Tag Archives: budget travel tips

Is it possible to travel across the USA and not visit a chain restaurant?

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Our journey from NY to CA

Our journey from NY to CA

Yes, indeedy. We did it and the funny thing is that we didn’t even try to avoid a chain restaurant. The only time we purposely went into a chain restaurant was to use the bathroom. I have to say McDonald’s generally have the cleanest restrooms across the country.

In 2008, we traveled from NY to CA, the long way as it took a month and a half and traveled  7,000 miles. So how does a family of three travel cross the country, eat well, and not pay a fortune for food while sidestepping all chain restaurants? First, some planning is necessary as well as intermittent access to the internet.  When we go on road trips, we travel with a cooler packed with staple foods, and generally stay at a place that we can enjoy some aspect of breakfast and eat lunch, snacks while traveling. Dinner is typically the only meal we eat out daily.

What’s in the cooler?

  • Orange juice – for breakfast as most places provide reconstituted OJ – yuck!
  • Milk – for coffee and cereal
  • Cider
  • Peanut butter and jam
  • Cheese – for snacking and sandwiches
  • Fruit – apples, oranges, grapes, and bananas travel well
  • Yogurt
  • Salsa
  • Hummus
  • Carrots
  • Maple syrup – for pancakes, waffles – we rarely find real maple syrup at a hotel’s breakfast area

Other food

  • Bread
  • Crackers
  • Cereal
  • Dried fruit
  • Oatmeal
  • Pretzels, tortilla chips
  • Lots of water

Before we left, Mike was addicted to Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations,” TV show that happened to have been exploring the south’s amazing BBQ joints. Each location was immediately put on our must visit list. About the same time we also found out about a great website, Roadfood.com. It focuses on the best regional specialties, inexpensive, non-franchised food made by America’s culinary folk artists. We found amazing BBQ, in the middle of nowhere packed with customers who were in the “know.” Since we spent most of our trip traveling through the south; it only made sense to search for the best BBQ. And boy did we find it. It was also great that Mathew loved pulled pork so there were no complaints from him.

When we traveled through an area that had no suggestions from Roadfood.com, we used Yelp.com. It is a very helpful site, which gives you a good sense of what restaurant to visit and which ones to stay away from. Recently, I heard that some reviews have become suspect, so beware.

Along the way, we also visited friends and family who fed us as well as make suggestions of where we should eat next. So that is how our family traveled from NY to CA without visiting a chain restaurant, easy peasy. What does your family do on a road trip to eat inexpensively?

 

 

Where o’where shall we lay our heads down?

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We love to travel and deciding where we stay depends on how long we have and how we are traveling. If we are going on a road trip, we tend to fly by the seat of our pants and find a place as we get close to stopping for the day. When we have a limited time for our holiday and are staying more than one day at a destination, I put a lot more time into finding a comfortable and affordable place to rest our heads.

When choosing lodgings we have a couple of items that we need:                               1. Clean and comfortable beds. Since we are traveling with two adults and one child, at a minimum we need either two full/queen beds or a full/queen and sleeper couch.

  1. Access to a refrigerator, at the very least, if not a kitchenette. No matter where we travel, we always like to have a refrigerator available for our snacks and drinks. Sometimes, we like to make some of our meals as well.

  2. Good location to where we are visiting, access to transportation, and free parking.

  3. Affordable

As, I have mentioned we love to travel and in order to continue traveling we must continue to live within our means. Not a very easy task nowadays; however, because of access to the internet, budget travel continues to be possible.

My first line of attack is the local chamber of commerce; some towns have a very comprehensive site, so there is no need to go further, for example, the one for Sanibel Island. However, for some towns, you must look deeper. Since we tend to explore new areas, we depend on reviews from fellow travelers to help us make up our mind.  There are several websites that I cross-reference: Tripadvisor, Hotel.com, bedandbreakfast.com, and, an old favorite, Travelocity. Recently I heard that some reviews on Tripadvisor were planted by the establishment’s owners/employees; I have found that they generally validate other reviews but it is good to keep that in mind. In the same commentary, they mentioned that reviews on Expedia could only be done by people that have purchased the lodgings through Expedia – good to know.

Recently, I have learned about Airbnb, a community marketplace for people to list their accommodations around the world. They list rooms, apartments, homes, villas, and castles that are available for a night, a week, or for a month. They list lodgings at any price point (I saw a room for $25 a night and villa for $1300 a night), in more than 26,000 cities and 192 countries. I learned about Airbnb from a friend who was listing her apartment and loved how easy it was to get booked. Another friend loves it too and wrote me:

“We used Airbnb on our Pacific Northwest trip to stay in Vancouver and San Francisco and loved both places we stayed at. One advantage is that you can select the exact neighborhood you want to stay in. In San Francisco, I like to stay around Buena Vista Park since that’s where we used to stay when my brother in law lived there. There was a choice of several and we got a place with killer views, near the Haight and Castro. Both parties are screened pretty thoroughly and the pictures are quite representative. I would definitely use them again and would have no hesitation recommending them.”

Airbnb sounds absolutely wonderful. The search engine appears to be very user friendly and accommodations are reviewed. I can’t wait to start using them.

How do you select your lodgings when you travel? Please share and I continue to share.