Always one of my favorite pages!! I’m so proud of being able to travel at a great level for $1500 a week! This trip came in right on that metric which may put to rest some concerns we had about inflation. I noticed early on that I thought taxi and food had risen but that was not born out in the numbers.
I left Boston on Jan 13 and returned on Jan 28, 15 days.
My flight down was 282 and back was 157.
My airbnb was 274
My bike rental was 392
My credit card racked up 1457
I took out 350 in cash
The total is 2912. or about 1500/week
How about some footnotes! Frontier Airlines really screwed me over. My flight down was scheduled with them and cost about the same as my flight back, 160. They canceled the flight! The one thing I can thank them for is that they did send me email about the cancelation a week? before flight so I was able to pay another $100 and book on Delta. I have seen no sign of a refund. Since my normal billing rate is $200/hr, I plan to spend 1 hour trying to get the money back. I assume I will fail. But at least I will never book with them again and I tell the story to anyone who will listen. Wife Kim was scheduled on a reputable carrier for another trip recently and they moved the departure up 1 hour 24 hours before flight and she missed it. I guess along with spam phone calls, I wish government would spend a little time making these providers pay for such moves.
This is my third year in the same Airbnb. I love it. It is 5 minutes from the bike shop! A nice walk through a park to busses to the Hotel Zone and downtown. This would have been my 4th year but a couple years ago I was confused by the listing and thought, incorrectly I am sure, that it was already booked. And I am not just saying this because the proprietress gave me an extra day for free! I realized on the Wednesday before leaving that my flight was one day AFTER I was scheduled to move out of the airbnb. I’ll add links and pictures of the room here.
I carry Mexican cash all the time but always use my Credit Card if it is allowed. I think the exchange rate on the card is better. The bank machines, on top of a poor exchange rate, take another $8 in fees. I do withdraw $100 at a time. I could have a better deal if I took more out as once but hate to have too much cash around. Each year, and remember I had to skip last year, so it really is two years, I forget how to deal with the cash machines. I entered 20 on the screen and got 20 mexican dollars so next time I entered 2000 and got the right amount, $100 US dollars worth of Mexican money.
As you may know, both the Bank of America, my bank and Capital One, my credit card company, are no longer interested in learning about upcoming travel. Usually that means that once you use the card in country they send you an email saying we have notices suspicious activity and we are cutting off your card. May be fine for people who use email on their phones but for a luddite like me who only uses email on a computer, it is a normal disaster. I have to admit that at least the cards were not cut off this year. I always travel with LOTS of travelers checks, cash and extra cards incase of disaster. And my daughter is set up to “receive” the annoying security code and speak it to me incase we are sent down that route.
If I get motivated, or if you ask, I can break out the actual daily eating expenses etc. I do include everything, even the sun screen that I used once and the Qtips that I brought home.