Archive for the ‘Spending’ Category

Road trip Or Flying- Which is best at this High Gas Price?

June 8th, 2008 Vijaianand

Are you kidding? With high gas price making all time record numbers every day, are you about it?! This was the first question asked by my friend when I told him about my plan to go on a road trip to Chicago from Houston 3 weeks ago. That really didn’t stop me. I ended up going, more importantly for a week and made it thru the tough wave of gas prices in different states.


I know it is hard to think about budget friendly vacation these days with big shift in the tourism because of price increases in various aspects starting from flight tickets, boarding, lodging, car rentals, sight seeing tickets and not the least but the most important dinosuar level gas prices adding it all up to eat your wallet.



Many of you already cut down on your vacations just because of this very own reason. In this post, I am just going to share my real roadtrip experience by taking you all along for the ride and show how you can still have fun on roadtrips in cost effective way.


I. Plan





I know planning comes first before you ever start. I am not a neophyte for roadtrips. I have planned many of them and made memorable lines in my life chapter. At the same time, I also flew to many cities for vacations. Comparing them, I totally fell in love with driving on the American roads and anytime prefer to do roadtrips if I have lot of time in hand. This time I luckily got a week long time to kill in my hand. My wife just used this opportunity to bring up our month old topic of going to Chicago for my cousin wife’s baby shower.



1. Research At first I didn’t even blink my eye and gave thought about it because its only a week away and too less of time get a deal on flight tickets. I know its really hard to get reasonable price with the high gas price affecting this airlines too. It is a cockroach which is now everywhere and its going to be a tough task to get it out of the system for a while.



Anyway, I started pondering around my favorite last time resort websites, to see my luck on getting last min deals. First Orbitz.com to get a average fare per person for roundtrip. Then I went to my favorite site, Priceline and started bidding for flights with various different combination to see whether I atleast get a reasonable price 25% lessthan the round trip fare from orbitz. No luck, it all came out to be close $384/ person. Then I visited my other saved sites like Farecompare, Lastminute.com and Sidestep to compare the prices average at this time of the year. It seems to be no chance to getting lower than that one. Farecompare.com


After seeing that number, I remember my wife suggesting for a road trip as the final option since we have good amount of time in our hand. So I got to google maps to figure out the mileage for the road trip. Then I jumped to google search to see whether I can find a fuel gas calculator and compare with airline charges. I couldn’t find what I was looking but happen to hit on the AAA website to find how much will be gas expense.


FuelGasCalculator is the tool to find an aproximate estimation of gas expense for your trip by AAA. I was really amazed with the options like car model to determine average mileage. I typed all they wanted including to and from and details and got the gas expense for two way around $300. That is with an average 30miles per gallon for my Honda Accord. It is just almost 60% of savings just for travel.

Thats just for travel after taking high gas price into account. It doesn’t mean all other expense going to be cheap. So I took my research further asking few questions,


1. Is Road trip going to work out cheaper than Flying with hotel expense on the way?



2. Do I have enough time to drive to and fro and have time for sightseeing? Is it going to be relaxing one?



3. Can I take advantage of this road trip to spend a day or two on the way and see few more places?


I love to continue but it will get too long on this post. So let me answer these questions on the next one. Hold on for a bit to catch the more fun part..

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My Wowing Cruise Vacation & Lessons Learned

April 11th, 2008 Vijaianand

I was soaking under the sun in the western Caribbean beach last week same time but now I am working hard to make some money. I know its back to reality time. This post is to brag about my 5 day cruise vacation and few lessons I learned.







If anybody like to know, How was the cruise? My answer – “What a WOWING experience to be on the Fun Ship?”


Life Mantra

As many of you know, my life Mantra, “Earn IT, Manage IT, Enjoy IT and Help IT” which I pretty much tend to follow. I truly believe enjoyment should be a part of your life and last of your life. If you only earn and forget or postpone to enjoy at the last min or last years. You have lost so many good years in your life to enjoy and have fun. I strongly disagree with people who say, you are in your prime years. So its time to make money now when you are good and you shouldn’t think about enjoying. That’s truly bad idea.


You can only enjoy certain things on certain age. When you are old, you might not have the guts to enjoy and adventure exciting things. Time is precious and you can’t never earn it back. So I strongly recommend, spice up your life with enjoyment and fun activities now and then. It will sure to recharge your batteries which helps to start back fresh.



Snapshot of Cruise Experience


I just assumed, I had short term memory loss and forgot all about my work, money and all other worries comes with it as soon I jumped on the new mini-world. The Ship in itself is like a own world out on the Sea. I would say “FUN WORLD ON THE SEA“. It has everything, I mean everything including people who just want to have fun and be happy. I also could literally see people from all over the world who can be categorized into 2 classes. One class working hard round the clock to make the other class happy. You name a third world country and I can a see a person mostly likely the cruise worker on the ship.


This is my first ever cruise in my life. We had so much fun on the ship and as well as on the shore excursions we did ourself. It was my first ever real vacation since so many year. It’s been long due and just get to do it.

I left for 5 days cruise from Galveston with my wife and 2 year old son Ashwin. We had good time together both in the cruise and visit to islands Cozumel and Progresso. We did some risky and adventures rides like jet skiing, kayaking with my 2 year old son. Days on the ship were fun with fun filled activities like playing Bingo(I even won $150 tasting the essence of my luck), doing my DRUMS in the Talent show in front of 1000 people and getting standing ovation and much more..



We felt 5 days is right period not too short and not too long. Except some toddler acts by my son now and then, we all some good family time together.



I strongly recommend everyone of you to consider going on a cruise at least once in your lifetime. I know I have seen people cruising for 10th times but that’s crazy. Like me, many think it’s expensive. For 5 days lodging, boarding, fun packed events, we only paid $400. Is that expensive when you think of going on 5 day vacation of Disney land? Not at all. Dec – April is a good time with less heat and less money on the cruise. During summer time it gets expensive. I have lot to talk about my cruise which I am planning to put another site for it.

One more thing, I don’t want to leave an impression that I did this cruise suddenly. No, It’s all well planned in advance. I put money aside for this trip in a short term savings. When I was financially ready, I made my plans. I shopped around for good deals. I made advance bookings to save money and made my plans for things to do. If you plan ahead, you can save money at same time have great fun.


Lesson Learned



During this short fun packed period, life did teach me some good lessons.



1. Don’t plan for full pledged Romantic/Family Cruise with a Toddler. It’s adds little more stress. But you can still have fun, just a little less if you take it slow and go with the flow.


2. In the cruise, when I first tried BINGO I never had intension to win but I won $150. I just played for the sake of playing it. But after that, I always wanted to win but never own once. What does it taught me? BINGO is a another type of gambling. It all depends on your luck. So if you are having fun, just have fun. If the luck shows up, just welcome and embrace it. Never try to force your luck to work for you. It never works.



3. When I see the cruise works on the ship, they work pretty hard to make us happy when we are in our vacation. Don’t ever think, you are working too hard. There are other people out there who work very hard then any one of us. What we have in our life are so much better so we shouldn’t crib about it. It also teaches me to push hard to work more.



I know these are simple ones but valuable.To conclude, plan for a break and venture out your inner dreams to have some fun with your family. At same time, look out for valuable lessons life can teach you..

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