Not today, but when we got back from our trip, I had about 2 weeks worth of mail waiting for me and it was the best mail day ever! I got this cute little Jelly Belly dispenser full of jelly beans, a $10 BK gift card, 4 of my coupons for a free meal at KFC (we should have 8, but only got 4 so far), a coupon for a free digiorno flatbread, my 2 $25 checks from the Taco bell game from a couple months ago, 6-$5 checks from the Honey nut cheerios game, and $26.46 in survey checks. I had so much fun opening all this, I barely noticed the bills also in the stack of mail. ;)
For our vacation, I did a ton of things to save money too. Here's just some of the saving money tricks I worked. Our best deal was the hotel and my dad actually worked that out for me. Through a friend of his, we were able to stay 2 nights in a 3 bedroom room (bigger than any of my apartments ever were!) at the Powhatan resort. We had a full kitchen, 2 bathrooms, 3 floors, and a full size jacuzzi on the porch. I hosted the after wedding dinner/party here and it was great! Then we had a 2 bedroom room at Greensprings resort for 3 nights. Not as big, but still great! I paid just $200 for all 5 nights! (The first night we all crammed into a room at Super 8 for $35 until Friday when our reservation started for the other one.)
Since we had a full kitchen while we were there, we were able to buy groceries and save a lot of money doing this. I was even able to hit the commissary one day and use up the last of my KY coupons for a little more groceries. I spent about $30 total on groceries for the whole trip, except for the party. (That cost me about $85, but ti was for about 25 people.)
I also had saved up gift cards for food for the travel time. I had gift cards for Burger King and subway. So we spent about $25 total on food going up and coming back. (I had a ton of snacks packed in the car too, so we didn't have to eat as much fast food when we stopped.) When we used the BK gift cards, they had just started their new transformers game, so we got game pieces on our fries and drinks too. So, free lunch with the gift cards and we got enough free food from the game pieces to get free breakfast for half of us the next day too.
I was counting on free tickets for Busch gardens for the military, but when we got there, we found out they were only giving them away now for active duty. (Booo!)
So, we hit the base in Hampton and bought them there. This cost more than I had expected this way, but we still saved $20 off the adult tix and $10 off the kids. This was better than any other discount we could find anywhere. We also did one of those "90 minute" tours at the resort one morning and got 2 free tickets that way. That saved us $120 off the full price or $83 if we had to buy those on base. Of course, the 90 minutes took us almost 3 1/2 hours, but we got out alive and with the tix.
We also did not eat at Busch gardens, we left and hit BK (that's when we used our gift cards), so we saved a lot of money there! The kids also went swimming a lot at the resort- and that was free entertainment! We were going to hit CW and Jamestown, but ran out of time.
It was a great trip and thankfully, it did not break the bank. We did not get to do everything we wanted, but we did enough and we all had fun. And it just shows that you can be frugal in every aspect of life and have a great time!
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