There are 21 envelopes in the shoebox now. I laid them out on the kitchen table in two rows, 2025 on top and 2026 on the bottom, and Wes walked through with his coffee, raised an eyebrow and kept going. I was finding out what nineteen months of cheap weekends actually cost.
From the end of February 2025 to the end of September 2026, we took 21 trips, drove about 10,800 miles and spent $5,936. Every dollar came out of the trip account, which gets $250 on the first of the month and nothing else.
- Per trip: about $283
- Per night away: about $175 (34 nights, counting the four on my brother Darren's couch)
- Per mile: about 55 cents, everything included
That last one is the number I keep looking at. Fifty-five cents a mile isn't what it costs to drive our CR-V. Gas is only about 10 cents of that. The rest is beds, food, parking and admission spread over every mile we drove. It's the cost of being somewhere else, divided by how far we went to get there.
Our target from the beginning was under $300 a trip. The average is $283, so we made it, but only just. The 2025 trips averaged about $247. This year's nine trips are higher because of the Outer Banks cottage in August ($884) and the Beaufort trip where a wheel bearing put us in a rental car ($471).
Where the money went
Beds were the biggest line, a little under half of everything. Gas was about $1,130, roughly 19 percent, and it stayed the most predictable line all along: I figure it before we leave and I'm almost always within a couple of dollars. Food was the one I fought with. It crept up all through the first summer until I set a $25-a-day limit, and it has behaved better since.
The cheapest trip was one night at Lake Waccamaw State Park in July: $74. The most expensive was the Outer Banks this August. The splurge we talked about longest was Wes's 45th birthday in the Smokies last November, $612, with an urgent care visit we didn't plan for.
Not counted in any of this: the Rodanthe cottage that got cancelled by a tropical storm last fall. The $780 came back from the trip policy, and the $57 policy is on its own line in my notebook. Also not counted: car repairs. Tires, a battery, a wheel bearing and the routine work on a car past 130,000 miles come out of savings and the car repair fund, not the trip account.
The cheap trips weren't the short ones. They were the ones where somebody else's couch, a state park campsite or an off-season room took the bed cost down. Distance matters less than I thought. A 600-mile trip with a $94 motel can cost less than a 90-mile trip with a pricey room.
Off-season beat peak season every time. Our December night in the Pinehurst area cost about 30 percent less than the same trip priced for June. And booking directly by phone made a difference more than once: the family-run motel in Southport was $112 when I called them, $139 online.
The places we'd go back to tomorrow
I asked Wes to pick one, and he picked Carolina Beach State Park without thinking about it. Two nights near the marina, a fish supper, the aquarium at Fort Fisher, $242. I'd add these:
Lake Waccamaw, for a Friday night when we need a break and have $75. Southport, for the waterfront and the river pilots going by. Asheville, because the mountains are still coming back after Helene and our money does some good there. North Charleston as a base for Charleston, which saved us almost $180 on one night. And Hunting Island, rental car and all.
Places we probably won't repeat: the high-rise strip of Myrtle Beach in summer, and anywhere I can't find a room under $130 within 15 minutes of what we came to see.
Is 55 cents a mile worth it
For us, yes. In 2024 we spent about $2,900 on two big vacations and barely remembered either one. For about twice that, spread over nineteen months, we've seen three lighthouses, half a dozen state parks, a handful of cities and a stretch of the Parkway, and I can tell you what every one of them cost.
The Boone cabin is booked for later this month, and there's a new envelope on the dashboard waiting for it. That will be trip 22.
