Travelin' Money

My wife and I love to travel, especially to the coast and to cities steeped in history. But a journalist doesn't make travelin' money, and that was even more the case early in our marriage, and when our daughter was just a little thing.

But we've always traveled. How?

Early on, we received some wonderful advice that went something like this: You ought to decide what character your family will have, and then work to make that happen. On the ground, that meant for us to become a family that traveled. By necessity, that meant finding a way to make that happen financially.

Since we didn't have a lot of extra money lying around or flooding over the transom, we became intentional about saving for travel. It's easier than you think.

For instance, we got paid every other week, for a total of 26 paychecks. But we budgeted our mortgage on a 24-pay-period basis. What to do with the money from those extra two paychecks? We put it in a special fund, and used it to take quick long-weekend trips with our daughter. It worked for spring break, for instance. Or a fall trip to the beach. On occasion, we'd combine it with other funds for a longer vacation. The point is, it was a painless way to finance a get-away.

Another funding mechanism was our annual tax return. We intentionally set our withholdings slightly higher than they needed to be, so that we'd get several hundred dollars back each year. That went straight into our vacation fund, which financed our longer vacations. Sure, the federal government got to keep some of our income interest free for the year. But it was, again, a painless (but surefire) way for our family to have ready traveling money.

That's still one of our strategies. This year, we've spent a week at the beach in June and taken our extended family on a three-day trip to Fredericksburg, Mount Vernon and George Washington's Birthplace. Sweet!
Here's another idea:

If you and your spouse work, and each squirrel away just $5 a week for travelin', that's $10 a week, $40 a month, $120 a quarter. That'll get you a hotel room and a few dollars toward a tank of gas, to spend some family time far from the homestead for an overnight. Maybe to the foothills. Or Wilmington. Or a shopping trip to Concord.

Little things, in other words, add up to a road trip.

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Starting Out

There aren't many things I get really excited about. But my adreneline positively pumps whenever I think about a trip that we have planned. And we just LOVE to travel.

I'm a husband, father of one, granddad of 2 (soon to be 3) and a former newspaper journalist, and our little family always has put travel high on our priority list. Mostly it was to relax and to learn. We love visiting historic places, and when our daughter was young, we'd drive to New Bern for the day to tour Tryon Palace or to Greensboro to enjoy the Guilford Courthouse battle re-enactment or carve out several hours during a week at the coast to wander Fort Macon.
 
Sure, we've enjoyed Cape Canaveral and Chicago and Williamsburg, Va. But my wife and I really enjoy traveling the Carolinas. My wife is a North Carolina native, but I grew up in Philadelphia. Our beach was the "shore" at Atlantic City or Cape May, which are fine. But they're not North Carolina.
 
Emerald Isle enchanted me from the first time I saw its sea. We honeymooned on the Outer Banks. Our mothers both climbed to the top of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse alongside our teenage daughter during an extended family trip several years ago. One of my favorite memories is several days with my college-aged daughter in Hilton Head. We ate the best Greek food in the world at the Greek Festival in Charleston. My wife and I spent a night in a castle in the North Carolina mountains, and experienced total darkness in the heart of Linville Caverns.
 
We made a decision as a young couple to set aside money each year to travel, and it was one of the best decisions we ever made.
We tend to take short trips, and we're frugal travelers -- mainly because we traveled on a journalist's pay. So that will be the focus of my blog. It will be about travel, traveling in and around the Carolinas, and traveling so as not to break your bank.
 
I hope you visit Nearly There often. Please send comments and suggestions for posts.
 
And I hope Nearly There energizes you to get there often...wherever "there" is for you and yours.
Here's a photo from a trip we took to the N.C. coast around New Year's 2009.

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