Wednesday, May 31, 2023

Of Budgeting and Spreadsheets

This post is dedicated to the lovers of spreadsheets.

Seriously.

Because I love a good spreadsheet for planning and tracking!  And I know some of you do, too.

Someone recently asked me how I was keeping up with all our plans.  A spreadsheet, of course.  With multiple worksheets.

A few years ago, our younger son introduced me to Google Sheets.  For this trip, I am using Google Sheets to record our Budget and our Accommodations because I want to be able to access it while we're traveling.  We have an old student edition of Microsoft Office (2007 for those who wondered) that I use Excel from for our household business, but it's on an old desktop that belonged to our younger son when he was in middle school.  I don't foresee us hauling it just to access spreadsheets, and our newer laptop wants to use Microsoft 365 which my access to will end when I retire (work perk - Microsoft 365 for personal usage).  So Google Sheets is a great solution in that it is accessible as long as we have an internet connection.

So let's get to the spreadsheet!  The first worksheet is the Budget.  We've followed Dave Ramsey's plan of giving every dollar a name and using a (virtual) envelope system for managing our money.  And while this is important in every day life, it's especially important for a vacation like this one.  So it has been intuitive to create a budget for the trip to cover the main categories of Lodging, Gas, Food, Attractions, Supplies, and the ever popular Other catch-all.  

The spreadsheet includes some initial columns including the date of travel, the starting location, the ending location, and a column for notes about what we will be doing along the way, especially if there will be admission costs involved.  For each category, I carefully calculated what I anticipated our expenses would be each day, and then added 10 percent to cover rises in prices.  Here's some of the thought process which may be helpful to others when building a travel budget.

*Lodging:  Once we had our itinerary figured out for what location we would be in each night, I researched hotels, bed and breakfasts, campgrounds, AirBnBs, national and state parks, and vacation rentals to see what options were available.  We agreed to not make this trip a tour of Holiday Inn Expresses (although we have reservations at several), so websites such as TripAdvisor and Google Maps have proven to be good resources for finding accommodations.  We also ordered materials from nearly every location's visitors bureau.  So last year, I made a list of accommodations that met our criteria (no smoking, no pets besides service animals whenever possible, occasional access to laundry), and then started making dummy reservations.  Dummy reservations are when you put in all the information such as dates, type of room, rate specials like AAA or Senior Discount, to get an idea of what the price would be.  Because most places only book at less than a year out, we used similar 2023 dates to hit the seasonal prices for the spreadsheet.  We put these values, which included tax (plus 10%) into the Lodging (budgeted) column of the spreadsheet, and next to it is a column Lodging (actual) where we are recording the actual amount we will spend as we are in the midst of making our actual reservations for 2024.  With over half of our reservations made already, the plus-10% was pretty accurate in calculating what the expected rates would be.  [Note: we do plan to re-shop some of the accommodations as the trip nears because there are times when rates go down or there are specials offered.]

Gas:  This is where AAA TripTik and Google maps came in handy for planning the route from place to place and being able to see the approximate number of miles to be traveled.  Our vehicle gets over 35 mpg on the highway, so we calculated the gas cost as if we will get 30 mpg and gas will cost $3.50/gallon (and then rounded up by 10%).

Food: Most of the places we will stay offer breakfast as part of the reservation, and we generally eat just one meal a day when traveling, so we calculated food expenses based on those parameters.  There will be some places we stay where we can prepare meals in, and others where we may want to splurge (although we haven't identified those yet), so our food budget is averaging to $60/day.  This is the one category we can adjust on the fly if we find we want/need to spend more in another area.

Attractions:  This is where we budget for all admission tickets, entry fees, and parking passes  Like the boat tours we want to do, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the ferry to Mackinac Island.  We have a National Park Pass and we are looking into getting a Michigan State Park Pass (for non-residents) as we'll have a few opportunities to use it.  We use our Florida State Parks pass routinely throughout the year.

Supplies:  While we won't be roughing it, we do need to take some basic supplies with us or pick them up along the way.  Things like laundry detergent, toiletries, snacks, and other things we don't bring along from home.

Other:  I put the Other category in mostly as a buffer for whatever we haven't thought of that we'll want or need to spend money on while traveling.  This is mostly for emergencies, better safe than sorry.

I told you I love a good spreadsheet!  I built in conditional formatting and sums and averages so we can keep up with our progress along the way,  I'm interested to see how well we do with staying on budget!

The Accommodations spreadsheet provides details about each night's lodging including the following columns which are self-explanatory.  I wanted to keep them all in a single place so I can make sure that we haven't missed a night's reservation and find ourselves having to sleep in the car somewhere, and so we have the information handy should there be an issue with the reservations.

Date 
Overnight City
Date Reservation Made
Confirmation Number
Lodging
Address
Phone Number
Cancellation Policy
Website Link
Notes

In addition to recording the information in the spreadsheet, I also have it recorded in a word document that I'll print before we go, and I've saved all the email confirmations as well as printed them for the road-trip binder.  I love technology but I don't want to be so dependent on it that when it fails, I'm lost. [I have to give a shout-out to a younger friend/colleague who has a bigger love of travel planning than I do who gave me some ideas for organization.  So M.A., thank you!]

~ Cindy D.





Tuesday, May 30, 2023

Seventeen States in 46 Days

Seventeen -  that's how many states we will visit by the time we get home from our Middle States trip.  That's 1/3 of the states we have in the U.S.  To give an idea of what we have in store, we've included a point of interest for each state that has made it onto our expected itinerary. 

