Good poll, Fuego, and quite an eye-opener when I started running our Quicken spending reports.
In the last three years spouse and I have been averaging over $8K/year for a family of three. Most of those were trips to college campuses or getting our kid to some educational opportunity. Hopefully we're done with that.
The irony is that we find it difficult to give ourselves permission to take vacations. (Is that because we've already been on vacation for over eight years?) Maybe it's the same mindset that makes it hard to loosen the frugal reins or to make the mental shift from accumulation investing to decumulation. There's more than enough to do here, and there's a certain amount of [-]five-hour flights[/-] wasted effort in getting to most destinations. Intellectually we
know that we could just pick up next Tuesday and go spend a couple weeks at Monterey Bay, but somehow that never happens. Heck, in 20 years of Hawaii I've never even visited Molokai or Lanai, let alone Niihau or Kaho'olawe. OTOH we're quite happy to travel "for a purpose" on subsidized trips to Maui, San Diego, Bangkok, the Marianas, and even Dallas.
Maybe we'll figure out how to loosen our mental travel chains. But I'm still going to avoid the cheap seats.
I figured there were at least some people on here that typically fly business or first for international trips. That will obviously rack up the dollar amounts (as you have shown!). Hey, if you can afford it, why not travel in luxury! Being a cheapskate, I'll continue to suffer through steerage class, er I mean economy...
I take every one of those first-class upgrades and hopefully with as few connections as possible. Spouse finds this highly amusing in view of my years of submarine experience. I call it making up for missed opportunities.
In reality, kids are expensive (travel or not
)...
I'm hoping that all the money we've spent on traveling to college campuses (and paying for our kid's other educational jaunts) have helped her achieve orbital parameters on the first (and only) launch.
So our vacation budget really might be more appropriately named the "college education & research budget".
$300 for the Amtrak ticket to Seattle and $40 a day on the ride back.
Boy, that's commitment. I'd bicycle away from home and see how far I got before I needed the train. Like it or not, you're going to have to bicycle the entire distance just to get back home!