawn.
Lunch: the grocery store deli
This is the one that saves the most. The deli counter at a supermarket will make a sandwich or sell you a box of fried chicken and two sides for less than half of what a sit-down lunch costs. In Savannah we walked into a grocery store on the way into town and spent $12.40 on lunch for both of us: a turkey sub split in half, a container of potato salad, two bananas and a bottle of water.
We ate it on a bench in one of the squares, which is better scenery than any restaurant in the city.
The second day we didn't buy lunch at all. We ate the leftover potato salad and the last of the sandwich makings from the cooler on the drive home.
The easiest way to blow $25 a day is buying drinks. A soda at a tourist stop is $3 now. I pack a case of water and a gallon of sweet tea in the cooler, plus apples, crackers, peanut butter crackers and a bag of boiled peanuts from a stand near home. We buy coffee. We don't buy drinks.
The supper
Saturday night we had supper at a seafood place a little outside the historic district. Shrimp and grits for me, a fried flounder plate for Wes, sweet tea, and a tip. It was $38 total. That's the meal we'll remember, and I don't mind paying for it. Keeping breakfast and lunch cheap is what makes that supper feel like a treat instead of something I'm sorry about Monday morning.
How it came out
For the three days in Savannah (Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon):
- Friday: cooler supper in the room, plus road snacks and coffee, $11
- Saturday: biscuits $7.58, deli lunch $12.40, sit-down supper $38, $57.98
- Sunday: biscuits and coffee $7.25, lunch from the cooler, $7.25
That's $76.23 for three days, including the supper. Without the supper it's $38.23 for breakfasts, lunches and snacks, well under $25 a day. With the supper it averages $25.41 a day. Close enough that I'm calling it a win, and I did not count the groceries I packed from home in the daily number, since they went into the trip envelope before we left (they were $14).
Compare that with Charleston in August, when food for one night came to $58 because we bought every meal and every drink on the go.
Fast food is not as cheap as it used to be. Two combo meals at a burger place are $22 or more now, which is two days of breakfast. And eating every meal out of the cooler gets old by the second day. Wes's exact words on the drive home from Jones Lake back in April were, "I'd like to see a plate." The mix is the point: one real meal, the rest simple, warm when it can be.
We're back at the coast this month, and I've already got the biscuit places marked in the road atlas with a pencil star.
