One thing on my bucket list this year was a vacation! And I am so thankful for the extra time that I had to spend playing with my family on Spring Break last week. But vacations don't come cheap and we are still saving for adoption expenses so we did our best to pinch our pennies. Here's how:
1) Booking the Room - We booked our room through ebay. Tons of timeshare owners sell their weeks on ebay and it is possible to make a legitimate vacation purchase on ebay. But remember a few tips, first check out the sellers rating and read through their feedback from previous customers. You should be able to verify that other customers have successfully purchased a vacation and had a positive experience, if not keep shopping! Also, never leave positive ebay feedback for your purchase until after your stay! This is key, if you do have any issues you can always report it to ebay for a refund, but if you have already given positive feedback it may be difficult to argue your case. We purchased a 2-bedroom condo for 5 days at Wilderness at the Smokies for $688 (waterpark passes included). I had been selling on ebay for a few months so we had a Paypal balance of $125.95, bringing our OOP total to $562.05. This averaged out to $112 a day for our family of 4 to sleep and play!
2) Meals - We typically ask for gift cards from our parents for Christmas, and we were able to save them for our vacation! We were able to treat ourselves to dinner at Red Lobster completely free, and it's a favorite for our whole family. Before the trip, we used our weekly grocery budget to purchase drinks and snacks for the condo. This included our breakfast and most of our lunches. Total dinners out over the 5 days was $114.71. This averaged out to $22.94 a day for our family of 4!
3) Entertainment - The majority of our entertainment was the waterpark at The Wilderness resort. We did allow $25 per kid at the arcade (which is hefty considering Ashton is only 2). Personally I hate arcades because they are a money pit but all those flashing lights and sounds are kid magnets! So to keep the peace, we caved to the arcade. We also took the kids to a pottery shop at the resort where they painted their own pottery, which cost about $30 but they each came home with a souvenir that they painted themselves. We spent a day in Gatlinburg at the Ripleys Aquarium and strolling through the town looking at all of the shops. We attempted to purchase discount tickets for the aquarium at the resort, but they only had one ticket for us, the other two we had to purchase at the aquarium (Ashton was free!). This cost us $62.56. On the last day of our trip we took the kids on a bear hunt at Cade's Cove. Cost for this was FREE! Woo hoo! Total entertainment was about $142.56, an average of $28 per day for our family of 4!
A vacation was long overdue for our family and it may be a LONG time before we see another one!
ADOPTION UPDATE: We are currently working on our USCIS application and our dossier! Ethiopia was in a slow period for several long months but things are finally looking up again :)
