Vacationing for Less

Last Thursday, T e-mailed me from work to tell me he was going to try to get Monday off and how do I feel about taking our New Hampshire trip this weekend?  How do I feel?  Let’s do it!

On Friday, he found out that he could, indeed, take Monday off.  So he called and booked a cabin at the Twin Mountains KOA campground.  We got the basic, no frills other than electricity (we only had lights) cabin.

Cute place, right?  It only cost $60 for the night where as the cheapest motel he could find in the area was $120.  If you know me, you know I don’t dig germs – and public bathrooms disgust me.  I’d rather pee behind a tree, thank you.  But you can’t shower behind a tree.  I was willing to give it a try even though it meant having to use the public bathrooms. 

We only have good things to say about this place.   Even the scary public bathrooms were really really clean.

My only complaint is this.  The pool and playground claim to close at dusk.  I don’t know about you, but at this time of year 7PM is NOT dusk.  After putting on our swim suits and heading to the pool, we discovered it had been closed in the 5 minutes it had taken for T to check it out, come back to change and the walk back up to it.  We were still able to entertain the kids fairly well with our very very limited supply of tricks.

Something else we do when we’re on vacation is avoid eating out.  Restaurants cost big bucks.  We packed all of our food in a fairly small cooler.   We decided sandwich fixings for lunch on day 1, dutch oven pizza casserole for dinner, mini-bagels and a small pack of bacon for breakfast and grab lunch at the park before heading out. 

This pizza casserole was really easy to make.   Once again, you know me.  I couldn’t leave it as was.  We added pepperoni, green peppers and mushrooms to it as well.  I would suggest cooking your green peppers ever so slightly because they were still crunchy.  This one will be pulled out for a BBQ some time later this summer.  It was that good.

You don’t need to spend big bucks to have a great vacation.  Normally, we’d do hiking and outdoors stuff but the point of this trip was to take our kids to Santa’s Village (and Storyland, but that didn’t happen.  Long story for another day).  So to Santa’s Village we went.  And it was worth the entire 4 1/2 hours it took for us to make the drive (with stops, of course – there’s no NOT stopping with 2 little ones!)

If you’ve never been, I’d suggest checking it out.  It’s a great place to go even with the younger kids. 

We’re already trying to figure out when we’re going to go back!