Florida - we live in Florida, so Florida is mostly about getting out of the state.  As noted in our first post, we're really kicking off this trip at Hot Springs National Park, but we don't want to miss out on anything on the way to the starting line.  Kinda like when you take a cruise and don't see or do anything at the embarkation port city.  [That's a lesson we learned from our first Mediterranean cruise where we sailed from Barcelona but were so exhausted after an overnight flight that we barely saw anything but the inside of our eyelids as we slept on the Bus Turistic tour through the city.]

Alabama - like Florida, Alabama is a pass-through state on the way to Arkansas, but we plan to spend a night in Tuscaloosa and drive by the University of Alabama.

Mississippi - the road will take us right through Tupelo, so we might as well stop at the Birthplace of Elvis Presley.

Arkansas - and here we go!  We'll be in Hot Springs for several days while visiting the National Park among other things.

Oklahoma - we're trekking across the lower part of the state to spend a night at the Quartz Mountain State Park Lodge.

Kansas - DH's parents made a trip to Dodge City; our visit here will be one that is in their footsteps.

Missouri - I'm a big fan of Walt Disney, so of course we're going to Marceline to visit the Walt Disney Hometown Museum.  We'll also visit Hannibal and St. Louis on the way back.

Nebraska - we plan to be in two states at one time while here when we take the pedestrian bridge between Nebraska and Iowa.

Iowa - our first post explains why we're stopping in Le Mars, but on our way back, we plan to spend some time in Le Claire, including a visit to the American Pickers store.

Minnesota - I know people today have a lot to say about the Little House on the Prairie books and television show, but as a young girl, they only spelled adventure to me.  We'll be cutting across southern Minnesota traveling from Walnut Grove through Sleepy Eye and on to Mankato.

Wisconsin - we'll explore the upper part of the Mississippi River aboard the Winona Tour Boat before heading to Upper Michigan.

Michigan - my only visit to Michigan was when my family lived in Kalamazoo for a summer when I was two years old.  So while I have technically lived in Michigan, I only have some photos to prove it, but no memories of my own.  We're spending six nights in Michigan so we can explore quite a bit including Mackinac Island before heading back to Wisconsin via the S.S. Badger.

Illinois - before we get to Illinois, we'll have been back through Wisconsin and Iowa and part of Missouri for the Mark Twain leg of our trip.  Illinois begins the Abraham Lincoln portion in Springfield.

Indiana - While there are a few Lincoln things to see in Indiana, I'm looking forward to visiting Santa Claus!

Kentucky - DH's home state means we have family and friends to visit here, as well as complete the Lincoln portion of our journey with a visit to the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace site.  While we have been there before, we haven't been since a family member started volunteering there as a host.

Tennessee - Dollywood and the Great Smoky Mountains.

Georgia - it's all downhill home from here.  But not without a visit with my brother along the way!

These are just a few of the things we have on our itinerary, and we're always open to other ideas.  In fact, most of the things we have on the agenda are from word-of-mouth experiences of friends, family, and people we've met while traveling other places.  So if there's somewhere you think we need to be sure to be, drop us a comment!

Thanks for reading!

~ Cindy D.

 


Saturday, May 27, 2023

Two Years in the Making

Welcome to Vacationing through the Middle States, our blog dedicated to the planning and traveling for what will be our most adventurous and extensive trip we've made in our over three decades together.

By way of introduction, I'm headed towards retirement in March 2024 while D(ear) H(usband) has been retired since 2016.  When he retired, we had one son in college and one graduating from high school, so his first few retirement years were spent in getting them through college and out on their own.  We're happy to report that it has been successful, so now that I'm ready to retire, we're truly empty-nesters and are in a position that we can just go!  (I will say here that I'm glad I didn't choose to retire during COVID because I would have been seriously disappointed at not being able to travel freely during that time.)

And now that we have a target date for when we can go, why the Middle States, and why Two Years in the Making?

Why the Middle States?  I have been to 46 of the U.S.'s 50 states; DH has 9 to go before we can say we've been to all 50 states.  I still need Iowa and Kansas (and Vermont and Delaware), and DH has several in addition to those two that are in the middle part of America.  I love Blue Bunny ice cream and their headquarters is in Le Mars, Iowa, so I had joked around that "if I ever go to Iowa, I'm going to the Blue Bunny Ice Cream Parlor" [which has now changed its name but is the same idea].  One day, DH said he would really like to go to Hot Springs National Park.  I guess I filed that away in my travel-planning brain because when we started talking about what we'd like to do to celebrate my retirement, Hot Springs became the starting point for what has become our Middle States trip.  We got the map out (ok, we loaded Google Maps on the computer screen) and started looking at how far it was to some of the other places (Blue Bunny in Iowa) that we would like to see in person as well as check off some more states.

Why Two Years in the Making?  We first started talking about really doing this trip in early 2022, and since it was all new territory for us, I knew we had a lot of research to do.  [I should say here that I'm the one who loves to do the planning and such; DH enjoys the trip itself, so most of the planning is my responsibility but for this one, we picked the main places together.]  Our initial look revealed that for some of our destinations, they have such seasonal schedules that we needed to have an idea of where we were going early so we could see what their 2023 schedules are so we could make educated guesses about what 2024 would be.  We also have been tweaking our planned route as we've learned more about the area(s) from friends, online sources, or meeting people from the places on our itinerary.

So we're about 11 months away from departure. I want to document this trip, not just when we go on it, but also the planning and preparation process in case it's of interest or helpful to someone else.  I enjoy reading about others' traveling and pick up useful tips and information; I hope we can return the favor through this blog.

~ Cindy D


Sharks teeth and the end of the trip

We've been home two weeks now, and I'm finally getting to the last blog entry to record our trip. When we left Fort Myers, we headed...